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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 27 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Your inner beauty I can only feel as far as I have discovered myself. But for ten years, whenever I see you entering the auditorium, there is this surprise about your unbelievable outer beauty too.Osho, is the outer appearance always just a reflection of the inner?The outer beauty comes from a different source than the inner. The outer beauty comes from your father and mother: their bodies create your body. But the inner beauty comes from your own growth of consciousness that you are carrying from many lives. In your individuality both are joined: the physical heritage from your father and mother and the spiritual heritage of your own past lives, its consciousness, its bliss, its joy. So it is not absolutely necessary that the outer will be a reflection of the inner, nor will vice versa be true, that the inner will correspond with the outer.But sometimes it happens that you have so much inner beauty, so much inner light that they start radiating from your outer body. Your outer body may not be beautiful, but the light that comes from your sources, your innermost sources of eternal life, will make even a body which is not beautiful in the ordinary sense appear beautiful, radiant. But vice versa it is never true.Your outer beauty is only skin-deep. It cannot affect your inner beauty. On the contrary, the outer beauty becomes a hindrance in search of the inner: you become too identified with the outer. Who is going to look for the inner sources? Most often it happens that the people who are outwardly very beautiful, are inwardly very ugly. Their outer beauty becomes a cover-up to hide themselves behind, and it is experienced by millions of people every day. You fall in love with a woman or a man because you can see only the outer. Just within a few days you start discovering his inner state; it doesn’t correspond to his outer beauty. On the contrary, it is very ugly.For example, Alexander the Great had a very beautiful body but he killed millions of people, just to fulfill his ego that he was the world conqueror. He met one man, Diogenes, when he was on his way to India, who lived naked, the only man in Greece who did, unique in a way. His beauty was tremendous, not just the outer, but he had so much inner radiance, so dazzling, that even Alexander had to stop his armies when he was close by in a forest near a river. He stopped the armies and went to see Diogenes alone; alone, because he did not want anybody to know that there exists a man who is far more beautiful than Alexander himself.It was early morning and Diogenes was taking a sunbath, naked on the riverbank. Alexander could not believe that a beggar… He had nothing, no possessions – even Buddha used to have a begging bowl, but that too Diogenes had thrown away. He was absolutely without any possessions, exactly as he was born, naked.Alexander could not believe his eyes. He had never seen such a beautiful personality and he could see that this beauty was not just on the outer. Something infiltrated from the inner; a subtle radiation, a subtle aura surrounded him. All around him there was a fragrance, a silence.If the inner becomes beautiful – which is in your hands – the outer will have to mold itself according to the inner. The outer is not essential, it will have to reflect the inner in some way. But the converse is not true at all. You can have plastic surgery, you can have a beautiful face, beautiful eyes, a beautiful nose; you can change your skin; you can change your shape. That is not going to change your being. Inside you will still remain greedy, full of lust, violence, anger, rage, jealousy, with a tremendous will to power. The plastic surgeon can do nothing about all these things. For that you will need a different kind of surgery.It is happening here: you are on the table. As you become more and more meditative, peaceful, a deep at-onement with existence happens. You fall into the rhythm of the universe. The universe also has its own heartbeat. Your heartbeat, once it starts in rhythm with the universal heartbeat, will have transformed your being from that ugly stage of animality, into authentic humanity. And even the human is not the end. You can go on searching deeper and there is a place where you transcend humanity and something of the divine enters in you. Once the divine is there, it is almost like a light in a dark house. The windows will start showing the light; even the cracks in the wall or the roof or the doors will start showing the inner light.The inner is tremendously powerful, the outer is very weak. The inner is eternal, the outer is very temporary. How many years do you remain young? And as youth fades away you start feeling that you are becoming ugly, unless your inner being is also growing with your age. Then even in your old age you will have a beauty that the youth may feel jealous of. Remember: from the inner the change to the outer happens, but I am not making it inevitable. Most often it happens, but sometimes the outer is in such a rotten state that even the inner radiation cannot change it.There have been cases on record: one very great mystic of India whose name was Ashtavakra – I have spoken on him for almost half a year continuously. What he has written is tremendously important. Each sentence has so many dimensions to be explored, but the man himself was in a very difficult situation.Ashtavakra – the name was given to him because he was almost like a camel. In eight places he was distorted in the body – one leg was longer, one arm was shorter, his back was bent… In eight places he was distorted. That’s how he was born, with a crippled, distorted body. But even in a crippled and distorted body the soul is as beautiful as in the most beautiful body. He became enlightened, but his body was too rigid to change with his inner change. His eyes started showing something of the beauty, but the whole body was in such a mess.The story is…The emperor of India in those days was Janak and he was very much interested in philosophical discussions. Each year he used to call a big conference of all the scholars, philosophers, theologians or whoever wanted to participate. It was a championship competition.One very famous philosopher, Yagnavalkya, came a little late. The conference had started and he saw one thousand beautiful cows standing outside. Their horns were covered with gold and diamonds. This was going to be the prize for the champion. It was a hot day and the cows were perspiring.He told his disciples, “Take these cows. As far as winning the competition is concerned, I am certain. Why should the cows suffer here? Take them to our place.” They had their own place in the forest.Even Janak could not prevent him, because he knew that Yagnavalkya had been the champion continuously for five years, and he would be the champion this time because there was nobody else who could defeat him. It is not right to take the reward before you have won, but his victory was so certain to everybody that nobody objected. So his disciples took away all the cows.While Yagnavalkya was discussing, a very unknown scholar was also present at the conference. Ashtavakra was this unknown philosopher’s son. His mother was waiting for her husband to come home. It was getting late and the meal was getting cold. So she sent Ashtavakra to bring his father home, knowing he could not win the competition. Why should he unnecessarily waste his time? He was a poor scholar and there were great scholars there. Ashtavakra went. There were at least one thousand people at the conference, the highly cultured and sophisticated scholars of the country.As Ashtavakra entered, looking at his distorted body they all started laughing. But Ashtavakra was a man of tremendous integrity. As they started laughing, he laughed even louder. Because of his loud laugh they stopped. They could not believe that he was laughing.Janak asked him, “I can understand why they are laughing; it’s because of your body, but I cannot understand why you are laughing. And you stopped all their laughing with your laughter.” A single man stopped one thousand people’s laughter.Ashtavakra said to Janak, “I thought this conference was for scholars and philosophers, but these are all shoemakers. They can understand only the skin. They cannot see the inner, they can only see the outer.”There was a great silence. What he was saying had a great truth in it. Janak dissolved the conference and said, “Now I would like to inquire of Ashtavakra only. He has defeated you all just by his laughter and his statement ‘You can’t see the inner, you can only see the outer; you are all shoemakers.’ Shoemakers work with the skin of different animals. I dissolve the conference and, Yagnavalkya, return those one thousand cows because you also laughed. And when Ashtavakra laughed, you also stopped.”It was a very strange situation; it had never happened before. And then began the long inquiry of Janak, the emperor. He asked questions and Ashtavakra answered them. Each answer in itself carried so much meaning and significance. Because his body was in such a bad shape he could not get identified with it. Sometimes blessings come in such disguise. He could not go out, because wherever he went people would laugh, “Look at that man! Have you seen anything uglier than this?”So most of the time he was in the house, meditating, figuring out, “Who am I? Certainly I am not this body, because I can be aware of this body, I can observe this body from within. Certainly that awareness has to be different from the body.”Because of his crippled body he experienced enlightenment. The only barrier is identification with the body. But he could not identify, the body was so ugly. He never looked in a mirror; it would have been such a shock.Yagnavalkya had to return those one thousand cows to Ashtavakra’s house. He was young and he defeated one thousand old philosophers, well-versed in the ancient scriptures.It is one of the strangest things in this country that on every book written by any prominent mystic there have been hundreds of commentaries, but nobody before me has commented on Ashtavakra. And he must be at least five thousand years old. For five thousand years nobody has bothered to look into his statements, which are so significant. But his inner enlightenment, his inner understanding, could not change his outer appearance. And yet for those who are going deeper into themselves, the outer does not matter. Even in Ashtavakra they would have seen tremendous beauty; it would not have been of the outer circumference, but of the center.Most often the inner change changes the outer, if the outer is not too rigid. But the outer never changes the inner. You need to have eyes going deep into people’s beings, which is possible only if you are going inward yourself. The deeper you go into yourself the deeper you can look into other people’s beings. And then a totally new world opens its doors.Flanagan is on his deathbed and Father Murphy has come to give him the last rites. “Open your eyes,” says the priest. “We have got to save your immortal soul.” Flanagan opens one eye, closes it and tries to doze off. He is having such a nice snooze.“Come on now,” says Father Murphy. “If you don’t want to confess, at least answer me this: Do you renounce the Devil and all his works?”“Well, I don’t know,” says Flanagan, opening one eye again. “At a time like this, it doesn’t seem very smart to upset anyone.”The inner comes out, you cannot hide it much. Now he is being very calculating. At the time of death, unnecessarily annoying anybody… And who knows where you are going? It is better to keep silent.A wealthy widower and his beautiful daughter are on a sea cruise. By chance the girl falls overboard, and Rubin Fingelbaum, aged seventy, splashes in afterward and rescues her. After the two are brought on board the ship, the widower throws his arms around Rubin.“You saved my daughter’s life,” he cries. “I’m a rich man. I will give you anything! Ask for whatever you want.”“Just answer me one question,” replies Rubin. “Who pushed me?”What is inside is bound to come outside. How can you hide it?An old black preacher had used the letters BS, MS and PhD after his name for many years without ever having had anyone from his congregation ask what they meant. Finally, a nosy old woman questions him about it.“Well, sister,” he answers. “You know what BS stands for, don’t you?”“I sure do,” says the lady indignantly. “Bull shit!”“Right,” says the preacher. “And MS just means more of the same, and PhD means piled high and deep.”That’s the inner side of most people: bull shit, BS; MS, more of the same; PhD, piled high and deep. No plastic surgeon can change it. But you are capable of changing it yourself. It is within your hands. Nobody can do anything about your inner being except you. You are the master of your inner world. As the inner world becomes silent, naturally your eyes become deeper, with an oceanic depth. As your inner being becomes cloudless, your face also becomes cloudless, just an open sky. As your inner being comes to discover the source of your life, the flame of your life, something of that flame starts radiating from every pore of your body.This is the rule. Ashtavakra is an exception. Exceptions don’t make the rule, they only prove the rule. But it has never happened vice versa before, and I don’t think it can ever happen.We are all trying to be beautiful on the outside: all kinds of make-up, all kinds of things are going on to make your outer beautiful.I have heard…A man was catching flies. Finally after two or three hours’ effort he caught four flies. He told his wife, “I have caught four flies: two are male, two are female.”The wife said, “My God, how did you figure out who is male and who is female?”He said, “Easy! Two were sitting for almost two hours on the mirror and two were reading the newspaper for two hours!”We are so identified with the periphery of our being that we have forgotten that the periphery does not exist in itself. There must be a center inside. And the search for the center is the only religious search – not for God, not for heaven, not for any rewards for your virtues, not to avoid hell and punishment.There is only one authentic religious search and that is to know your innermost being. It is the being of the whole universe. By entering your innermost temple you have entered the real temple. All other temples are false, man-manufactured; all other gods in those temples are false, they are man-manufactured.Only one thing is not man-manufactured and that is your innermost dignity, your innermost grace. That grace starts flooding your outer being too. And that grace transforms not only the inner, but gives a new look to your outer being: an innocence, a serenity, a depth, a peace, a love, and these are all flowers blossoming around you. Then even your periphery becomes so beautiful, so musical, such a dance of rejoicing.But you should start from the inner.Osho,What is civilization?Civilization has not happened yet. It is a false idea that we are civilized people – civilized people and continuously preparing for war?Even the animals don’t eat, don’t kill, their own species. It is only man who kills his own species – no lion will kill another lion, no dog will kill another dog. No lion will eat another lion. Man is the only one who can be a cannibal. There are still small groups around the world in isolated places who are cannibals. They are remnants of the past, but they are still there.In Africa there is a small cannibal colony in the thick forest. There used to be three thousand at the beginning of this century, now there are only three hundred because when they cannot find anybody else, they have to eat somebody from their own group. They are getting reduced in numbers – they eat their own children, they eat their own parents. Once in a while they get a Christian missionary, but that is very rare.Once they caught a very fat Christian missionary and they were immensely happy. There was dancing and celebration, a big pot on the fire was boiling and the Christian missionary asked, “What is this celebration for? I have come here to give you a taste of Christianity.”They said, “You wait, soon we will have the first taste of Christianity.”He asked, “How are you going to have the first taste of Christianity if I don’t give it to you?”They said, “Don’t be worried, you will have to give it.”The missionary said, “I don’t understand what you are talking about.”They said, “Look at that fire and the big pot. We will put you in the pot. When the water is hot enough, we will make a soup of you and that will be our first taste of Christianity!”Once perhaps the whole of humanity was cannibal. In emergency situations one falls back. For example, when there was a famine in Bengal, people were found eating their own children. You cannot conceive it, but rather than die it seems to be logical and rational to eat your own children. Those who were not able to do such a thing sold their children, knowing perfectly well that the people who were purchasing their children would eat them. And with the money they purchased other people’s children. This way they protected their conscience a little bit, but not much, because it was absolutely clear what was going to happen. In emergency situations man shows his real face; otherwise our civilization is only a mask.In a civilized humanity a few things are absolutely necessary. One: there should be no possibility of war because it is life-destructive. And a civilized humanity will have the sensitivity not to destroy life in any form.George Bernard Shaw had around his house a beautiful garden where he had collected exotic roses from different countries, different colors, different fragrances. A friend had come to see him and he saw the roses. He could not believe that there were so many colors and so many different fragrances. When he went inside he said to Bernard Shaw, “You have such beautiful flowers, but you don’t put them in a pot inside your sitting room.”Bernard Shaw said, “I am a civilized man. I love children, but that does not mean I should cut off their heads and decorate my sitting room with them. I love roses, but that does not mean that I have to cut the living flower from its life source and put it here in my sitting room. That would be uncivilized behavior.”Even to cut a flower is uncivilized behavior, what to say about people like Genghis Khan, who killed forty million people; Tamerlane, who killed thirty million people; Nadir Shah, he again killed forty million people, and statistics are not available about many others. There is no data available about Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte or Ivan the Terrible, but they must have killed more people than Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadir Shah. Data is available on Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and they were not very far away from our present time, just forty years ago. They killed millions of people for no reason at all. This destructiveness is a death-oriented ideology and it is so deeply rooted in our minds that it keeps us below the animals.Man is not yet civilized. His civilization will begin by dropping war, by dropping nations. What is the need of nations if you are not going to fight? Nations are needed for wars. Why create these stupid lines on the map of the world? The world is one. There are no natural lines dividing nations. Then why do you go on with this? There is a deep desire to dominate and there are so many people in the world to dominate: they need many nations. Otherwise just a single government, a functional government for the whole world will be enough.What is the need of so many laws if man is civilized? What is the need of so many courts, jails, so many legal advisers, if man is civilized? A civilized man will not commit murders, a civilized man will not rape women, but we keep this whole paraphernalia of courts, laws, constitutions, legal experts. For whom?Man is still a criminal. These jails, these judges and these laws prevent nothing. Jails go on growing, judges go on increasing – more and more of them; more courts, more legal experts, thousands of colleges around the world producing legal experts every year. But even they cannot manage, for the criminals increase at a faster rate, and they don’t have a college, they are not educated. Something is basically wrong, something is missing. What is missing?I call it meditation. Only meditation can make humanity civilized, because meditation will release your creativity and take away your destructiveness. Meditation will bring your compassion and will take away your cruelty. Meditation will make you responsible to your own being and then you cannot be a criminal. To be a criminal needs great unconsciousness. Meditation destroys your unconsciousness, opens the doors of light and suddenly what you were doing in the darkness starts disappearing.A civilization can be based only on meditation. The only people who have been civilized were people who were in touch with their own being: a Gautam Buddha, a Socrates, a Pythagoras, a Lao Tzu; these people are civilized. Only individuals once in a while have been found civilized, but the collective mass is still far below the standard of civilization.It has to happen! Those who are with me, they have to create the foundation for a civilization, for a civilized humanity, by themselves becoming civilized.It was the night before the wedding, and young Herschel Goldberg is having a drink with Moishe Finkelstein, his future father-in-law.Soon the conversation turns to Ruthie, the bride-to-be.“Well,” says Moishe, a little the worse for drink, “are you going to be a man and do it tonight, or are you going to be a mouse and wait until tomorrow night?”Before he can stop himself, Herschel blurts out, “I guess I am a rat, sir – I did it last week.”These are your civilized people.On honeymoon, the young French bride is becoming exhausted by her ardent eighty-year-old husband. During a short lull, while he is shaving, she sneaks out and staggers into the hotel coffee shop downstairs.“I don’t get it,” says her friend, the waitress. “Here you are, a teenage bride with an ancient husband, and you look a wreck. What happened?”“The old goat double-crossed me,” sobs the bride. “He told me he had been saving up for sixty years, and I thought he was talking about money!”Just look around, look at people’s behavior and you will be surprised. This idea that we have become civilized is very dangerous. It is preventing us from being civilized, because once you accept that you are civilized there is no need to work for civilization. Once you accept you are healthy, there is no need to remove any sickness that you may be suffering from. The first thing to be recognized is that you are sick. Then only can something be done for your health. But if you deny sickness, which has been done for centuries by your so-called politicians…They deny that we are uncivilized people, they say we are civilized people. And this camouflage prevents us from being civilized. We have completely accepted the idea and forgotten that we have to see whether it is true or not. It is certainly not true. Unless each man comes to the consciousness of a Gautam Buddha, there is no question of civilization.After I left America, the US Attorney for Oregon gave a press conference in which he was asked, “Why have you let Osho go and not jailed him?” And the US Attorney said, “There are three reasons: one, our priority was to destroy his commune and we could not destroy it if we had not deported him.”But why should they be interested in destroying the commune? The commune was not hurting anybody. It was the most civilized group of people in the whole world. Five thousand people living for five years together in a desert, with no rape, no madness, no stealing, no murder, no suicide. People were so happy and so joyous. Why was the US Attorney interested in destroying the commune? The fact is: the commune became a pain in their neck. They could see what is possible. No court, no laws, no army, no police and yet five thousand people are living peacefully, lovingly, understandingly. This was hurting the politicians of America, because soon people would start comparing: “Why is it not happening all over America?” That was their number one priority – to destroy the commune.“Second,” he said, “we did not want Osho to become a martyr.” It implies that they had the intention to murder me, but they were afraid that murdering me would mean creating a new Christianity.If the Jews had not crucified Jesus there would not have been any Christianity at all. That’s why I never like to call it Christianity. I call it Crossianity. It has nothing to do with Jesus, it has everything to do with the cross. And you can see that cross hanging around the necks of all the missionaries and the bishops and the cardinals and the priests and the pope. The cross is the center. Anyway Christ was a Jew! And he always remained a Jew. He never even heard the word Christian. He died a Jew. But the cross created a great sympathy toward him. That was the fear: if they assassinate me, the danger is that sannyas will become a far more solid movement around the world.But the desire was there, otherwise he would not have mentioned it. Whatever you say shows not what you are saying but what is hidden behind it. Mentioning “We did not want Osho to become a martyr,” shows the desire that if it had been possible without making me a martyr, they would certainly have preferred to assassinate me. But he said, “We will do everything to silence him.” And they did everything to silence me.They influenced twenty-four countries not to allow me into their territories. The Indian government is under their pressure, making every effort… They cannot do anything to me, but they can do one thing: they can ensure that no news media reaches me, that no seekers from outside India reach me. They are making all kinds of efforts to prevent people coming to me. Naturally I will be silenced. It will be equivalent to killing me without a cross.The third thing is the most interesting thing he said. He said, “Moreover, Osho has not committed any crime; we don’t have any proof, we don’t have any evidence.” This recognition by the US Attorney for Oregon – but still I was fined four hundred thousand dollars! They don’t have any proof and they don’t have any evidence, they don’t think I have committed any crime. For what have I been fined? And they know perfectly well, I don’t have a single dollar. I have not touched money for almost thirty-five years! Perhaps, because I don’t have any possessions, they were hoping that I wasn’t going to be able to pay almost half a million dollars. So naturally, if I could not pay them, they would have an excuse to put me in jail for at least twenty years, thirty years.And you call this world a civilized world? For what reason did they deport me? They did not allow me even to stay a single night! I was ordered from the court directly to the airport; my jet was ready, its engine was kept running. “Move out of America immediately.”What was the problem? Why could I not stay at least for the night? The reason was they were afraid I might appeal to the higher court, I might go up to the Supreme Court. It was better to throw me out of America so I could not do that.And this is a civilized world! America is very proud of its civilization. Absolutely innocent people are being tortured. Thirty million people in America are beggars. They are just on the street, with no food, no shelter, no clothes; they don’t know from where they are going to get their food tomorrow. And exactly the same number – a strange coincidence – thirty million Americans are suffering from too much weight. They are looked after in the hospitals because they cannot be left alone in their houses. Devageet was right: in the middle of the night they empty the fridge.Thirty million people are dying of overfeeding and thirty million people are dying without food. Is this civilization? Can’t a simple understanding be there: “Don’t eat too much and what remains can save thirty million people?” Not eating too much is going to save the other thirty million who are dying of starvation. If they go on eating, sixty million people are dying unnecessarily.You call this an intelligent world, a civilized world, a cultured world? No, I refuse to! A hundred times No! This world is not yet civilized. It needs civilization, certainly. But up to now no effort has been made to civilize it.And strange things go on happening. I have been continuously receiving letters from sannyasins from all over the world that they want to come, but the moment they mention meditation – that they are going to India for meditation – the Indian embassies refuse them. They say “India is not for meditation.” And for almost ten thousand years India has been the center of meditation, and pilgrims from all over the world have always moved toward India in search of meditation.Now who are these idiots who are preventing people from coming to India because they want to learn meditation? They are allowing people who want to see the ruins of old forts, castles, caves. That’s perfectly okay, you are a tourist. But if you are going to learn meditation, you are not to be allowed.The fear is: if you are going to learn meditation, you will end up in Pune. Around the world this is the only effort being made on a large scale to make people civilized. But no politician wants people to be civilized. No country wants people to be civilized. They want a pretense, a hypocrisy, but not a deeper transformation.We have to create that revolt around the world. It is not against anybody, it is against your false ideas, your false personality, your masks. You have to discover your original face, you have to discover your authenticity and you will create a small energy field. Whoever comes close to you will feel the flavor of civilization, of culture, of humanness. And if you go really deep into your being, you can radiate something which is the only argument and the only proof that the world is not dead, that it is alive, it is intelligent, it is divine.All religions should disappear from the world. Religiousness alone is enough, and religiousness need not be organized. It is each individual’s communion with the universe. There is no need for Christians or Hindus or Mohammedans. There is only need for religious people, seekers, lovers of meditation dropping all their masks, courageous enough to expose their original face to the world.When the world has its original face, it will be a civilized world – not before that.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 28 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is the transcendental?The moment you start witnessing yourself, you will see three layers of existence within you. One is the outermost. Everybody can observe it: it is objective, it is material, it is your body. The second layer behind it is your mind, your thoughts, your dreams, your expectations. Only you can see them, nobody else can see them from outside. They are not objective. They are subjective, but they certainly are. They exist in their own way. You cannot deny their existence, certainly on a different wavelength – not as solid and physical as the body – but you can see them. They direct your life, they are your hopes, your projections, your expectations.The first layer is called the objective and the second layer is called the subjective, but beyond both there is a witness which can watch both the body and the mind, the material and the nonmaterial. This witness, this consciousness, this awareness, is beyond both. It is neither material nor nonmaterial because it is beyond both. You cannot go beyond it. You cannot witness it. You have come to the very end of the rope, you have come to the very bottom of existence. This awareness is called the transcendental because it transcends the duality of body-mind. To be centered in it means you have come home. There is no way beyond it. Here the road ends.Suddenly you find perfection in everything. Nothing is missing, nothing needs improvement, refinement; everything is as it should be, and this feeling, that everything is as it should be, brings tremendous gratitude. The perfection of existence fills you with the tremendous joy that you are a participant in a perfect existence, that you are an invited guest, that you are welcome here, that the whole existence needs you. If you were not here, it would miss you; some place would remain vacant. Nobody else can take your place. This gives you individuality and dignity and a great blissfulness. For the first time you are at ease with existence, with trees, with stars, with the ocean. The whole becomes your home. This is the transcendental.It is called transcendental because it transcends all duality and brings you to a state of oneness. This is the ultimate outcome of a meditative consciousness.Maharishi Mahesh Yogi calls his meditation Transcendental Meditation. That is an unnecessary repetition of words. Meditation is enough, or transcendental is enough; both mean the same. Meditation brings you to transcendence and every transcendence is nothing but the ultimate flowering of meditation. And what he calls Transcendental Meditation is neither transcendental nor meditation; it is just chanting a certain name. You can chant your name. It gives a certain relaxation.The great English poet Tennyson, without being initiated by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – there was no question of it because he existed a long time before Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was born – just found it by himself because he had to sleep in a room separate from his parents. They were rich people, they could provide each child with a separate room of his own. But he was so small and the nights were so dark. There was great fear – and particularly in England, which seems to be the most ghost-haunted country in the whole world.It is strange, but nowhere in the world will you find so many ghost-haunted houses, so many people concerned about ghosts. So naturally the little child, Tennyson, was very worried when it became dark and the lights were put out. Finding nothing else to hold on to, he discovered a trick. He would repeat his own name continuously: “Tennyson, Tennyson, Tennyson, Tennyson,” just to avoid all kinds of ghosts who must have been around in the darkness, hiding in the nooks and corners of the room. He became so occupied with his own name that a certain curtain was created protecting him from all sides, so there was not even a small gap for any ghosts to enter.He found – strangely, accidentally – what Maharishi Mahesh Yogi calls Transcendental Meditation. He became utterly silent, peaceful, and fell into deep relaxed sleep. And in the morning when he woke up, he would wake up with the same repetition – “Tennyson, Tennyson” – that he had gone with into sleep.This is something to be understood. Anything that you go to sleep with, the last thing that you remember before sleep falls over you, will be the first thing you remember when you wake up, even before opening your eyes. Psychologically of course you were not aware of it, but you repeated the same thing the whole night.If Tennyson repeated his own name while he was falling asleep, slowly, slowly the sleep became deeper and the word Tennyson became farther and farther away like an echo, until finally he forgot all about Tennyson and fell into an unconscious state. But that word continued in the unconscious as an undercurrent. That’s why in the morning, the first thing he remembered was his own name.You can try it. Anything you fall asleep with will remain flowing within you and you will have to encounter it in the morning when you wake up. This means the whole night he was repeating consciously at first, then unconsciously, then again consciously, the same name. Naturally he could not dream. He could not think of anything else. His sleep became a very silent, deep, dreamless sleep – what Patanjali calls sushupti. Modern psychology is still not aware of it.Patanjali, the man who first wrote the whole science of Yoga… It happens very rarely that a single man creates a whole science. It is now five thousand years old, but in these five thousand years, nothing has been added to the science of Yoga. It remains exactly the same. And I don’t think there is any possibility in the future either to make any improvement. A single genius completed the whole thing, not leaving anything out of it that could be added later on. Patanjali calls this state sushupti, dreamless sleep. It is a beautiful state, very healthy, very nourishing, very rejuvenating. But it is not meditation. It is just a kind of hypnotic sleep.By repeating your own name continuously you create a certain kind of boredom. Obviously, if you repeat “Tennyson, Tennyson,” how long can you remain interested? Soon you start feeling bored, and boredom is a very good state for bringing in sleep. Whenever you feel bored you start falling into sleep. The mind finds a way to get out of boredom by going to sleep. That’s why in every church you will find almost everybody asleep, just having a good Sunday-morning sleep.I have heard about a priest who was very famous and his congregation was very large. The reason for his congregation being so large was that there was no other preacher who was so boring. It was a strange reason. But he bored people to such an extent that even people who were suffering from insomnia fell asleep. The whole night, even with all their sleeping pills, they could not manage it, but the preacher was really a genius. His voice was so boring; what he was saying he had said so many times that people could hear it even in their sleep. He was also happy; with everybody asleep the whole church was silent.He had only three sermons; there was no need to have more, three were enough. Nobody was awake so nobody knew which he was giving; nobody could repeat what they had heard. Everybody said that the man certainly cast a hypnotic spell.Just one old man sitting in front of him, the richest man of the city, was a trouble. He snored. His snoring was not a trouble; the trouble was that because of his snoring, many people could not sleep. The preacher was very much disturbed that if it continued many people would stop coming. They came only to have a good morning sleep on Sunday. It was so rejuvenating, one hour’s sleep, that it was enough to keep them relaxed, calm and quiet for the whole week. He had to find some way – and he found it.The old man always used to come with one of his great-grandchildren, just a small boy, but very alive. In fact, in the whole congregation only he was awake. The priest pulled the boy aside one day and said, “Listen, I will give you a quarter of a dollar if you can keep your old man awake. Whenever you see he is snoring, just start nudging him. Wake him up. Don’t let him sleep. And a quarter every week is certain.”The boy said, “Done.”The next week the old man could not figure out what had happened to the boy. He always used to sit silently by his side. The moment he started snoring, the boy started waking him up.Outside the church he asked, “What is the matter with you? You did not let me sleep at all!”He said, “The priest is giving me a quarter to keep you awake.”The old man said, “Then you should have told me before. I will give you half a dollar to let me sleep!”He said, “Done.”The next week the preacher watched. Again many times he gestured to the child, gave all indications, but the child simply sat there smiling, not even bothering about the priest.The priest thought, “What has happened? Has he forgotten completely?” When everybody was sleeping he even showed him a quarter. The child said no, just waved his hand. “Strange…” After the meeting he got hold of the child and asked, “What is the matter?”He said, “My old man is giving me half a dollar.”The priest said, “Half a dollar? I will give you one dollar, but don’t let that old man sleep!”He said, “Done.”But the priest thought, “I cannot compete with that old man because he is very rich. I am a poor priest.” He said to the boy, “Listen. I am a poor priest, I cannot give you more than that.”He said, “It all depends on the old man. If he says he is going to give me two dollars… You are a man of understanding, business is business.”And that’s what happened. The old man said, “Two dollars,” and the boy again stopped.Finally the priest had to talk to the old man himself. “Let us clarify the whole thing. I am not worried about your sleep. My problem is that because of your snoring many people cannot sleep and they are complaining. My congregation is the biggest in the city because they enjoy such a beautiful sleep. Anything boring is helpful.”Now they have created many machines which simply create the noise of the ocean, the waves coming to the rocks, splashing, making their sound. You just have to plug into the mechanism and it gives you the continuous sound of the waves, and many people are helped by it. They fall asleep, it is so boring.What Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is teaching people is a kind of dreamless sleep. It is not meditation. Meditation is awakening, not going to sleep. I have nothing against it, he just should not call it Transcendental Meditation. It is simply hypnotic sleep. He is using a wrong name and exploiting people because of the wrong name. People think it is meditation. This is sheer conmanship.In the East, we have known for centuries that chanting is good for sleep, and sleep is good for health. So there is nothing wrong in it, just fifteen minutes or ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the evening. If you can do it, you will have better health, a better sense of well-being, so there is nothing wrong in it. But it is not meditation.Meditation is just the opposite. It is awakening. It is becoming fully aware of your body, of your mind. And you have simply to be watchful. You don’t have to repeat anything, because repetition means you have fallen into identifying with the thought process.Chanting is also a thought process. Repeating a mantra or a name of God – Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, it doesn’t matter. You can simply count from one to a hundred and back again, from a hundred to ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven, then go back. Go up, go down. Just climb the whole ladder up to a hundred and again come down. Four or five times you will be able to do it and then you will fall asleep. But the whole night you will have to do that, climbing up, coming down, climbing up, coming down. It may even be tiring, so that in the morning you may feel your back is hurting, something has gone wrong, you feel giddy. The first thing that you will find in the morning is that you are coming down or going up. The whole night it has continued. Don’t choose such a thing.It was perfectly good for Tennyson; he did it his whole life. In his autobiography he says: “I don’t know what the secret of it is. I simply stumbled on it out of fear. But I found it so peaceful, so relaxing, leading me into such deep sleep that I have used it my whole life. Whenever I have time, I repeat my own name, just sitting in the bus or in the railway train. There is nothing to do. I just close my eyes and go on repeating my name. And it is so peaceful and so silent.” But it is a silence which is of sleep, it is a peace which is of sleep.You will not become aware at the very moment it is happening; you will become aware when you awake. You will see you have passed through a peaceful land. Only the remnants like a memory hang around you – some fragrance. But you have passed through the garden completely asleep. When you wake up, you find you must have passed through a garden because you can still smell the roses.I entirely support what Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is doing. But I absolutely disagree with his using a name which simply exploits people who do not know what meditation is. He is giving something very cheap in the name of meditation. Meditation is always the essential awakening, witnessing, watchfulness, consciousness. It is never unconscious; it is never a deep sleep. It is a deep awakening. The moment you are alert, you can see the body, you can see your mind, and you can experience yourself. You cannot go beyond this yourself. You cannot go behind it or beyond it. It is your very being. You cannot jump out of it. It is not a dress that you can jump out of. It is you yourself. It is your very essence.This essence is transcendental.But all religions have created their own ideas about meditation. Except Gautam Buddha, no other religion has been able to find exactly the right meaning of meditation. Hence he remains a pillar of light to all those who are seeking, searching. All other religions have fallen into the trap of chanting, prayer, mantras, rituals. A single man in the whole of history stands alone like an Everest, denying everything except witnessing. That’s what he means by vipassana.It is the art of witnessing all your actions, physical or mental. As you watch them, they slow down. Your body becomes more at ease, tensionless; your mind becomes slowly, slowly thoughtless. And when the body is completely silent, and the mind is without any thought, your whole being is filled with a light that you have never known before. It is not the ordinary light that needs fuel. It is your very being radiating. From this moment onward, your journey will take a new turn. On each step, a new mystery will open its doors. You will be becoming more and more part of the miracles of existence.Existence is a mystery. It is not something that you have to solve. It is not a problem, nor is it a puzzle; there is no solution to it. No philosophy can demystify it. You can experience it, you can enjoy it, you can dance it, you can live it, but you cannot know it.The young mother is skeptically examining the new educational toy. “Isn’t it rather complicated for a young boy?” she asks the assistant.“It is the very latest idea,” replies the girl. “It is designed to adjust the child to living in today’s world. Any way he tries to put it together is wrong.”But this small anecdote is true about existence. Any way you want to explain it, your explanation is wrong. Those who know it do not try to explain it. They only describe its beauty, its truth, its glory, its blissfulness. They only give you some indications that may create a longing in you to find out what it is.Once you enter it, you will forget all about finding out what it is. Enjoying it so much, who cares what it is? What are you going to do with your explanations? And anyway there is no explanation. The whole of existence is only an experience without any explanation. This is its transcendentalness. It transcends all understanding, all knowledge, all explanation, all philosophy. But you can experience it. You can become one with it. It is always ready to absorb you. Just as the ocean is ready to absorb any dewdrop.Existence is always waiting and willing, welcoming. You just have to learn a little courage, just a little courage. One jump and you are gone forever into the mysterious. You yourself become a mystery. Every mystic is a mystery. He has become one with the ultimate mystery. Mysticism is not a religion because it has no theology, no philosophy, no doctrine, creed, cult. It explains nothing. It simply shows you the way to move into the unexplainable. It opens the door of the unknowable and pushes you in.There is a beautiful story about the Great Wall of China. It must be a story because nobody has found the spot up to now. But it has been reported for almost three thousand years that there is a spot on the China Wall… The wall is thousands of miles long and broad enough for a car to move along it. It is one of the miracles man has achieved. Millions of people died in making it. It took hundreds of years to build. They created almost a mountain against invaders.It was reported again and again that there is a spot somewhere on the China Wall where, if you place a ladder and go up the wall… Whoever has done that simply reaches the top of the wall, laughs loudly and jumps down the other side, where there is a deep ditch. The man is finished; you cannot even find pieces of him. But before jumping he laughs very loudly, perhaps the first belly laughter that he has ever laughed, with his whole body. It is the most mysterious point on the wall. Many have reported that they have seen people reaching the point where they laugh and jump. Nobody knows why they laugh.Many people have tried, determined not to laugh whatever happens, and even if they laugh, not to jump. But whoever has gone to the point, even with absolute determination, suddenly forgets all determination, laughs loudly and jumps. Nobody has found any explanation yet of why it happens. And nobody comes back to tell you.I don’t think there is any such point on the China Wall, but perhaps it is a parable about mysticism. Something like that happens the moment you reach and the door opens. You have a good laugh and you jump.But the mystery remains a mystery. And that is the beauty of the mystic: he does not try to demystify existence. He loves the mystery. The mystery has a certain romance about it, its unknowability is exciting. It is a great challenge, a great adventure for all those who have souls strong enough to go on such a pilgrimage.Mysticism is transcendentalism.Osho,When the old road has come to its end and the new path is not seen yet…When the past has no more meaning and the new dawn is still far away…When everything looks old and futile and the new has not arisen yet…When I know what I am not and I don't know who I am…When there is no hope, not even for a new hope…Osho, is this the dark night of the soul? Will I see the dawn?Sarjano, it seems you have come to the point of the China Wall that we were looking for. Just have a good laugh and jump! The past is finished, there is no meaning in it. According to you, you have understood what is false, so there is no question of clinging to it; you don’t have anything to lose. Why not have a good laugh and jump?It never happens the way you are asking. You remain intellectual. You are saying the darkness has gone but the light has not come. Now what am I supposed to do? It can’t happen in the very nature of things. The moment you understand the false as false, instantly you know what is real. These two things don’t happen separately. There is not a gap of time, they happen together. Here you understand what is false, and immediately, instantly, you know what is real. How can you understand the false as false if you don’t understand the real as real? Without the understanding of the real you cannot call anything false.So your question may look very relevant – it is not. I will read it so you can see.“When the old road has come to its end and the new path is not seen yet…” Then what are you seeing? That’s just what I was saying, have a laugh and jump. The old road is finished and the new you cannot see. Certainly there must be a valley. Just say, “Giddyap!” and take a jump! It does not need an answer, it needs a little courage. But I say to you, in the very nature of things it does not happen. “When the old road ends…” That is where the new road begins. The end of the old is the beginning of the new. They are not two separate things; there is not a gap between the two.If there had been a gap, then it would have been impossible to find the new, because you would need something to join the old to the new. What will you call it? Old or new? You will need something to make the join, a bridge, a road – what will you call it? If you call it old, then when you were saying the old is finished, it was not finished. If you call it new, you have already found it, you just move on. No, there is no gap ever. In existence there are not gaps; everything is continuous.Do you know when your childhood ended and you became young? Can you remember the day, the date, the hour, the minute, the second? Everything is continuous. Do you know the day you will become old? Will you be able to mark it on the calendar? “Today I am becoming old. Youth is finished. Now begins old age.” You never know. Things are continuous. Yes, one day you realize that you are now old, but it is not the moment when you become old. You don’t become old in a single moment. It is a process. It goes very slowly, without making any noise.You see that “…the old road has come to its end and the new path is not seen yet…” but I cannot concede that. If the old is seen as ending, that is the beginning of the new. Move on it. “When the past has no more meaning and the new dawn is still far away…” It does not happen. You are asking a very intellectual question, but existence has no obligation to fit with your intellectual categories. Existence goes on its own way. You have to fit with it. If the past has no more meaning, you have become new. The dawn has come. The birds must have started singing, the flowers must be opening, the sun is rising.Have you ever seen a gap between the night and the day? When the night ends, the day begins; when the day ends, the night begins – immediately. There is no gap at all. If there had been a gap, there would have been immense difficulty how to jump it. The day has ended, you are standing there and the night has not begun. Now how to jump? Where to go? Nature does not leave anything incomplete.You say, “When everything looks old and futile and the new has not arisen yet…” How then can it look old and futile? With what are you going to compare it? When you say everything looks meaningless, it implies that you have a certain understanding of meaning. You know what meaningfulness is. Only in comparison to meaning can you say that something looks meaningless. Only in comparison to life can something look like death. If you don’t know anything about life, you cannot describe somebody as dead. These categories are combined. They are two sides of the same coin.But you go on and on – “When I know that I am not and I don’t know who I am… When there is no hope, not even for a new hope… Is this the dark night of the soul? Will I see the dawn?” It is nothing so great as you are making it. The dark night of the soul is experienced only by very great mystics, Sarjano; it is not spaghetti! The dark night of the soul means you have come close to the dawn. The darker becomes the night, the closer is the dawn. The dark night of the soul is a moment of celebration because the dawn is not far away. If the dark night has come, then the dawn is implied in it. It is bound to come, in fact it has come. It is not separable from the dark night.But you have a habit of complaining. This whole question is nothing but grumbling, complaining, that you have done everything that was needed. The old is finished, the false is dropped, the dark night of the soul has come, and nothing is happening. You remind me of Moses.Moses is standing facing the Red Sea. Behind him, in the distance, clouds of dust from Pharaoh’s army, hot in pursuit, arise. Suddenly with a mighty roar, the waters part, opening an escape route.Moses looks ahead at the wet roadway and the cliffs of water on either side. He lifts his face to the sky and murmurs, “Tell me something, God, how come I always have to go first?”Such a great miracle is happening and he is not going to thank God. He complains about why it always happens that he has to go first.If all that you are saying is really happening, be thankful. If the old has ended, you will see the new. If everything has become meaningless, you will find authentic meaning. If the dark night of the soul has arrived, dance, rejoice, the dawn is not very far away.But always be grateful.Prince Edward, the Queen of England’s youngest son, meets one of Gaddafi’s daughters at a party and they fall in love. Edward tells his mother that they want to be married, which puts the Queen into a dilemma. On one hand she is pleased because it will dispel all the rumors about Prince Edward’s homosexuality, but on the other hand, to have any allegiance with Libya will annoy Ronald Reagan considerably. Her motherly instincts get the better of her and she consents to the marriage.Still not trusting the girl’s motives, the Queen instructs James Bond to spy on the young couple. The next morning Bond reports back to the Queen.“What happened, Double-O-Seven?” she asks.“Well,” says Bond, “first she said to him ‘I offer you my honor,’ then he said to her ‘I honor your offer.’”“So what happened next?” asks the Queen excitedly.“Well,” says Bond, “after that it was on her, off her, off her, on her, all night long!”What you need, Sarjano, is a good laugh and then just jump. If the old road has ended, jump. You will be on the new road. Certainly you cannot be on the old road. If everything has become meaningless that is a great freedom. It means the very effort of trying to find meaning in things is an exercise in utter futility. Life has significance but no meaning. Meaning is a mind trip. Significance is a great love affair of the heart.You are not potentially a man of the head. You are potentially a man of the heart. But everything is topsy-turvy in you, upside down. You have not realized a simple fact about yourself: you are a man, not of logic, but of love. Drop all intellectual bullshit. Get deeper into your heart and you will be able to see the new light, the new path, the new dawn.They are here, but your eyes are closed. The head is blind. Only the heart has eyes. It is strange that almost every culture of the world, every society, and every civilization that has up to now pretended to exist, they all say love is blind – without exception. But I want you to be absolutely clear about it: only love has eyes. Logic is blind.But all these societies wanted you to be fixed in the head and forget all about the heart, because the heart is not much use in the marketplace. What is needed there is the head, what is needed there is cunningness, cleverness; what is needed there is reason. Love is not needed at all in the world that we have created. That’s why it is ugly and miserable. Without love, man cannot get rid of misery, despair, anguish. He is bound to suffer. Only love is the savior, the redeemer.Just get down from your ladder a little toward the heart. The heart is exactly in the middle between your head and your being. Once you are down in the heart, you will have a totally different vision of things. Then I can tell you: one step more, from the heart to the being, is a very relaxed, silent, peaceful journey with no hindrances. But from the head there is no direct way to the being.Society has played a tremendously criminal trick on every human being. They have completely taken the heart away from you. This is the strategy so that you cannot reach your being. You can reach the being only via the heart. And the heart has been ignored by your education, by your religion, by everybody. It has been forced into darkness. So you are hung up in the head and you cannot go anywhere. You can only go on making questions, intellectual gymnastics, but it is all meaningless, futile.Rather than questioning, you should start moving toward the heart. That is the true rebelliousness, love revolting against logic. And then from love to being is a very simple, very joyful way. It is a garden path full of roses.Looking at your question, all that I can feel, Sarjano, is that you are not supposed to be an intellectual, a heady person. You are not. I have seen your tears and I have seen your laughter and I know that you are misplaced. It is within your hands to revive your heart, which has been repressed, and drop your head, which is not your destiny. It is nobody’s destiny. The destiny is to realize the being and the being can be realized only via the heart.Unless you know and learn the art of love, unless you are sensitive and creative, unless you forget all Aristotelian logic, you will never reach your being. And your being is the place where sat-chit-anand – truth, consciousness, bliss – are waiting for you. Just a small effort from the head to the heart, then there is no effort needed at all. Effortlessly you will slowly sink from your heart into your being.This reminds me that all the Eastern mystics have been saying that no effort is needed to find yourself. From the very beginning they were all trained to be in the heart. The modern mind, particularly the Western mind, finds it difficult to understand that you can achieve something without effort. Some effort has to be made. The reason for this problem is that the modern man is head-oriented and the people who were talking about effortless let-go were heart-oriented. The situation has changed. That’s why the modern man finds it difficult to understand the mystics of the East. There is a certain gap that has arisen. They were talking in the language of the heart, you are listening in the language of the head – and there is no communication between head and heart.Moving from the head to the heart is the first step of any authentic meditation. But you don’t have to take the second step; it happens on its own accord. There are only two steps. One you have to make – from the head to the heart – the other happens spontaneously, on its own accord. You simply relax and you will find yourself slipping deeper and deeper. One day, suddenly all is achieved. All that was missing has become available. The whole is yours. The whole mystery is yours.Osho,Being near you, I feel utterly at home, as if in the right soil. In the West, I worried: “How to be near Osho sooner?” and often found it impossible to be meditative. Is it really possible to grow and flower in the harsh environment of the West?It is certainly difficult to grow into meditation in the harsh environment of the West, but it is not impossible. It is certainly arduous because the whole surrounding is against meditation. Everything is mind-oriented and meditation is a state of no-mind. The whole of education, the culture, the society, the people, are all believers that there is nothing beyond the mind. The mind is their whole world. Meditation simply denies the mind and wants to go beyond it.So I can understand, it is difficult. But even in the West you can find silent moments when society cannot interfere. In your own room, in the middle of the night, when everybody has fallen asleep, when the noises of city life have disappeared, you can find the East in your bedroom. When you have some time, weekends, holidays, you can move to some solitary place, you can go to a forest. Don’t go where everybody else is going, just avoid those places. And you can always find… The West is not as populated as the East. Here it is very difficult to find a place where people are not.I have heard a story about the first astronaut.When he landed on the moon, he found a few Indians sitting in a corner, smoking beedies. He asked, “My God, how did you manage it? You don’t have enough technology, particularly space technology, you don’t have anything at all, how did you manage to reach, and not only one person, but a whole group?”They said, “It is very simple, there is no need of any technology. We just stood on each other’s shoulders and went on standing. Finally we reached the moon.”It is so crowded in the East, it is very difficult to find… But the West is not so crowded, you can still find very silent, very peaceful places which have not been spoiled by the mind-oriented society. Trees don’t get educated in your universities, nor have the mountains heard anything about the Vatican. Just take a small boat onto the ocean, and you are out of the West. You don’t have to go far away, just on a river or the ocean. Just stop your boat there and the sunrise will be as fresh as it has ever been. West or East does not matter; the starry night above will be as young and as beautiful and as unpolluted as it has always been from eternity.So you just have to be a little alert to find moments, spaces where you can relax, where you can meditate. I’m not telling you to meditate sitting in a London street. That is possible when you have known meditation and you have passed on that path many times, then it doesn’t matter whether it is London or New York. Anywhere you can slip inside yourself. And your inner being does not belong to the East or to the West. It transcends all dualities.But the problem is certainly there and the only way to solve it is – when you can manage it – come here, be here. Then forget the West completely and don’t waste your time on anything else. Put your whole energy into meditation. Once you are centered in your being, once you know the inner path, then wherever you are, you can manage to go to the center without any difficulty. Even when you are dying, it will not make any difference. You may be sick, it will not make any difference.A strange thing happened with one great English philosopher, C. E. M. Joad. He was always against George Gurdjieff. In modern times, Gurdjieff was the only man – very authentic – to take the message of inner crystallization from the East to the West. Many others have gone to the West. Most of them are hocus-pocus; they have gone to the West just to earn money. Now all over the West there are Indian monks, Japanese monks, Tibetan monks, but these are not authentic people. Their only desire is to exploit the gullibility of Western humanity.Because the West has developed its mind to such an extent, you cannot defeat it intellectually. You cannot defeat it in wars. But it has forgotten its inner world completely, so completely that any idiot can exploit it, saying they will show the way. The West has become lopsided. The intellect has gone very far and the heart has remained very small, untrained, uneducated. So when somebody comes and brings a message about the heart, the West has no way to understand whether the man is phony or authentic.As far as I know, nobody has made such a tremendous effort as George Gurdjieff to bring the Eastern methods of self-realization to the West. But even a man like C. E. M. Joad, a great philosopher, who has written many beautiful books on philosophy, laughed whenever George Gurdjieff’s name was mentioned. “That man is just a cheat, a fraud. There is nothing inside, no center. What crystallization? He is just using these words and cheating people.”But C. E. M. Joad fell sick and death was coming close, and the doctor said, “You are not going to live more than six weeks. So whatever you want to do, do!”At that moment he realized, “Perhaps there may be something inside. I have been denying it only intellectually, I don’t really know. And I have been laughing at that man Gurdjieff, but my laughter was insensitive. I have not understood him at all, I have never gone to meet him while he was teaching in London.”Finally he asked a friend, “Can you bring George Gurdjieff to my place? At least I can ask his forgiveness for making a fool of him without understanding him or his message. I have been criticizing him without understanding him.”Some friend brought Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff sat by the side of C. E. M. Joad’s bed. Joad said, “Please forgive me. I may not have another chance to see you again because my death is coming closer.”Gurdjieff said, “Forget about all that. It is death that has inspired you to call me. It is death that has made you waver about your whole lifelong stand that the mind is everything. But it is good! There is enough time. Six weeks will do. Even six minutes are enough. And a man of your caliber can even manage in six seconds. Just close your eyes – I am sitting here by your side – and watch your mind. Don’t do anything else, simply watch.”When death is so close, one is ready to do anything. If death had not been so close, Joad would have argued that except the mind there is nobody who is going to watch, but there was no time to argue. It was better to experiment with what this man is saying – there can be no harm. He was amazed when he started watching the mind. He forgot about Gurdjieff, he forgot about his death, he forgot by and by all the thoughts, and there was an immense silence in the room surrounding him. It took almost three hours.When Gurdjieff woke him up, he told him, “I am immensely happy, watching your face changing deeper into silence, watching your eyes, that they have become unmoving.”You can even see from the outside, from the eyelids, whether eyes are moving or not. If there are thoughts inside or dreams or anything, your eyes will be moving. If thoughts stop, dreams stop; if there is nothing on the screen of the mind, the eyes stop. So Gurdjieff was sitting there, watching, when Joad’s eyes stopped moving and his body was almost relaxed – as if there was no fear of death – and his face started changing with his inner experience. As the witnessing grows, the face starts having a certain grace, a certain beauty.Gurdjieff said, “You have done it. Now these six weeks are enough. Continue. And you have twenty-four hours every day. While you are awake, lying down – you have been told to rest which is good – use this opportunity that has been provided by death and you will die a very crystallized being. You are intelligent enough to understand the situation: before death comes, you have to know something in you which is deathless.”There were tears of gratitude in Joad’s eyes. He didn’t say a single word, but those tears said everything, his gratitude, his apology. Those six weeks were the most important in his life. His last statement to his friends was: “I had never thought that it would finally be Gurdjieff who would help me on my new journey, who would help me to know something that is immortal and eternal.”So wherever you are, just go on meditating. And it is just a question of a little intelligence to find a silent corner, a silent space. Once in a while move to the forest, to the ocean, to the mountains, and just meditate. The West cannot prevent you. If you cannot come here, then you have to find something there. But whenever you are here, devote your total time to meditation. All I would like you to do is to become so centered that you know the path very well. Become so acquainted with it that even in the crowd of any Western city you can manage to go inward. Nobody can prevent you.One day, while decorating the bathroom, Hymie Goldberg repaints the toilet seat, but forgets to tell Becky about it. So when she uses the toilet, she gets stuck to it. She sits there screaming and crying until Hymie comes and unscrews the seat. He helps Becky to the bed and lies her face down.Calling the family physician, Hymie does not tell him what has happened, but explains that there is no way that Becky can come to his office.Reluctantly the doctor agrees to call by on his way home. When he arrives, Hymie shows him into the bedroom, where Becky gets up on her hands and knees to display her problem.“Well, Doctor,” says Hymie, “what do you think?”Stroking his chin, the doctor replies, “I think it is lovely, but why such a cheap frame?”So whenever in the West, enjoy all kinds of stupidities that are going around. There are so many idiots in the West. Forty-three percent of people in America believe in flying saucers. Never before has there been such a great crowd of idiots in the world. Millions of people believe in crystals. It seems humanity is on the verge of absolute insanity. So enjoy. When you are in the West, enjoy all kinds of foolishnesses that are going around in the name of New Age.While you are here, meditate, so that you can get in contact with yourself. That is the only religion there is. All else is simply exploitation of people who have lost grip of themselves, of life, who have forgotten how to approach their own being. And they have become vulnerable to exploitation by any kind of conmanship.There are so many people doing all kinds of things that it seems soon there will be no possibility for any authentic religious movement. All these fake and fraudulent people are destroying the possibilities for any authentic movement. So while you are there, enjoy all the games that are being played in the name of spirituality. Here things are absolutely simple.Except witnessing, I don’t teach anything else. So just witness your mind and the meditation will be happening. And once you have got in tune with your being, you know the way, you know the how. Then it does not matter where you are. Alone or in the crowd, in the silences of the forest or in the noises of a marketplace, it is all the same. You can simply close your eyes and disappear inward.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 29 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,If, in a still and calm and silent moment, I whisper, “Kill me now,” will you do it?Anand Rakesh, I have every intention of killing you because without killing you, you can’t have a new life. You will go on living the old, rotten personality which keeps you company and gives you a certain consolation. But the company is of misery and the consolation is only a hope; it never materializes. Just because it is old, you feel at ease with it. However dark and however painful, man has the greatest adaptability. If he becomes accustomed to it, he can adjust in any situation; it only needs time.You can see it happening in poor countries like India. About five hundred million people are starving, but they won’t revolt, they won’t start a revolution. They will starve and die, hoping for some god’s messenger – avatar – some savior to save them. It is strange how blind man can be. So many saviors have come to the earth, so many messengers have come, but not a single one has been able to effect any change in human life. On the contrary, they have made it more miserable because they imposed unnatural systems of thought which go against your very potentiality. But the hope continues. It is the hope that keeps the starving person from revolting.Secondly, this poverty, this hunger, have become so much part of his life, almost his lifestyle, that he does not conceive of any possibility of another kind of life. He will go on living as he has been living for centuries: in starvation, undernourishment, in slavery. It is simply unbelievable how man adapts to the old, to the acquainted, to the known and is afraid of the unknown. He may have nothing to lose, but still the fear of the unknown is very deep-rooted in man.Perhaps it is from your very birth that the fear of the unknown settles in. And that is the bottom of your unconsciousness. Every child is born into an unknown world. He has to leave the known world of the mother’s womb; reluctantly he leaves it. He makes as much effort to cling to it as possible. It is just by nature that he has to come out – it is impossible for him to remain there any longer. But he comes trembling, not knowing where he is going, what kind of existence, what kind of life. He is accustomed to the life of the womb. Hence the first thing that he experiences is the fear of the unknown. And that fear haunts him all his life.You are asking me, Rakesh – but you may not have looked deeply into your question – “If…” Remember, I don’t like ifs and buts, so this is not a true thing that you are asking. You are simply supposing; it is hypothetical. If means the beginning of a hypothesis.“If, in a still and calm and silent moment…” Do you know any still, calm, and silent moment? Is it your existential experience? If it were so, you would not start the question with if. But as far as I am concerned, if you are in a silent, calm and still moment, I will not wait for you to whisper, “Kill me now”; I will kill you before that. I don’t postpone anything and I don’t wait for anything because the next moment is so uncertain.And when you are calm and still and silent, from where will the question come? From a silent space when you are enjoying life in its real essence, when it is the most juicy experience, from where will the whisper “Kill me now” come? In fact your stillness, your calmness and your silence have already killed you. And it is pointless to kill a man who is already killed. I am a lazy man, I don’t make unnecessary efforts. Once killed, killed for ever.But this very experience of death in silence is the beginning of a new life – very fresh, very young, just a green sprout, just the early morning cool breeze. It does not have the old connotations about death that your mind may be filled with: darkness, danger, angels of death surrounding you, pulling your soul out from your body while you cling to it. Death is a tremendously beautiful experience, perhaps the most significant moment in your whole life. It is the very climax, the crescendo, as if your whole life has become concentrated in a single moment.It is a known fact all over the world that sometimes when people are drowning, but don’t die; they are saved. All these people have a strange experience, all over the world this similar experience. When a person is drowning, he knows he is dying. He has no idea that he will be saved. He comes up from the water one or two or three times at the most, just for a few seconds. But in those few seconds a strange thing happens: he starts seeing his whole life as a film, passing fast before him from the first day he can remember, up to the moment when he is drowning, as if the whole mind is exposing itself, all its memories.It has been a great question mark for the scientists. How is it possible within two or three seconds to see your whole life which has taken you seventy years to live? But it happens. The film goes quickly. You see your whole life. If the man is saved, he will tell people that he saw his whole life.This is about the ordinary man with a very small consciousness. When an enlightened man is dying he not only sees his whole life, he also sees death as the highest peak he has ever experienced. It is not an enemy, but a great friend, because it is not the end but the beginning of a greater life, of an eternal life.So you need not even whisper; I don’t literally have to kill you. Your silence, your calm, your stillness will do my work. I have to kill indirectly, otherwise it will be illegal and criminal. I don’t touch you, I simply teach you something which is going to kill you. No court, no law can say that I kill you, can say anything against me. I was teaching you silence, meditation, I was teaching you to be joyous, I was teaching you stillness. No court, no law, no lawmakers have any idea that this is the situation in which one finally dies, as far as the old is concerned, and is reborn into a totally new vision with fresh eyes.The whole world changes for you. It is no longer separate. It is not something you have to conquer, to fight, to prove your manliness. No! It is something so tremendously close to your heart; it surrounds you with such warmth and love that you simply allow a let-go. In that let-go is the crucifixion of the old and the resurrection of the new.Ancient scriptures say “The master is death.” They are right, but only half right. The master is also the resurrection. But as far as the disciple is concerned he has no idea about resurrection, he only sees death. And there is a very subtle psychology behind it, Rakesh.You have not lived peacefully, you have not lived in stillness, you have not lived in silence; your life has been just vegetation. Naturally when you find stillness, calmness, and serenity, a desire deep within you arises that this is the right moment to disappear. You have never seen such a beautiful space. This is the space, not to pull back from, but to go deeper into – and disappear.It all comes automatically. If you meditate to the very end, death will happen to you. It will happen at the very center of your being, and from there, just as a seed dies in the soil and a sprout arises out of the death of the seed, you will die. But something fresh, young, eternally fresh, green, will arise out of your death. On your death, roses of your enlightenment will blossom. The new life will be the life of light, the life of blessings, the life of love.It has nothing to do with your old idea of death. You have to learn a new alphabet, a new language with new connotations. When you become a meditator, you cannot go on carrying the old associations with words that have been given to you by society, which is absolutely unconscious.You don’t need me to kill you. Although I am making every effort to kill you, I cannot kill you directly. And killing you directly is not going to help. It will be simply murder – of a vegetable! It is not a crime, in fact, because a vegetable-cutting knife would be enough. You are not yet ready to be killed. You are so fast asleep, so dormant, that it can be said you are absent.First be present in this silence, which is still an if for you. Make it a reality. In this silence will arise your presence, and with that presence you will feel death as a welcome guest. It takes you out of the grip of the old and helps you to move into the cosmic existence. It is a blessing, but only for those who are conscious. For those who are unconscious it is a curse.In the Upanishads there is a very beautiful story…An old man, a very rich man, a super-high-caste brahmin, very learned in the scriptures, was distributing gifts to other, poorer, brahmins because he knew he was going to die soon. His small son, whose name is Nachiketa, looked at the things that he was distributing. They were all rotten junk.People give these things as gifts. I have been watching gifts. They go on moving from one hand to another hand. Nobody uses them; they are so useless that the moment you get them you start looking for somebody to give them to.He had thousands of cows – in those days in India cows were the symbol of richness. How many cows you had was your bank balance. But he had chosen the oldest cows which no longer gave milk.In India an old cow is a burden. You cannot kill it because it is your mother. It does not give you milk, but you cannot let your mother starve. That is irreligious. You will not believe what Manu says in his scripture, which dominates Hindu society even today after five thousand years. It says: “To kill a cow is almost equal to killing one hundred untouchables, the sudras.” The cow is so valuable that if you can kill one hundred sudras – the untouchables, the poor, the poorest of the earth – the crime will be the same. And you can be forgiven by God if you kill one hundred sudras, but you cannot be forgiven if you kill a single cow.So he was giving old cows to other brahmins. As that boy was innocent he could not see the point. He asked his father, “What are you doing? These people are already poor and starving and you are giving them old cows, which I know perfectly well don’t give any milk. These poor brahmins cannot manage to find themselves two meals a day. How are they going to feed these cows?”He was so persistent that the father became angry. He said, “Be careful, I will give you away too!”He said, “To whom will you give me?”In anger the father said, “I will give you to death.”So he waited while all the brahmins passed by. The ceremony of giving things was over and he asked his father, “But death has not come and you were going to give me to death. I will have to go in search of death. In your anger, in a way you have already given me to death.”The father knew… “Where can he search for death?” He said, “Okay, go and search. If you can find him I will give you…”The story is very beautiful, although from this point on it becomes allegorical.The little Nachiketa – one of the most beautiful names as far as seekers are concerned – goes on and on asking everybody where he can find Death. And finally he ends up at the house of Death.But Death has gone to take a few people whose time has come. So he meets the wife. The wife, seeing a high-caste brahmin – and such an innocent child – asks him to come in.He said, “No, unless Death invites me, I will not come in. I will sit outside.” The wife brings food for him, something to drink.He refuses. He says, “I will fast until Death comes.” Three days pass and the wife is very concerned: the little boy has not eaten anything, has not drunk anything.Finally Death comes and Nachiketa says, “My father has given me to you.”Death says, “But you are too young. Your time has not come and your father has no right to give you. When your time comes I will come myself. You took such a long journey unnecessarily and then you have been fasting. Even I feel sad for you. What can I do for you? Just tell me – I will allow you three wishes. You can have all the money that you want, you can have a great kingdom if you want, if you have any desire for a beautiful woman, you can have her. Whatever you want, just tell me and I will do it.”Nachiketa says, “If I am a king, will you come or not?”And Death says, “You are asking strange questions. I will have to come one day finally, whatever you are, whether a king or a beggar.”He says, “Then there is no point in asking for a kingdom. And certainly death will be the same for the richest man. So there is no point in asking for money. Since you are going to come, I don’t see any point in asking anything of the world. I will ask you only one question: When you come, am I going to die really or is it just a facade? Am I just going to change bodies like houses? You have to tell me the truth.”Death is at a loss, because this is his secret. But the promise has been given, so Death says, “It is very difficult for me to answer you, but I have to be truthful to such an innocent inquiry. I have never killed anyone. I have simply changed their old, rotten bodies, their old, rotten minds and given them new bodies. And there are a few who have lived so totally and so consciously that they don’t need to come back into the world as a separate entity. They don’t get another body again. To them I give the whole of existence to disappear into. They will be in this cosmos not as separate units, but as one with the whole.”This is one of the most beautiful stories – very significant. The proverb I told you which says “The master is death,” here shows the reverse: “Death becomes the master.”And Nachiketa says, “Then there is no problem. I don’t have to be afraid of you. You are just a fiction and nothing else. Those who are unconscious believe you are a reality; those who are conscious know that you are a fiction, just an appearance.”Osho,For over thirteen years now, you have been ignoring me. What I could never fully grasp is that what you ignored was my neediness, greed, and all kinds of garbage. For my part, though I have been physically close to you, I have managed in my ignorance and fear to keep a certain distance. Really I have been ignoring you.Osho, from the first day I knew I was yours. But I was, and still am, a coward and an idiot.It is again Anand Rakesh. In the first question he was ready to die. But it was an “if” question. Now he is far more real. Now he is exposing his thirteen-year-long, strange, insane behavior.I don’t ignore anybody, but this is part of the human mind’s work: it projects everything onto somebody else. It ignores, but it projects on somebody else that it is being ignored. In fact somebody else becomes a mirror. You see your own face, but you think there is somebody in the mirror – small children do it. And everybody is a small child as far as spirituality is concerned.It is worth watching: when small children start moving a little, just put a big mirror in front of them and they will be stunned. Seeing the other child, there will be a few moments of utter silence – mixed with fear – but then curiosity takes over. They try to touch the other child, and the other child also is touching them. They become clear that there is no danger, but where is the other child hiding? Behind the mirror? I have seen with my own eyes the child go behind the mirror to find where the other child is. He cannot conceive that it is just a reflection.The master is a mirror: he only reflects you. But you go on projecting all kinds of things onto him. When you are in a good mood, he is a great master; when you are in a bad mood, he is just a fraud. Your conception about the master goes on changing every day. Sometimes he is so beautiful and sometimes he is just the incarnation of the Devil. Sometimes he is the Christ and sometimes the same person becomes the anti-Christ. But you never see the point: all these concepts and projections are yours. The master is only a mirror, a very clean mirror; it shows your reflections.At least you have come to a situation where you can realize it; thirteen years have not been wasted. You say, “Really I have been ignoring you.” Experiencing this, your life will take a new turn. Thirteen years you have been wandering zigzag, wanting my attention, but still keeping a distance. People go on doing that because they all have a split mind.Physiologists have just discovered what the meditators have known for centuries: you don’t have one mind, you have two minds. In your skull your mind is divided into two hemispheres, the right and the left – and they don’t have any connection with each other. They are not on speaking terms with each other. They don’t in fact know the other.Strangely enough, there are a few things which only the left-side mind is capable of doing and there are other things which only the right-side mind is capable of doing. They need a great harmony so that they don’t destroy each other’s efforts. That’s what goes on happening. What the right mind creates, the left mind destroys. They don’t know each other. They don’t have any idea that there is anybody else. One mind decides one thing, the other mind cancels it.But in meditation a bridge happens. Other than by a meditative mind it has not been possible to create this bridge. The bridge happens on its own accord. As you become silent, calm and quiet, both minds start functioning together in harmony. Your life becomes integrated, you are out of the schizophrenic world.This realization that you have been ignoring me is of great importance, Rakesh. From now on, you can start moving in the right direction. You say, “From the first day I knew I was yours. But I was and still am a coward and an idiot.” These are great realizations.Almost everyone is a coward, but hiding the fact so deeply that even he becomes unaware of it. Everybody thinks that he is a very brave man, but in fact to think of yourself as brave is nothing but a repressive technique of your cowardliness. This is a pose that you are putting on to cover your cowardliness. You can only become really brave when you know that death is a fiction. Before death becomes a fiction, it is absolutely natural that you will feel a certain cowardliness within you.It is better not to cover it up. It is better to understand it because that is the way to get rid of it, to find ways that can make you aware that death is a fiction. Then you are no longer a coward. And the same is true about your being an idiot. The world is full of idiots. It is very difficult to find someone who is not, but everybody believes he is an intellectual giant. He may not say that to others, it wouldn’t look right. He leaves it to others to understand; he knows himself that he is an intellectual giant, but because nobody recognizes his great intellect, he feels very offended.I have come across many intellectuals who are feeling very offended that they don’t have any recognition. I said, “If you are certain of your intelligence, you don’t need anybody’s recognition. Do you need anybody’s recognition that you have eyes? You’ve never thought about it. Only a blind man will think about it, ‘If somebody could recognize that I am not blind, it would be a great joy.’”Realizing that one is an idiot is simply realizing that one is unconscious. The word idiot is a little strong, just pure whiskey without water. You have to realize that your actual nature is simply unconscious. And out of your unconsciousness you go on doing things which prove to be idiotic.The psychiatrist marries a very ugly woman. When asked by a friend about his reasons the shrink replies, “I know that her face looks like the back end of a bus, that she has a terrible figure, that she is cross-eyed and stupid, but wow, what dreams she has!”He has married her for her great dreams. The psychoanalysts are interested in dreams and nothing else. Even the people who are concerned with your psychological sanity are themselves sitting in the same boat you are in. There is not much difference.Young Ruthie, the daughter of Hymie Goldberg, is watching her mother Becky as she tries on her new fur coat.“Mum,” she says in disgust, “do you realize how much a poor, dumb animal had to suffer, so you could have that coat?”“Ruthie,” snaps Becky angrily, “how dare you talk about your father like that.”Out of our unconsciousness we are looking at things, seeing things, which are not there, hearing things which have not been said. Our whole life is a mess because we are not alert.Becky Goldberg is watching the local news on the TV while Hymie is involved with a crossword puzzle.“Darling,” she says, “did you hear that? A man in New York has swapped his wife for a season ticket to the New York Yankees. Would you do a thing like that?”“Hell, no,” replies Hymie, “the season is half over.”“Gentlemen,” announces the drunk at the registry office, “I want to register this birth of twins.”“Why do you say ‘gentlemen’?” inquires the official. “Can’t you see I am here all alone?”“You are?” gasps the new father staggering back. “Maybe I had better go back to the hospital and have another look.”Perhaps he has seen twins where there was only one. He is seeing many gentlemen when there is only one.If you can understand that you are unconscious, it is the beginning of becoming more conscious. Nobody can remain unconscious if he realizes it, because then he knows that all his life’s misery and suffering is born out of this unconsciousness – there is no point in changing symptoms. Up to now you have been fighting with symptoms: how not to be miserable, how not to suffer, how not to be angry, how not to be jealous – these are all symptoms. You cannot fight with symptoms, you have to go to the roots.The root is simply your unconsciousness, out of which all these poisonous things go on growing. Once you reach the root, then the only way is not to bother about anger or suffering or misery, but to put your whole attention and energy into making the unconscious conscious. In other words, what I call meditation is just an effort of transformation from unconsciousness to consciousness, from darkness to light.A few years ago, when Ronald Reagan was still a third-rate movie actor, his little daughter was watching him in the shower. She pointed to his testicles and asked what they are.“Those are my apples, dear,” replied Reagan. Quickly the child ran to her mother and told her what Reagan had said.Nancy replied, “That’s nice, dear, but did he tell you about the dead branch they are hanging on?”

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 30 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is the responsibility of love?The mind creates questions. They may look very relevant and rational, but they are against experience, against existence. And because the whole world is communicating with each other only through the mind, nobody raises his voice against such basically wrong questions. For example, this question is fundamentally wrong. It is out of total misunderstanding.Love knows no responsibility because love itself is responsibility. To separate love and responsibility is simply stupid. But all moral systems of the world separate them. Their idea of responsibility does not correspond with existence, only with their logic. And it has to be understood that logic is man-manufactured. It does not grow in the fields. It is not like the mountains and the stars and babies. It is simply a mind projection.It has dominated humanity for centuries. It has destroyed many valuable possibilities, potentialities. It has closed many doors to the mysteries of life. It has made man almost blind to light, to consciousness, to bliss, to truth. But it has been such a long domination that it isn’t easily apparent that it goes on committing mistakes against existence. I would like to dissect this question as minutely as possible. Only dissection of the question will make you aware that it does not need an answer.Responsibility according to all moral codes is a kind of duty – and a duty is a burden. You have to do it in spite of yourself because you have been told to do it; it is a should. You feel guilty if you don’t do it. You feel you are escaping from your responsibility. But if you do it, you feel enslaved, destroyed as an individual, your freedom destroyed. So on both counts, you are in trouble. Morality makes man psychologically sick. It gives you ideas which are going to make you uneasy whatever you do. Whether you follow them or not makes no difference.You are told, “This is your responsibility toward the nation.” Now, the nation is a fiction. There are no nations in the world as far as nature is concerned, existence is concerned. All your maps are just meaningless and a better humanity is going to burn all of them, because all the boundaries that discriminate against any part of humanity are ugly, insane.I have told you a story…When India was divided into two nations, India and Pakistan, a rumor was heard that there was a madhouse just on the boundary. Neither India nor Pakistan was interested in taking the madhouse. But something had to be done. It had to go somewhere. Finally, the chief superintendent of the madhouse called all the mad people and asked them, “Do you want to go to India?”They said, “No, we are perfectly happy here.”The superintendent said, “You will be here. Don’t be worried about that. Just tell me – do you want to go to India?”They all looked at each other and they said, “People think we are mad! Something has gone wrong with our superintendent. If we are going to be here then the question does not arise of going to India. Why should we go to India?”The superintendent was in a difficulty how to explain to these insane people. He said, “Then would you like to go to Pakistan?”They said, “No, not at all. We are perfectly happy here. Why should we go anywhere?”He again tried to explain to them, saying, “You will be here, whether you choose India or Pakistan. You are not going anywhere.”Then they said, “It seems to be very strange. If we are not going anywhere, then why should we even be asked about it? We are here.”It was impossible to convince them that it is not a question of physically moving to India or Pakistan. It was a political question: “Under which country, within which boundary do you want to remain?”Finally it was decided by the officials that the madhouse should also be divided into two parts. One would be in India, one would be in Pakistan. They raised a huge wall, dividing the whole madhouse in two.And I have heard that the mad people still climb up on the wall, talk to the people on the other side and say, “We cannot figure it out. We are here, you are here, but you have gone to Pakistan and we have gone to India – just because they have raised this wall. And the strangest thing of all is that they think we are mad.”It is a mad world. All boundaries are absolute nonsense. Anything that divides man from man is inhuman, uncivilized, uncultured. But nobody asks whether nations are a fiction, and because you never ask, you start believing in the reality of nations. Then questions of responsibility toward the nation arise. You even have to sacrifice your life for a nation which is a fiction. No such thing exists anywhere, no India, no Germany, no Japan, no America. It is a single planet, one humanity. But because of the fiction, people go on killing each other. Real people are killed for an unreal idea.Responsibility toward the nation has been the cause of all wars. If all those people who had gone to war had refused – “We are not going to kill anybody for a fiction and we are not going to be killed for a fiction” – there would have been no wars, no politicians. The world would have been a peaceful, beautiful place to live in. For centuries we have done nothing except fight, except kill. Our only profession seems to be war. Sometimes we fight, and sometimes we prepare for a future fight.All the time we are engaged in a single profession – that of murderers – because we have been taught a stupid idea: responsibility toward your nation, responsibility toward your religion. All the religions have been teaching that your life is not more valuable than your religion. It is such a strange idea. All these things should be for man, not vice versa.A religion exists to help man, not to destroy man. But all religions have been destroying man, none has been helping. They say: “It is your responsibility. If your religion is in trouble or if your religion is trying to conquer bigger territories, to acquire more people, sacrifice is your responsibility.”It reminds me of the primitive religions because it is a relic of those days. In the ancient book of the Hindus, Rig Veda, they sacrificed to a fictitious God. Nobody has seen him, nobody has any idea what you mean by the very word. There exists no proof, no evidence, no witness. But for that unreal, fictitious God, which is just a hypothesis, men were even sacrificed before a stone statue – a statue that you have made.There is mention in Rig Veda of narmedh yagna. Sacrificing men to God was the greatest ritual. And the man who was ready to be sacrificed was thought to be a saint. Those who could not do such a thing were thought to be cowards, not fulfilling their responsibility. Dying for God – what can be more valuable than that?After men, they started sacrificing animals. Today all the Hindus of this country continuously try to stop cow slaughter. But they are not aware that their forefathers in the Rig Veda were themselves killing cows as a sacrifice to God. And they were eating the meat of the cows; stone statues don’t eat. You make an offering and then you can take it back as a divine gift. Everything is yours: you kill the cow, you offer it to a stone god, who cannot eat, and then you take it back and distribute it to all the worshippers. And those people are continuously trying to stop cow slaughter. They were killing horses, they were killing all kinds of animals. They are still killing.In Kolkata, at one of the most famous temples of the mother goddess Kali, every day they still kill a few goats and then the goat meat is distributed as prasad, as God’s gift to the worshippers. And this is a vegetarian country. A strange kind of vegetarianism! When they stopped sacrificing men… It had been hammered more and more by people like Gautam Buddha and Vardhaman Mahavira that it was absolutely ugly and uncivilized, that eating man in the name of religion was just a strategy to hide their cannibalistic tendencies. Because it was criticized so much, finally they dropped killing men.But something had to be found as a substitute. Even today, people who are using the substitute may not be aware what they are doing. They found a substitute in the coconut because it looks like the head of a man – two eyes, a little nose, a small beard, hair. In Hindi the head is called khopri and the coconut is called khopra, so there is not much difference. If you want to visit any temple, you will have to take coconuts. You don’t know what you are doing! The statues were once bathed in human blood. Now, that has become difficult. Coconuts are being used, so the statues are colored red. Why red? Blood red.In the name of God, which is a fiction, your responsibility was to sacrifice yourself. In the name of religion, there have been crusades: Mohammedans killing Christians, Christians killing Mohammedans, Mohammedans killing Hindus, Hindus burning Buddhists alive. And the greatest problem is that what you are doing to man is in the name of something that you cannot provide any existential proof for.But responsibility… Responsibility to your parents, responsibility to your wife, responsibility to your husband, responsibility to your children… Perhaps you have never thought about it: if you love your children, there is no question of responsibility. Because you love, you do things, you enjoy doing them. Nobody can enjoy responsibility. It is too big a word, too heavy. If you are educating your children, is it responsibility or your love? If it is love, then there is no question of any burden; you are not doing something reluctantly, in spite of yourself, just because it has to be done.But you are concerned about respectability, what others will say. You will be condemned, so you have to take care of your old parents – out of responsibility, not out of love.Love is completely forgotten, because love needs a revolution in your consciousness. It is not as cheap as responsibility. Responsibility can be taught to you by the priests, by the teachers, but nobody can teach you love. You have to find love yourself, within your being, by raising your consciousness to higher levels. And when love comes, there is no question of responsibility. You do things because you enjoy doing them for the person you love. You are not obliging the person, you don’t want anything in return, not even gratitude. On the contrary, you are grateful that the person has allowed you to do something for him. It was your joy, sheer joy.Love knows nothing of responsibility. It does many things, it is very creative; it shares all that it has, but it is not a responsibility, remember. Responsibility is an ugly word in comparison to love. Love is natural, responsibility is created by the cunning priests, politicians who want to dominate you in the name of God, in the name of the nation, in the name of family, in the name of religion – any fiction will do.But they don’t talk about love. On the contrary, because they are unable to control love, they are all against love. A man of love acts out of his own heart, not according to any moral code. A man of love will not join the army because it is his responsibility to fight for his nation. A man of love will say there are no nations, so there is no question of any fight.When I was a student at the university, it was made compulsory for every student to join army training, otherwise they would not be given their postgraduate certificates. It was my last year in the university. I went to the vice-chancellor and told him, “It goes against my consciousness, it goes against my heart to learn anything destructive. And I refuse absolutely to join any training that you are providing for students. I don’t care whether you give me the certificate or not.”He immediately said, “But don’t you feel any responsibility for your nation?”I said, “Where is the nation? I have never come across it, except on the map.”And I told him a story about two men sitting on the sea beach who suddenly began to beat each other. A crowd gathered and they were somehow separated. The police came, they were arrested and taken to the court.The magistrate said, “I know you both. You are known in the city as the best of friends. What happened?”They both felt very ashamed and they looked at each other. One said, “You tell him what happened,” and the other said, “Better you tell it.”The magistrate said, “What can be such a secret that you are having so much difficulty in telling it?”They said, “It is not a secret. It is simply so shameful that we don’t want to tell it, but if you insist, we will have to speak.“We are great friends. We were just sitting on the beach, when this person – my friend – said that he was going to purchase a buffalo. I said, ‘Buffalo? But remember, she should not enter my field. I am going to purchase a farm and if she enters my farm… I will not tolerate your buffalo simply because you are my friend. I will kill your buffalo.’“My friend said, ‘This is too much. Buffaloes are buffaloes. And I cannot follow my buffalo the whole day wherever she goes. She will go onto your farm and I will see then who kills my buffalo. I will kill anybody who kills my buffalo. I will not remember that you are my friend. You are my enemy if you kill my buffalo.’”Things came to such a head that the man who had made it clear that he would not tolerate the buffalo, drew a square on the sand with his finger and said, “This is my farm. Now let us see where your buffalo is.”He does not have a farm yet, nor does the other man have any buffalo. Both are thinking of purchasing.The other asked, “This is your farm?” and he ran his finger across “the farm” saying, “This is my buffalo. Now do what you want to do.”And the fight started.The magistrate said, “This is too much. Neither does he have the farm, nor do you have a buffalo. You should at least have waited.”They said, “It was a hypothetical question, but we forgot that it was hypothetical. We became so excited. Please forgive us.”We have all forgotten that many hypotheses are asking us to do things which we would never do in our senses, in our intelligence, in our consciousness.You are asking, “What is the responsibility of love?” You don’t understand those words. You don’t understand because you have not loved yet. That’s the only reason that you don’t understand. If you had loved, you would have experienced a responsibility arising out of it, with no sense of duty, with no sense of burden, but just a sheer joy, a dance, a song of the heart. You are doing something that is needed. You never think that you are obliged.Love never obliges anybody. Love is always obliged that you allowed the heart to shower upon you its flowers, its joys, its songs. Love is obliged to you for your receptivity. Responsibility always thinks: “I have done well and everybody should know it. And everybody should feel obliged. I have sacrificed so much for the freedom of the country. I have done so much in the war in defending the country. I am working so hard so that my children can be educated, can be well-nourished, and so that I can provide facilities for my grandparents or my parents.” But you find this a burden. You are crushed under it. It is not a joy, it is not blissfulness, it is not ecstasy.My grandfather loved very much. He was old, very old, but he remained active to his very last breath. He loved nature almost too much. He lived on a faraway farm. Once in a while he would come to the city, but he never liked it. He always liked the wild world, where he lived.Sometimes I went to see him and he always liked somebody to massage his feet. He was becoming so old and he was working so hard, so I would massage his feet. But I told him, “Remember, I am not fulfilling any responsibility. I don’t have any responsibility toward anyone in the world. I love you, and I will massage your feet but only up to the point where it is not troublesome to me. So when I stop, never ask me to do a little more. I will not. I am doing it out of my joy, not because you are my grandfather. I could have done the same to any beggar, any stranger, just out of love.”He understood the point. He said, “I never thought that responsibility and love are two things. But you are right. When I am working in the fields, I always feel I am doing it for my children and their children, as a duty. It is heavy on my heart. But I will try to change this attitude of responsibility. I may be too old to change – it has become a fixation in my mind – but I will try to change.”I said to him, “There is no need. If you feel it is becoming a burden on you, you have done enough. You rest. There is no need to continue working unless you enjoy the open sky and the green fields and love these trees and the birds. If you are doing it out of joy and you love your children and you want to do something for them, only then continue. Otherwise stop.”Although he was old, something synchronized between me and him. That never happened with any other member of my family. We were great friends. I was the youngest in the family and he was the oldest, just two polarities. And everybody in the house laughed. “What kind of friendship is this? You laugh together, you joke with each other, you play with each other, you run after each other. And he is so old and you are so young. And you don’t communicate the same way with anybody else, nor does he communicate the same way with anybody else.”I said, “Something has happened between us. He loves me and I love him. Now it is no longer a question of any relationship; neither am I his grandchild nor is he my grandfather. We are just two friends: one is old, one is young.”Once you taste love, you will drop the word responsibility completely. Hence your question “What is the responsibility of love?” is simply irrelevant. Love needs no responsibility, and responsibility knows no love. I don’t teach you any responsibility because I don’t want you to be sacrificed in any fictitious name. I want you to live as naturally, existentially as possible. Don’t live according to hypotheses. Don’t live according to moral codes. Don’t live according to Manu or Moses. Live according to your own heart and whatever you do will be right. Never ask anybody what is right. Only a man who has no heart asks that kind of question. Let your heart respond to your question. Your answer is not going to come by any scripture, any holy tradition.I have heard…When God made the world, he went to the Babylonians and asked them, “Would you like to have a commandment?”They said, “First tell us what the commandment is.”God said, “Thou shall not commit adultery.”The Babylonians replied, “Then what shall we do? No, we don’t want any such commandment.”He went to the Egyptians with the same result. He went to other people – the same. They all asked, “What is the commandment? Don’t trick us into some trouble. First be completely clear: What is your commandment?”Finally he went to Moses and asked, “Would you like to have a commandment?”Moses asked, “How much?”God said, “It is free.”Moses said, “Then I will have ten.”Because of this Jewish mind, millions of Jews since that time have been living according to those ten commandments.I was in Greece and one of my sannyasins, Amrito, told me that the Greek Orthodox Church is very old-fashioned, very traditional. It insists on every woman being a virgin until she gets married. She has been one of the most beautiful women herself. When she was young she was chosen to be the beauty queen of Greece and since then she has been a top model. She was telling me about this emphasis of the Greek church on virginity.I asked her, “But is it followed?”She said, “Don’t ask such a question. You will not find a single virgin in the whole of Greece.”I remember she told me that in a church a priest was hammering hard on the fact. “If you are not a virgin, you will suffer eternal hellfire. So if any woman here is a virgin, stand up.” Nobody stood up, everybody was looking down. He said, “I give you another chance. Stand up! At least for God’s sake, one or two women should stand up.” Finally, one woman with a small baby stood up. And the priest said, “You think you are a virgin?”She said, “No, I am not a virgin. This baby is a virgin. But she cannot stand on her own. She is the only virgin in the whole congregation. She is only six months old, so I have to stand up.”People have been forced into all kinds of nonsense, and they have been made to feel guilty if they don’t follow the codes. If they follow them, they become unnatural. They start becoming miserable, they become unnecessarily tense. Because they are going against life, they lose all juice in life. Love is not a religious commandment. Love is your innermost longing, your very nature. Responsibility is imposed from outside and it is needed only by those who have not grown up in love. If you have grown up in love, you can throw away all responsibility. Love is enough unto itself.Your question makes me feel sad that you have not yet experienced love. But this is the situation of the greater part of humanity. Forget all about responsibility, search deep in your being for the space which we call love. Once you have found that space within you, it expands. On its own, it starts growing. It goes spreading around you, radiating around you. It becomes your very aura, your very energy field, and whoever comes into that energy field is touched, deeply touched, by your joy, your celebrating realization, your love. But it is not a responsibility at all.Little Ernie is playing with the girl next door. “Let us play Adam and Eve,” he says. “You tempt me to eat the apple and I will give in.”Be Adam and Eve, as if you are the first people in the world. You don’t have any past, you don’t have any Moses and you don’t have any Manu and you don’t have any Confucius. There is no past.Adam and Eve had a certain freedom which you don’t have: they had no past, only an open future. You don’t have any future because you are always looking at the past and the past is gone. You can see the dust a long way back on the road, but you cannot reach again to the same place. What is gone, is gone. And remember: existence has not given you eyes in your neck. If it was the intention of existence that you should look back, it would have given you eyes in the back of your head. What is the point of giving you eyes looking forward when you are not looking forward?Responsibility is looking backward; love is looking forward. Be innocent like Adam and Eve, as if you have just arrived fresh and you don’t have anything to do with the past. You have to find your own way; there is no guide, there is no holy scripture, there is no prophet, no savior. You are left alone to find your path. You will not find responsibility, you will find spontaneity. You will not find duty, you will find love.If your life is nothing but pure love, you don’t need any other spirituality. Love is the best name you can give to God because love is something which is not a hypothesis. It is your intrinsic reality – and it is the most precious thing in you.A Jewish boy is courting a Catholic girl. “I’m sorry I could not see you last night,” she says, “but I had to go to confession.”“I hope you don’t tell the old priest all about the things we do when your parents are out,” says the boy.“Sure, I do,” she says. “But don’t worry. I just slip Father Murphy ten bucks and he makes things okay for me.”The next evening the Jewish boy arrives at the Catholic church to see the priest. “Aha,” says Father Murphy. “My son, I suppose you have come for confession.”“No Father, not likely,” says the boy. “I have come for my commission.”In fact, all your religions are nothing but business. And the boy is right to ask for a commission!Love is not a business and love is not a sin. Love is your greatest virtue. Love is your highest flowering. Sharing it is sheer joy. Don’t call it responsibility. That word has become too heavy due to continuous use by those people whose vested interests are served by it. Love serves nobody. It gives you individuality and a tremendous sense of freedom. Love makes you courageous enough to assert your uniqueness in a world where the crowd respects only those who belong to the crowd.The unique person does not belong to the crowd. He stands alone and aloof like a very tall tree reaching toward the stars. The small bushes, naturally, feel jealous. Hence every great man in the world is going to be condemned by the pygmies. They will find all kinds of excuses to condemn anyone who has something unique in him. Any individual who is not surrendering his freedom to the crowd is going to be condemned. I want you to be individuals, not respectable people. They are the ugliest people in the world. Those who are thought to be respectable are the most condemnable because they have sold their souls for their respectability. They have become slaves of a crowd which knows nothing of the higher things of life, the higher values of life.Just be yourself, silent, peaceful, meditative, and love will arise in tidal waves and will go on coming to you from unknown sources which are hidden inside you. Those sources are as oceanic as any great ocean in the world. And you can share that love without humiliating anyone and without feeding your ego. These two things are done by responsibility; it feeds your ego, makes it stronger and humiliates the other person.You may not be aware that whenever you do something because of responsibility, the other person can never forgive you. You have insulted him. But when you do something out of love, nobody feels any humiliation because love is humble; it cannot humiliate. Responsibility is not the quality of a humble person, it is the quality of the egoist who wants to make everybody obliged to him, who wants everybody to be a beggar and he the giver. He always wants to keep the upper hand. Nobody can forgive such a man. They may give him respect in the crowd, but behind his back they all feel utterly insulted – and they take revenge.Love never humiliates; hence there is no question of revenge. It simply rejoices in giving: it gives and it forgets. It does not even remember to whom it has given, what it has given. It does not keep an account of all that it has shared. It goes on, moment to moment, singing its song to whoever is capable of understanding it. Whoever is capable of receiving it, will receive it. The person who does something out of love is not doing any social service, he is not a public servant. He is a man who knows how to celebrate. He is celebrating himself.In the three hundred years of America, there have not been many men who can be compared to the great mystics of the world. Only one man, a poet, comes very close to the mystics – Walt Whitman. One of his beautiful poems is, I Celebrate Myself. America has not paid much attention to Walt Whitman, but he is the only one in the three hundred years of America’s life who has reached the highest peak possible.When he says “I celebrate myself” he is saying everything about love. “And if you can rejoice in my celebration, you are welcome. If you can be my guest, I invite you to celebrate.”Love celebrates. It is not a responsibility at all.Osho,Why is it so hard to accept being a failure? I would rather sacrifice my well-being than admit that I have failed.The question you have asked is the question of all those people who have been trained to be egoists, and unfortunately the whole of modern education, which is based on modern psychology, teaches everybody to be an egoist, strong, crystallized.The idea is that you are being prepared by education for a world which is competitive. It is a constant battle. Everybody is your enemy because everybody is your competitor. And unless you have a very strong ego, you will not become a president, you will not become a prime minister, you will not succeed in becoming the richest man in the world. You will remain a nobody, left by the side of the road, and the whole caravan of competitors will move on ahead of you. You will be crushed under everybody. This fear has been created in every child from the very beginning: you have to be very strong, otherwise you will be crushed. Everybody is trying to be victorious in some way or other. Everybody is competing to get ahead, to become somebody special.Your question has arisen because of this wrong teaching, this utterly inhuman teaching. You are a victim of a wrong world, of a wrong civilization, of a wrong educational system. You are asking, “Why is it so hard to accept being a failure?” Because it hurts the ego; otherwise there is no problem.I have told you about one incident that I have never forgotten and will never forget.In India, there is one day every year devoted to the worship of snakes. On that day, all over India, there are wrestling competitions. For many years my school used to be the champion of the whole district. This was due entirely to a single student who failed every year in matriculation. The school was happy about it because he was a good wrestler.The principal and the teachers all said to him, “Don’t be worried. You can fail as much as you want, but every year you have to win the championship for the school. And when you are tired, we will give you some employment in the school. Don’t be worried about your employment, although you are not even a matriculate. We will make some arrangements, we can make you a peon: you do not need to be a matriculate.”He was very happy that a job was guaranteed and every year he was the hero. But the year I reached my matric class, that man unfortunately passed the examination. The whole school was sad and sorry. The principal called me and said, “Now find somebody, for up to now we have always won.”I said, “It is a difficult thing to find a wrestler of his quality.” He was doing nothing but exercises the whole day, morning till evening. The school was providing him with as much milk as he needed, because every year he won the championship. “It will be very difficult to find somebody, but I will try.”In my class there was a man, a young man, not very strong and not in any way a wrestler, but a very beautiful person with a great sense of humor. I told him he would have to do this.He said, “I have never fought anybody. I have never been in any competition. I have never done any exercise. And the people who will be coming from other schools are trained.”I said, “Don’t be worried. Somebody has at least to participate. At the most you can be a failure.”He said, “If that is all, then I am ready.” And what he did left an impact on everybody.It was going to be decided in the semi-finals, and because my school was continuously the champion, every other school was afraid. They were still thinking that because of our man we would finally win. So they had brought a professional wrestler who was not a student. They could find no other way to defeat our man who had won continuously for ten years.Naturally, they had to find some way. So they looked and found a wrestler who was not too old and they shaved him well and prepared him perfectly as if he were a student. But he was a trained wrestler and our candidate was not a wrestler at all. He asked me, “What am I supposed to do?”I said, “Make it fun. Don’t be worried.”I had once seen a wrestler… The village where I lived was famous throughout the area for wrestlers. There were so many gymnasiums in that small village and wrestlers from outside used to come to fight with the wrestlers of the village.Once I had watched a wrestler and had become very friendly with him. His style was very new. First he would dance around. The other wrestler was standing in the middle, looking embarrassed, and he would dance. He had a very beautiful body. He would dance all over the place. His dance made the other man feel embarrassed and a little afraid also. “If this man is dancing with such joy, there must be some strategy that will defeat me.” Then the wrestler would suddenly jump to the ground. He was not a very strong man, but he had a very beautiful body, a very proportionate body.By his dancing he had made the other man so afraid by this time. It was so out of the ordinary – nobody danced. There was no real need to dance because most of the time he would anyway win.I liked the man very much. He used to stay in a temple nearby, so I went to visit him. I said, “This is very beautiful. This is how things should be. You have a great psychological insight.”So I told the boy, “You do the same. First you dance around. Make the other fellow feel completely embarrassed. And we are here, because the competition is going to happen in our school. All the students, all the teachers will be there. We will clap when you dance. We will laugh and cheer you. So dance, and don’t be worried about that man. Let him stand in the middle, embarrassed, worried, ‘What is going to happen, what is happening?’”Nothing happened. He danced and we clapped and shouted and cheered, and that man looked near defeat. But the boy that I had chosen was no match for him. He was a wrestler and this boy had no idea. He danced, and then he simply jumped into the middle and fell flat on the ground.In Indian wrestling, the person who falls to the ground with his back touching the ground and the other person sitting on his chest is thought to be defeated; the man sitting on his chest is the winner. So that boy without fighting simply fell in front of him and we all cheered him and the man could not think what to do.The boy said, “Sit on my chest. Sit down and be victorious!” The man could not bring himself to sit down on the chest of the boy who had fallen by himself. He looked all around and the boy was smiling.The referee came over and said, “What do you want to do with your opponent?”The man said, “I am simply puzzled. What kind of wrestling is going on? Sitting on this poor boy’s chest looks so ugly. I have not fought, how can I be victorious? And he is telling me to sit down. He is almost ordering me.”They were declared to be equal. We took the boy on our shoulders and we danced around. And the principal called to me, “You managed at least to be equal. I had no hope that this was possible and when I saw that boy that you had chosen, I thought the trophy was gone. But you trained him well.”I said, “I only trained him for dancing. What he did was absolutely spontaneous. Seeing the situation he said ‘I am going to be defeated. What is the point of fighting unnecessarily and being harassed. Just lie down, rest.’”But he was a very humble person with a great sense of humor.You feel unnecessarily worried that you cannot accept being a failure. You are saying, “I would rather sacrifice my well-being than admit that I have failed.” The very idea of being competitive is egoistic. It is sick. There is nothing wrong in being a failure. Just be a total failure! Do everything that you can do, and if failure comes out of it, accept it with dignity. Somebody has to fail, somebody has to win. You should not be so attached to your own ego that you always have to win.Once in a while, just for a change, failing is not bad. As much can be learned by failure as can be learned by victory. You can learn egolessness, you can learn humbleness, you can learn accepting whatever life brings to you. And all these things will give you maturity. Then who is bothered who is the winner and who is the failure? People are unnecessarily concerned that the whole world is watching. Nobody has time. Everybody is interested in his own competition.After being elected as President of America, Ronald Reagan returns to the small town where he grew up. “I suppose you folks here all know of the great honor that has been conferred on me?” he asks an old school friend.“Yes,” comes the reply.“And what do they all say about it?” Reagan asks.“They don’t say anything,” replies the man. “They just laugh.”Who cares? People simply laugh that this idiot has become the president. In fact, if you are a failure, you may have the sympathy of everybody. But if you are a winner, you won’t get anybody’s sympathy.One should take life almost like a playground. One should learn gamesmanship. One should know that somebody has to be the winner and somebody has to be the loser. And if you are a humble man, you would rather be a failure than deprive somebody else of victory. Perhaps you have never thought about the possibility of enjoying failure because you have given somebody else the chance of enjoying victory. His victory depends on you. You could have deprived him of victory.All that is needed is a deep awareness to think and to see that these are the only two possibilities. Fight with your total energy and intensity, but it is not necessary that you should be the winner. And when the other wins, rejoice in his victory too. It was a beautiful game. Don’t feel defeated. Your failure is a defeat only if you have not put your whole energy into it. If you do, you can make your failure more valuable than victory itself.You seem to be a very serious person. Take life as a game, enjoy every side of it: the failure, the victory, going astray or finding the right path, the darkness of the night and the beautiful dawn. Enjoy both sides, all the possibilities, and learn from every experience something that brings you more maturity. And learn to be a little less serious and a little more understanding. Have a little more sense of humor.Just for you, a small story…Three women die and arrive at the Pearly Gates, where they are met by Saint Peter. “Did you avoid sex on the earth?” he asks the first lady.“I absolutely avoided it,” she replies.“Very good,” says Peter. “Here is a golden key. It will open the doors of paradise.”Then he turns to the second woman and asks, “What about you?”“Well,” she replies, “about half and half.”“Okay,” says Peter. “Here is a silver key. It will open the doors of purgatory.”Then he asks the third woman, “What about you?”“Me?” she replies. “I did all the things you can imagine and also many things you can’t imagine.”“Great!” says Peter. “Here is the key to my room. I’ll be coming there in a minute.”

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is the mystic conception of ultimate reality?The mystic’s conception of the ultimate reality is the only authentic and real experience. It is not a thought or a concept, but an existential experience.The mystic does not deal with the mind. His whole effort is to get rid of the prison of the mind. The mystic is not a philosopher; his world is beyond all philosophies. Philosophies are simply by-products of mental processes. They do not reflect the reality, they only reflect you. That’s why there are so many philosophies in the world contradicting each other.The reality is one. How can there be so many philosophies? There are not so many mystical experiences. There is only one experience: neither time nor space changes it. For millennia, the mystic in every country, in every race, in every age has experienced the same reality. The philosopher thinks about reality, the mystic simply drops all thinking. In his silence – his utter silence and serenity – he becomes a mirror, and the reality reflects itself.The mystic is the greatest flowering of human consciousness. His ultimate vision can be described in three beautiful words that have been used for thousands of years, and there has not been any improvement on them. They are three words from the ancient-most sources: satyam shivam sundaram.Satyam means the truth – not what you think about it, but what it is; not your idea about it, but its reality. To know this truth you have to be utterly absent. Your very presence will distort the vision – because your presence means the presence of your mind, your prejudices, your conditionings. You are nothing else but a bundle of all that has been forced upon you by the religions, by the society, by the so-called leaders of humanity.Your absence means the absence of all prejudices, of all borrowed knowledge: absence of the Christian, absence of the Hindu, absence of the Mohammedan; just a pure sky, a pure being. I am using the word absence to deny all that is not you.But don’t misunderstand me: this absence of you is your real presence. Only the prejudices are absent. The ego is absent, your knowledgeability is absent but your being shows in its utter purity. You disappear as a personality and there remains only a pure presence. So on one side it is absence of all that is false in you, and on the other side it is presence of all that is real in you. In this state you don’t think, you simply see.This seeing of existence is the first experience of the mystic contained in the word satyam. Satyam means the truth: not any conception about it, but truth itself.The second word, shivam, means virtue: all that is good, all that is valuable, all that is the most precious in you; the ultimate good. The man who comes to experience the truth starts living the truth immediately. There is no other alternative. His living the truth is shivam. Shivam means truth in action, truth in your life, truth in your love, truth in your friendship, truth in your eyes and truth in your heart. Shivam is the action of truth. Truth itself is the center of the cyclone, but if you experience the truth, the cyclone around you becomes shivam. It becomes pure godliness.A man of truth is the only proof that the world is divine. No argument can prove that the world is divine.I am reminded of one of the greatest mystics, Ramakrishna. When asked by a logician, “What is truth? Do you have any argument, any evidence for it?” Ramakrishna laughed hilariously.He said, “I am the argument, and if you cannot see in my eyes the proof and the evidence, you will not find it anywhere else. I am the only proof that existence is not dead, that existence is not only matter; that existence is not only available to science, that existence is much more than matter, that you are much more than the body, that you are much more than the mind.”But this “much more” cannot be proved by any logician, any scientist. Only the mystic is the proof. He also cannot prove it by words, but only by his way of life. The way of life of the mystic is the only possibility of coming in contact with the divine, which is all around you. You are living in the very ocean of the divine, but the mystic becomes your first window through which you can see the non-material, the spiritual, the beyond.Shivam is the mystic in action: his gestures, the music in his words, the poetry of his life, the light and the depths of his eyes. And whatever he does – whether he is chopping wood or carrying water from the well – you can see that there is a subtle difference. He is total in his every act, and that totality brings the third word, sundaram.Sundaram means beauty. So this is the mystic trinity: satyam, the truth; shivam, the good, the divine; and sundaram, the beauty.You have seen the beauty of the flowers, you have seen the beauty of the stars, you have seen the beauty of a bird on the wing, you have seen beauties upon beauties of sunsets and sunrises. But the greatest beauty is to see the totality, the intensity of the mystic. That is the greatest flowering in existence – of consciousness itself. It is available only to those who are humble enough to receive it, who are not living a closed life of fear, of paranoia, but who are living a life of love with all the windows open. And they are ready to go with life wherever it leads.These receptive souls are the only real seekers in the world. These receptive souls are blessed with their experience of sundaram: the beautiful rose that is opening in the heart of the mystic. These three words are so unique, so incomparable, there is nothing parallel to them.Truth is the experience, shivam is the action that comes out of the experience, and beauty is the flowering of consciousness of the man who has experienced truth. These three are the ultimate reality for those who are on the mystical path.This is a mystery school. All my effort is not to give you knowledge, but to take all knowledge away from you; to make you so innocent, just like a newly born child who is fully conscious, sensitive, alert, but knows nothing. His not knowing makes every child’s experience something that is available only to the greatest sages of the world.To understand the psychology and the development of religious consciousness, I would like you to start with the child. It is the child’s experience that haunts intelligent people their whole life. They want it again: the same innocence, the same wonder, the same beauty. Now it is a faraway echo; it seems as if you have seen it in a dream. But the whole of religion is born out of the haunting of the childhood experience of wonder, of truth, of beauty, of life in its beautiful dance all around. In the songs of the birds, in the colors of the rainbows, in the fragrance of the flowers the child goes on remembering deep in his being that he has lost a paradise.It is not a coincidence that all the religions of the world have this idea in their parables: that man once lived in paradise and somehow, for some reason, he has been expelled from that paradise. There are different stories, different parables, but signifying one simple truth. These stories are just a poetic way of saying that every man is born in paradise and then loses it.The retarded, the unintelligent completely forget about it but the intelligent, the sensitive, the creative go on being haunted by the paradise that they had once known. And now only a faint unbelievable memory has remained with them. They start searching for it again.The search for paradise is the search for your childhood again. Of course your body will no longer be a child’s, but your consciousness can be as pure as the consciousness of the child. This is the whole secret of the mystical path: to make you a child again – innocent, unpolluted by any knowledge, not knowing anything, still aware of everything that surrounds you, and with a deep wonder and a sense of a mystery that cannot be demystified.This is something of fundamental importance to understand. The scientist is trying to demystify existence. His whole effort is to make everything known. The very word science means knowledge. The work of the mystic is exactly the opposite of the work of a scientist. The mystic does not want to demystify existence; on the contrary he wants to become part of this enormous mystery itself. He does not want to become a knower; he wants to disappear in the mystery of existence.I am reminded of a beautiful story. Of course it cannot be true, but it is so significant that I don’t care whether it is true or not.A Chinese emperor called all the painters in his empire. It was one of the greatest empires in the world. He himself was in deep love with painting and he asked the painters, “I want to declare one of you the master painter of my empire. You are going to be my guests and you have to paint. I will come to see your paintings and whichever painting proves to be the best, that painter will become part of my royal court and the master painter of the whole empire – with many rewards.”Thousands of painters participated in this competition. One old painter said to the king, “It will take at least three years for me to complete the painting, and I have a few conditions. While I am making the painting, nobody should enter into my house. I don’t want anybody to see the incomplete painting. When the painting is complete, I will invite you.”The king said, “Three years? That is too much.”The painter said, “Then I must get out of the competition. Three years is nothing because you don’t know what I am going to paint.”Reluctantly the emperor agreed. All the other painters finished their work: somebody in one week, somebody in two weeks – at the most four weeks. But the king was not satisfied. He was waiting for the old man. Without seeing his painting he could not declare his judgment.After three years the old man came and asked the emperor, “Now the painting is complete. You are welcome.” He was painting in the king’s palace itself. He had been given a beautiful place that was guarded twenty-four hours a day so that nobody should enter for three years. Let the painter do his work unhindered, not interfered with.The emperor was waiting for three years. It is a long time and he was old and afraid that perhaps death may come before then. But fortunately he was still alive. With great wonder in his heart he entered the palace where the painter had done his work. He had painted on a whole wall of the palace, a beautiful forest with a small river flowing, and a small footpath going into the deep forest and disappearing into the mountains that he had painted.The king could not believe his eyes. It was almost miraculous, magical. He was in awe. After a long silence he asked the painter only one question: “I am very much interested in this little footpath that goes around the forest, is sometimes seen around the mountains and then disappears. Where does it go?”The painter said, “There is no other way to know unless you walk on it.” And the king completely forgot that it was only a painting. He was so overwhelmed by the beauty that he took the painter’s hand in his hand and they both walked on the path and disappeared into the mountains.They have not yet returned.This is the way of the mystic. He disappears into existence not to return.The scientist always remains an outsider: speculating, dissecting, analyzing, but he is not part of what he is doing. He is just a neutral objective observer. The mystic is not an observer. The mystic joins the dance. He dances with the trees, he dances in the rain, he dances with the peacocks. He sings songs with the birds. He slowly, slowly merges and melts into existence. He does not demystify it; he makes it more mysterious. He glorifies it, he gives it its splendor, its majesty. He makes it the most profound orgasmic experience.The mystic is a lover not a knower. His path is of love not of knowledge. Love is his God, not logic. Through his love he has come to realize three things: satyam shivam sundaram – the truth, the godliness of existence and the tremendous beauty, the unbelievable poetry, the song of the silence, the music without sounds. Only the mystic knows without any knowledge.The scientist has knowledge but knows nothing. A man of the caliber of Albert Einstein said to his friends before dying, “If there is another life, I would not like to be a scientist or a physicist again. This has been a sheer wastage. I have known so much, but I know nothing about myself. What is the use of all this knowledge? My inner world remains dark and I have been watching faraway stars and the galaxies and the nebulas and I have not looked at myself.”Only a man of tremendous intelligence can see the point: Albert Einstein was not dying with contentment, with joy, but with a deep frustration and disappointment. The world may think that he was one of the greatest, most successful men – perhaps the greatest scientist that has ever walked on the earth. But ask him, he has missed all that is beautiful, he has missed all that is divine, he has missed all that makes life a rejoicing.The mystic’s concern is to create a song in your heart and a dance to your feet and a joy that never fades in your very being.Remember these three words. They are the most beautiful words ever uttered by anyone, and they reveal the very essence of the ultimate reality: satyam shivam sundaram.The second question:Osho,I was reading an article about women being fed up and the responsibility is from men. Is it true?It is true, but only half true. Man is also fed up, and the responsibility is of the women. In fact we are all in the same boat. Man or woman, all are fed up because our way of life is utterly wrong. Neither are men responsible for women’s boredom nor are women responsible for men’s frustration.You will have to go deep into the psychology of frustration. The first thing to remember is that you are frustrated, you are fed up, you are bored only if you were expecting otherwise. If you were not expecting anything…I am not fed up, and I don’t see any possibility… To the very last breath I will remain with the same wondering eyes that I was born with. I am also living in the same world in which you are living. I am not bored because I never expected anything. Hence frustration is impossible.Women are fed up because they have been expecting too much from man, and the poor man cannot fulfill all that. Women are more imaginative. They make a hero out of any Tom, Dick or Harry. With their romantic eyes, idiots appear to be Gautam the Buddhas. And slowly, slowly as they come closer to their great heroes, they don’t find the giants, they find ordinary, poor human beings. Then great frustration sets in. They magnify and exaggerate but you cannot live in exaggerations and you cannot go on living looking through a magnifying glass. Sooner or later you have to come to terms with reality, and the reality is just the henpecked husband, and utterly uninteresting.And the man – he is not so imaginative but his biological instinct makes him almost intoxicated, and when he is intoxicated by his biological instinct then any ugly woman appears like a Cleopatra. His eyes are covered with biological madness. The people who called love blind were not wrong. He starts seeing with closed eyes. He is afraid to open his eyes because the reality may not be so great. But how long can you go on living with closed eyes? Sooner or later you have to see the woman you have been infatuated with.The biological infatuation disappears very soon. It is chemical, hormonal. Once you are sexually satisfied with the woman, all blindness, all madness disappears. You are again rational, sane, and you see just an ordinary woman. Naturally, to avoid her you start reading the newspaper. Men are sitting before their TV’s. In America they have done a survey: the average American man looks at the TV seven and a half hours per day. And naturally the woman feels fed up.I have come to know that people are even making love to each other and watching the television at the same time! Even the greatest sexologists – Vatsyayana, Pundit Koka, Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis – have not dreamed about a day when people will make love while they are watching the television. They are so bored with everything. Television is a refuge.But the psychology is simple: you start expecting things from others and you start believing in your expectations. Soon your expectations are shattered against the reality. That is the reason why men are fed up, women are fed up – everybody is fed up. The world is full of bored people.Boredom is perhaps the most significant phenomenon that has happened to the twentieth century. Man was never so bored before. In ancient days, when man was a hunter and there was no marriage and no possibility of monotony, he was not bored. There was no time to be bored. The woman was not bored: there were possibilities of choosing new men. Marriage settled everything in the name of safety and security, but it took away the joy of exploration.One of the Urdu poets has a beautiful song in which he says, “If you…” he is addressing God, “…if you were in favor of marriage, then why did you give me eyes, then why did you give me intelligence?” Idiots are not bored! And you will be surprised: blind people are not bored.The more intelligent you are the sooner you will be bored. That is the criterion. The most intelligent, sensitive, creative people are the most bored people because one experience is enough. To repeat it is only for the idiots.As the world has become more and more settled financially and socially: marriage, children, education, retirement, pension, insurance – in advanced countries people are even paid for their unemployment – it has taken away all the joy of exploration. Everything has become so settled and controlled that in the West particularly, there seems to be only one possibility left to explore, and that is suicide. Only that has remained unknown.They have experienced sex and found it is just foolishness. They have experienced drugs and found that it is just deceiving yourself. Now there seems to be no adventure, no challenge. More and more people are committing suicide. It is something to be noted that the suicide rate is not increasing in the poor countries. The poor people seem to be less bored, less fed up because they have to think about food and clothes and shelter. They don’t have time for boredom. They cannot afford it.The richer the society, where everything is available… How long can you go on living in a settled, monotonous, secure, insured, guaranteed lifestyle? People of great intelligence start committing suicide.The East has also known times of richness, but fortunately the East has found a better substitute for suicide, and that is sannyas. When people became fed up, like Gautam Buddha… Because he had all the luxuries possible, and how long can you go on repeating the same luxuries every day? By the age of twenty-nine he was finished with the world. He had experienced everything; there were no more possibilities in the world.One dark night he escaped from his kingdom, his security, his safety. He dropped all of that and became a beggar in search of something which will be eternally fresh, which will never become old, which will never become boredom. The search for the eternally fresh is the search of sannyas.There is a source within you that is eternally fresh. It never becomes old, you can never get fed up with it. And when I am saying this, I am saying it from the same source. My words are coming from the same source. If you can taste them, if you can feel them, you may have some glimpse of a faraway land where everything goes on becoming new every moment, where dust does not gather on any mirror.And that world is within you – but you are interested in a woman, and the woman is interested in you. The woman cannot find your eternal source of joy, neither can you find your eternal source of joy because you are focused on the woman. We are all focused on others, and that which can give you a continuous joy is within you. But you never look within.People are ready to go to Everest, people are ready to go to the moon, to Mars in search – but you don’t know that even if you reach Everest you will simply look stupid. What will you do there? How long did Edmund Hillary remain on the top of Everest? Not more than two minutes! And he risked his life. Hundreds of others had died before him, trying to reach the same peak. And as far as I can see, Edmund Hillary standing on the highest Himalayan peak in the world must have looked very embarrassed. It was good that there was no one to see him. After two minutes he was bored: Go back home!What are you going to do on the moon? It is a strange situation with man.When Yuri Gagarin, the first Russian astronaut in the history of man to reach close to the moon came back, he was asked by the journalists, “What was your first thought when you were close to the moon?”He said, “The first thought: I looked at the earth. It was looking so beautiful from there. It is eight times bigger than the moon, and from space it shines exactly as the moon shines, but eight times more. And the moon becomes just as ordinary as the earth.”It is only from far away that you catch the reflected rays of the sun. The moon has no light of its own: when you reach the moon, it is the most deserted, the ugliest spot possible because there is no water, no greenery, no roses. Nothing happens there at all. It is just a desert, utterly dead.“But from space,” Yuri Gagarin said, “my first thought was, ‘My beautiful earth!’” Strange! When you live on the earth, you don’t bother about the earth. Yuri Gagarin had lived his whole life on the earth and he had never thought, “My beautiful earth!”And the second thing he said was, “When I uttered to myself ‘My beautiful earth!’ I remembered that I am a communist and I belong to the Soviet Union, but from space the earth is no longer divided into the Soviet Union and Germany and Japan and America and India.” All these stupid lines that we have created on the map don’t exist on the earth. From close to the moon, for the first time he felt one humanity, one earth – and so beautiful.Yuri Gagarin was in India. I met him in New Delhi and I asked him, “Since you have been back on the earth, have you ever thought ‘How beautiful is my earth’ again?”He looked at me, shocked. He said, “Nobody has asked that question. And I have never thought that about the earth again.”Man always looks to faraway things. He seems to be completely unaware of that which is obvious, that which is close. You are the closest to you, that’s why you go on missing it. And there is no way to take you away from yourself. Wherever we will take you, you will be – you cannot be separated from yourself. Hence you cannot say, “My beautiful being!” You will have to learn the art of entering into yourself. You will have to be more subjective than objective.Subjectivity is the essence of mysticism. You will have to start looking inward: that’s what we call meditation. It is nothing but looking inward, reaching to the point of your very life source. And once you have touched your very life source, there is no boredom. Your life is a constant celebration. Otherwise, whether you are man or woman, to be bored is going to be your destiny.Becky Goldberg was becoming extremely upset and lonely because all her husband, Hymie, did all day and all night was watch television. So she went to the pet shop to find a companion.“If you are looking for an unusual pet,” said the shop owner, “this cage contains a giant goony bird, whose beak and claws are capable of destroying anything.”“How horrible,” said Becky.“Not at all,” the man replied. “The goony bird is remarkably well-behaved, completely obedient. He will only destroy something if he is given the command, such as ‘Goony bird, the chair,’ or ‘Goony bird, the table.’ Then he will fly into action.’”“Could he destroy a TV set?” asked Becky.“Of course,” said the man. “He will turn it into a pile of scrap in a matter of seconds.”So Becky bought the goony bird and took him home. Sure enough, Hymie was in front of the TV, so she opened the bird’s cage.Hymie looked up and said, “What sort of pet did you buy, dear?”“I bought a goony bird,” said Becky, preparing to give the command.Hymie went back to watching TV and said, “Goony bird, my ass!”

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The other morning when I heard you talking about sexual energy, AIDS and birth control, I felt such a pure rightness about each thing that you said. You are the intellectual giant of the century: there is no competition. I also feel a sense of urgency. What can I do to spread your words, or is that something only you can do?The question you have asked has raised many questions.First, I am not an “intellectual giant of the century.” That kind of misunderstanding is very possible, particularly because whatever I have to say has to be said through the intellect. But intellect is only a means, a vehicle, a medium; it is not the source of what I am saying. It is not the meaning of my life and my being. I am not an intellectual. In fact, I am the most anti-intellectual person who has ever existed on this earth. I will have to explain to you.Intellect is thinking about things you do not know. How can you think about things you do not know? It is simply groping in the dark. I am reminded of the old definition of a philosopher. A philosopher is purely intellectual. The old definition of a philosopher is of a man who is blind, and in the darkest night, in a house that has no light, he is searching for a black cat that does not exist.The intellectuals go on doing great gymnastics of the mind. They go on thinking about things that they do not know. Naturally, they never come to any conclusions. And it is impossible to come to any conclusion, to any realization through intellectual processes; hence the whole philosophical effort of the world has been an exercise in utter futility.All philosophy is bunk. No philosopher has contributed any new insight, any new consciousness, any new festivity to the world, any new celebration to man’s consciousness. No philosopher has contributed to the beauty of this planet and this humanity. But they have been doing tremendous work all their lives creating great systems of thought which are nothing but castles in the air, soap bubbles.The greatest intellectuals and philosophers of the world are just children, playing on the sea beach, making castles out of sand. You cannot live in those castles; in fact, just a little breeze and your castle disappears.Mind can be used in many ways. One is the way of the intellectual: he goes round and round and round, about and about and about. He moves in a circle, which is of course unending. Every circle is unending. He travels much but he never reaches anywhere. This is the most futile use of your mind.The other way is to use the mind not in circles but as a straight, horizontal line – one-dimensional. That’s how the scientific, the mathematical, the logical genius uses the mind. He moves in a straight line, but horizontally. He comes to certain conclusions, he comes to certain discoveries, he comes to certain inventions. He enriches the world as far as matter is concerned, as far as technology, machines and knowledge about objects is concerned.At least his effort is not absolutely useless. It may be harmful, but it is not useless. Because the one-dimensional man is blind, he goes on searching, seeking, but does not know what the ultimate purpose of all his seeking and searching is. Hence even a man like Albert Einstein ends up finding atomic energy.He was not a man who was violent or destructive. He was a man of peace. But if you are blind and you go on searching in directions without knowing where you are going, you are bound to end up in areas which are not healthy, which are not life-affirmative, which may even be dangerous to human beings. And that’s what Albert Einstein’s whole life’s effort has proved: Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the ultimate conclusion of his discoveries.Science is a blind search. It has no sense of direction; it does not know the meaning, the significance of human life. It does not understand that man is not only matter. The horizontal, straight, line of science can never discover anything more than matter; hence science has become confined to a materialist conception of the world.It is one of the most dangerous conceptions because a man like Karl Marx – a great genius, a giant as far as intellectuality is concerned – ended up with materialism. He concluded that man is nothing more than a by-product of matter, an epiphenomenon. The moment the body dies, nothing remains, everything dies. There is no difference between a man and a machine. A machine has no soul, neither does man have a soul.The ultimate result was that his follower, Joseph Stalin, killed thirty million Russians after the revolution without any difficulty. If man is only a machine, there is no question of compassion and love, and there is no question of violence either. If you destroy a bicycle you will not feel any prick in your conscience. You have not killed anybody, you have not murdered anybody. A bicycle has no consciousness, no life; it is already dead. How can you murder a dead thing?Because of Karl Marx’s materialist communism, Joseph Stalin was able to kill thirty million people from his own land without any trouble, without feeling any disturbance in his mind about what he was doing for a single night. He tortured more men than any other man in the whole of history. It was possible for Adolf Hitler to destroy six million Jews in Germany and altogether nearabout forty million people in the Second World War. A materialist conception about man is going to be destructive because it is coming out of a blind search.Mind can also be used as a ladder going downward. That’s how the psychologist uses it: from consciousness to sub-consciousness, from sub-consciousness to unconsciousness, from unconsciousness to collective unconsciousness – as yet they have only reached so far. One rung of the ladder has still to be reached. They will certainly reach it: they are groping toward it and that will be the final conclusion of all our psychological in-depth research.The last rung of the ladder will be the cosmic unconsciousness, utter darkness – a darkness that knows no dawn. Psychology is moving into the darker chambers of human beings; it is making man more and more at ease with his animality because those dark chambers belong to his animal past. This is not the right use of the mind either.There is one more use. This is the way the mystic uses the mind, in just the diametrically opposite dimension than the psychologist. The ladder is going upward from our so-called consciousness – which is very thin, almost negligible. Just scratch it a little bit and it will disappear and your unconsciousness arises. In the East this consciousness is only called the so-called consciousness. It is so thin, skin-thin, that it has no bearing on our spiritual growth.If you move upward, for the first time you reach the authentic consciousness that comes through meditation, awareness, alertness, witnessing. Your consciousness becomes a tremendous force. Your whole life starts revolving around your consciousness. It is no longer possible for anyone to drag you into unconscious worlds, no longer possible for anybody to drag you backward into the animal past – those dark nights of the soul that we have passed but which are still dormant in our beings.This small consciousness that we have is not enough to fight with the nine times more powerful unconsciousness. That’s why you decide one thing but you do something else. Perhaps you have never looked into the fact of your decision-making: small decisions, not of any great importance. You decide to wake up early in the morning at five o’clock, and even when you are deciding it, deep down you know it is not going to happen – and it does not happen.At five o’clock the alarm clock goes off, you pull your blanket over you, you start convincing yourself that it is too cold, too early, “I am still not fully satisfied with sleep. In fact, just now I was going more deeply into sleep and this crazy alarm clock disturbed me. And there is no hurry. Tomorrow I can wake up at five o’clock.”And this has been going on your whole life. There are millions of people who have never seen the beauty before the sun rises: the utter silence of the sky, the tremendous magnificence of the stars, the music of celestial silence. In fact, between four and six when the sun rises, those two hours are perhaps the most peaceful, the most magnificent in your twenty-four-hour day. But there are millions of people in the world who will never know about it – although they have decided many times.But what goes wrong? Your consciousness decides and your unconsciousness cancels. You have heard the proverb: Man proposes and God disposes. There is no God, but I know that there is somebody who disposes: it is your unconsciousness, it is your dark layers of being. Your thin consciousness decides, but your thick layers of darkness cancel, dispose. They have never known about your decision. There is no communication between your consciousness and unconsciousness.Going beyond this consciousness is the whole alchemy of meditation: attaining to an authentic consciousness which cannot be canceled or overruled by any unconsciousness that may be dormant in your being. Then the emperor has arisen in you, the master has arisen in you.The second layer, beyond authentic consciousness, is super-consciousness. You become open to the beyond, to the mysterious and to the miraculous. Beyond the super-conscious is the collective super-conscious: you start losing your “I,” your ego, your separateness from existence. Your dewdrop starts melting into the ocean. Collective super-consciousness – and you are almost on the threshold of the divine.Beyond the collective super-consciousness there is only one step more and that is cosmic super-consciousness. This cosmic super-consciousness has been called samadhi by Patanjali, nirvana by Gautam Buddha, kaivalya by Mahavira. In the East there are a thousand and one words for that ultimate experience. No language is so rich as to be able to translate all those words with their different nuances, different fragrances. In English we are utterly poor, with faraway echoes not authentic translations. The words that are being used are enlightenment, self-realization, illumination, the ultimate awakening, but these are very poor words.And why don’t they exist in thousands of languages in the world? – because the experience has not existed in those languages. For example, Eskimos have eleven words for snow. No other language has eleven words for snow, but because Eskimos live with it day and night – all the year round, their whole lives – they experience snow in different ways. They know the subtle differences.In the same way, the cosmic super-consciousness has been expressed by different awakened beings according to their own taste, according to their own choice. Mahavira calls it ultimate aloneness, kaivalya, because he enjoys the freedom of being absolutely alone. Everything else has disappeared: only aloneness, and the purity of it and the utter virgin silence of it. There is no “other” to create any hell, just absolute silence.And when there is no other, aloneness is only a word – because how can you be alone without the other? The very word alone loses all meaning if there is no comparison and context with the other. Mahavira is aware of it. He says this word kaivalya comes closest to the experience, but the experience is beyond it.The mystic uses intellect to transcend intellect. Therefore, I say unto you, I am not an intellectual. My whole effort is to help you to go beyond intellect, to reach to the cosmic consciousness, to go beyond thinking. Those who are thinking are still children, playing on the sea beach. Only the mystic is mature, only the mystic goes beyond the horizon. Only he has the courage of an eagle to fly across the sun.I am not an intellectual. I am simply a mystic. I don’t think about reality, existence, truth. I am experiencing them. They are my very being.But it is not only you. There are many very sincere people, very honest, who commit the same mistake. Just the other day I saw a review of my two books, The Rebellious Spirit and The New Man, by one of the best and the most honest, sincere and courageous journalists in India, M.V. Kamath. And he says the same thing you are saying: that I am the greatest intellectual of the second part of the twentieth century. He thinks he is praising me – and he has an honest intention. But he does not understand me.As I looked at his review, things became more and more clear. He is an intellectual and naturally that is his only measure. He knows nothing of mysticism and he commits the fallacy of all the intellectuals. With all good intentions he says in his review that if I were not a controversial man, always surrounded by controversies, I would have had many more admirers in the world.Now, he does not understand a simple thing: that no great intellectual has ever existed in the world without controversy. Intellect is intrinsically controversial. Only idiots are not controversial.And secondly, he says I would have had many admirers. He says that with great love, but the misunderstanding is there – with all the good intentions and love and respect. The intellectual likes admirers; the mystic does not care at all. The intellectual, the artist, the showman, the politician all exist on the admiration of people. Their whole life is how to get more and more admiration. That is their nourishment. That’s how they go on inflating their egos.The mystic has no concern at all about admiration. He is so fulfilled, so contented, that there is no need for any other nourishment. His nourishment showers over him from the beyond. He has found the very life source: he does not live upon the opinions of others. He can stand alone against the whole world.And that’s what I have been doing all my life: standing all alone – the majority of one against the whole world. And the reason why I can manage to be against the whole world is because I have found my own life source. I don’t depend on anyone. I don’t need any admiration, any compliments, any rewards, any Nobel Prizes. I am enough unto myself.I am not an intellectual, I am not a giant. I am a simple person who is utterly lost into the beauty of this glorious existence. I have disappeared into the whole. I don’t exist separately.If the outsiders think like this – and M. V. Kamath is an outsider and perhaps deep down afraid of coming closer to me because he ends his review by saying, “Osho needs to be read. You don’t have to listen to him and you don’t have to see him. You have just to read him. He is the master of words. He brings magic to ordinary words.”Now, he does not know that I am not a master of words, I am not a poet, I am not a creative artist. I use words just out of sheer necessity, always feeling guilty because no word is big enough to convey what I want to say. Every moment I utter a word I am committing a certain crime against truth because no word is capable of bringing truth to you. But it is perfectly okay for an outsider.It is not okay for you. You know that if my words have a certain beauty, it is not of the words. It comes from my silence, it comes from my wordless innermost fragrances. Because these words are coming from my heart, they carry some beats of my heart with them. But you know me: you have heard me, and you have seen me, and you have felt me. And you are perfectly aware that if the written word impresses a man like M. V. Kamath and he thinks that is enough, more than enough, he is unnecessarily clinging to a limitation.I speak words only to provoke you to come to me. If you become satisfied with my words, that is a calamity. Those words were only provocations, invitations, calling you forth: “Don’t be afraid, come a little bit closer” – because the spoken word is alive, the written word is dead. The written word may be beautiful but it is a corpse. The spoken word is still warm, is still carrying the silences of the heart. And to say that there is no need to see me is just showing your blindness.My words say something. My silences say more. My presence says all.If you can be in tune with my presence, if my heartbeats can become your heartbeats, only then will you understand my words and the transcendental meaning that surrounds them but becomes visible only to those who drink from my well. Otherwise, to the outsider, it remains invisible.You have to become an insider. You have to taste the presence of a master, of a mystic. Only then will you know that man is not just what you see in the world; man contains worlds beyond worlds, skies beyond skies.A mystic is a window into the ultimate, a finger pointing to the moon.I am not an intellectual, but the fallacy is created because I am compelled to use intellect and words to convey that which is not intellectual, which is not logic: that which is pure love. Out of sheer necessity I have to speak, but my speaking is not that of an orator. I am not a master of words: my speaking is just a simple conversation. At the most, I am only a storyteller, a man who loves to touch your hearts by different devices. Words are only one of my devices.You are also saying, “there is no competition.” In the world, everywhere, there is competition. Only in the inner, in the subjective, there is no competition – ever. Between two Gautam Buddhas there is no competition.It happened… I have told you many times; I love it so much. I rejoice in telling it.It happened that two great mystics, Kabir and Farid, had a meeting. The meeting continued for two days. The disciples of both were immensely excited in the beginning, thinking that something great is going to be communicated by Kabir to Farid or by Farid to Kabir.But as time passed, their excitement turned into great frustration because neither Kabir nor Farid spoke. Both remained absolutely silent. Sitting side by side, holding each other’s hand in deep love, once in a while smiling, giggling. And those smiles and those giggles irritated the disciples even more, but they never uttered a single word. And the day of departure came soon…Farid had had to go; he was on a pilgrimage and just because Kabir’s village was nearby, his disciples had told him, “It will be a great occasion if we stay at least for one or two days with Kabir.” And Kabir’s disciples had also asked him: “It will not look right if we don’t invite Farid, who is passing by the side of the village.”Farid had agreed, and Kabir himself came to receive Farid outside the village. They hugged each other, and two days passed in utter silence. Those two days appeared to the disciples like two centuries. After two days they hugged each other again, had a good belly laugh, and departed.As they parted, the disciples of both masters, who had been keeping themselves controlled with great difficulty because of the presence of the other master and his disciples… When they were left alone, the disciples of Kabir were very angry – and it was the same situation with the disciples of the other master. They said, “You have been talking to us every day and …what happened to you? You simply became as if you didn’t know how to speak!”Kabir said, “You don’t understand. We are both in the same space: two bodies, one soul. Who is going to speak to whom? And what is there to speak? He knows it, I know it.”And the reply of Farid to his disciples was the same: “Don’t be stupid! That fellow is exactly where I am. You are not perceptive enough, otherwise you could have seen. Our bodies were separate, but our beings were merging and melting into each other. There was no need to say anything. Everything was understood without being said.”In the world of the mystics there is no competition ever. Even if all the mystics of all the ages gathered together, there would not be any competition. There would be great rejoicing, dancing, singing, but there would not be any addresses, any lectures, any discourses. And there would be no question of competition.Competition is a word belonging to the ego, and the mystic comes into existence when the ego disappears. There is no question of any hierarchy – who is higher, who is lower, who is greater. All these childish categories are left far behind.And finally you say, “I also feel a sense of urgency.” That’s beautiful. Every one of you should feel the sense of urgency because you are blessed with the presence of a master. You are blessed to be in tune with a mystic. In me you have seen Gautam Buddha, Jesus Christ, Zarathustra, Kabir, Farid. They are all one with me.You should feel the urgency because the whole world needs what I am saying to you, and needs it urgently.And don’t think that only I can spread the message. I can ignite you, I can make you aflame. Then go and shout from the rooftops and spread the fire around the world. If you are touched by me, if you are thrilled and your heart has started dancing, then go with deep compassion for anyone who is ready to share your joy.Share it, spread it. Humanity needs it more than ever.Osho,Why do I always have to cry when I am touched by love?You are fortunate. If love cannot bring tears to your eyes, then that love is dead.It is a great misfortune that tears have become associated with sadness, with sorrow. That is only one dimension of their being. But their more significant manifestation is in love, in gratitude, in prayerfulness, in silence, in peace. When you are feeling so full, tears are just the overflow of your contentment, of your joy.Tears have to be given a new meaning, a new poetry and a totally new dimension – which they have lost because humanity has lived in misery, and tears have become part of that misery.Secondly, because humanity has been dominated by man, he has made it a point of his ego and pride that he will not cry: “It is feminine to cry, it is womanish to have tears.” This is not true. It is an ugly, male chauvinist idea. Not only ugly, but unnatural and untrue because a man’s eyes have as many tear glands as a woman’s eyes have. Nature has not made any difference in tear glands.It is obvious that the intention of nature is not to discriminate between man and woman, but for centuries man has been very egoistic and he feels that tears are a kind of weakness. He has stopped his tears, but he is not aware what the consequence of this has been: he has also stopped his love. And he has also created situations for himself that are dangerous.More men go mad than women for the simple reason that man goes on controlling. A moment comes when the repression becomes too much and there is a breakdown. The woman does not control. When she feels like crying, she cries. She is more natural than man. That has given her a few more experiences which man has missed. The woman is healthier, she lives longer – five years more than man. She is more calm and quiet. Fewer women go crazy, fewer women commit suicide – although they talk about it! Sometimes they even try it, but very half-heartedly.But man goes on collecting, and a point comes where he is no longer in control. Either he commits suicide or he commits murder or he goes mad.Just sitting here is one of my attorneys from America, Swami Prem Niren. He came into deeper and deeper contact with me when I was in American jails for those twelve days. He followed me from jail to jail and he was the only person who was seeing me during all those days, almost every day. His eyes were always full of tears and I could see how much he loves me and how helpless he felt. He was doing everything that it was possible to do.All the other attorneys were paid. Naturally they were simply doing their job. He was the only attorney who was not a servant, who was a lover; who was not being paid. He was one of my sannyasins; my life was at risk, and it was natural for him to fight with totality and intensity. The last day, when I was released from the jail, we were sitting in the hotel. We had our own hotel, our own disco, and our own restaurant in Portland, Oregon, America.In our own hotel, he was sitting by my side with another of my sannyasins, Isabel, and he was crying like a child. And just the other day he was sitting on this side of me and then I again saw tears. Two years ago I had left him in America with tears, and yesterday I found him again with tears.But perhaps he is not even aware of his tears. When he came here just a few days ago, he talked to one of my secretaries, Anando: “Why does Osho go on saying this, that ‘my attorneys had tears in their eyes’?”When I heard this, I could not believe it – just yesterday he was sitting here with tears. Perhaps thousands of years of conditioning have blocked his awareness of his own tears, of his own love, of his own feminineness. A better world, a better humanity, and more people will enjoy tears. They are such a blessing.You are asking, “Why do I always have to cry when I am touched by love?” What do you want? What more do you want? Certainly you are thinking that those tears are something wrong. Is crying when touched by love something wrong? You are carrying a wrong conditioning. It is absolutely right. When touched by love, what can you do? Words won’t help; only tears can convey what is happening deep down in your heart. Tears are the most valuable treasure that you have.But man has been distorted in every way. Man’s nature has been pruned according to the ideas of the vested interests. Nations need armies and they do not want man to be at all touched by love. Their tears have to be dried up and their love has to be blocked, otherwise they will not be able to kill and murder and massacre people – people who are just like you, and people who have not done anything wrong to you, and people whose wives, whose children, whose old parents may be waiting for them just as your parents, your wife, your children are waiting for you.But to create the soldier, man has to be destroyed completely. He has to be made into a robot – and robots don’t cry, robots are not touched by love. Because armies were needed, man was distorted. Because women were not needed in the armies, they were left to the side. It was good for women because they have remained more natural.Never be ashamed of your tears. Be proud that you are still natural. Be proud that you can express the inexpressible through your tears. Those tears are your songs, unuttered. Those tears are your heart, which cannot use words.Never feel ashamed of your tears. Eyes that have lost their tears have lost their most beautiful, their most glorious treasure.I would like my people in particular to be absolutely natural, to be utterly innocent, uninhibited. And when tears are flowing, rejoice! You are still alive! Because don’t you know dead people cannot cry, dead people cannot have tears? And the people, who think they are alive and cannot cry and cannot have tears, are living in a fallacy. They have died long ago. The day their tears died, they also died, because their love died.Except love you don’t have any soul.

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why am I not curious about anything anymore?Devageet, seven hundred and fifty years ago there was a mystery school exactly like this. The mystery school belonged to one of the greatest Sufis, Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi. The Turkish word mevlana means “beloved master.” It has never been used for anyone else.In front of his mystery school was written in bold letters: “This place is not for those who are only curious.”Curiosity has no spiritual meaning. Curiosity is something like itching in your mind: if you itch it goes, if you don’t itch it also goes. Curiosity has no passion in it; it is very superficial – just by the way. An inquiry, a question arises in you, but it is not your quest, you are not going to dedicate your life to searching for the answer for it. You are not even going to commit yourself to the exploration.Curiosity is cheap. If somebody answers, good. If nobody answers, that too is okay. You are not deeply interested. It is not arising out of your heart. Curiosity has to disappear before you can attain a passionate inquiry into existence.So, Devageet, it is not a bad sign, but a tremendously important indication that you are on the right path. The path does not belong to the curious ones. It belongs to those who are committed, dedicated; who are ready even to sacrifice their lives for the experience of truth. As the curiosity disappears you are no longer a student; you become a disciple.That’s the only difference between the student and a disciple. The student is only curious, gathering knowledge from all the sources without much concern. It is not his essential search – just gathering knowledge to cover up his ignorance. But the ignorance remains there, and the more it is covered, the more dangerous because you start forgetting it. And a man who has forgotten his ignorance is a man utterly lost.To go on remembering that you are ignorant is to go on remembering that the night is not over and your morning has not yet come: that you still have a long way to go before the darkness disappears and you see the first signs on the horizon of the sun rising with all its colors and all its beauty and all its blessings.The curious person is not at all accountable for anything deep. The moment you become passionately interested to know, it becomes a question of life and death. Without knowing, your life seems to be just a desert without any oasis anywhere. You have to know; only then will your life have some significance, some meaning, some relevance, some reason why you should go on existing.But the disciple is only a beginning, not the end: the right beginning. A moment comes when your passionate longing to know turns into still deeper waters. It becomes a longing not just to know, but to be. Knowledge is always something there. There is a distance between you and the known. You are not one with it; the knower is separate from the known. That is the state of knowledge. It cannot quench your thirst. The water is there, you are there, but there is no connecting link.Your thirst will become even more fiery. That great moment also comes in the life of the disciple when he drops the quest for knowing and starts the quest for being. The curious person is only interested in information. The disciple is interested in knowledge. The devotee is interested in transformation. He is not content to know the truth. He will be contented only when he becomes the truth. And in fact it is just poverty of language that I have to use the word becoming. No one ever becomes the truth because everyone is already the truth.Truth is your very being, not your becoming. It is not a process, it is not a path that has to be traveled, it is not some faraway goal that you have to reach. It is something in your innermost being that has always been there from eternity to eternity. Whether you know it or not, whether you realize it or not, whether you recognize it or not – it does not matter. It is there.The devotee does not become the truth; he discovers that he is the truth. And this discovery is the greatest discovery possible for human consciousness. So it is perfectly good that you are not curious about anything anymore. It is a sign of maturity, of moving from the state of the student to the disciple. And as I know you, Devageet, you have already moved even from the state of the disciple to the ultimate glory of being a devotee. Your quest, your inquiry is no longer a dry exploration. It has become your love, it has become your very heartbeat. Naturally, all curiosity will disappear.One day you will realize that even to know about truth, to know about godliness, to know about beauty… You are no longer interested in knowing. Because knowing about water is not going to help, even knowing scientifically that it consists of oxygen and hydrogen is not going to quench your thirst.The most glorious moment on the path comes when your whole interest and passion become concentrated on a single point: of discovering yourself; of discovering that you have always been, that you are – even in this moment – and irrespective of whether you understand or not, you will always remain your authentic, your essential, your existential being. It contains all: satyam shivam sundaram – the truth, the godliness and the tremendous beauty that arises from the recognition of your being truth, of your being part of a divine existence.Your every gesture becomes a dance, your every silence becomes a song, your words become aflame with a new fire, with a new light. Your whole life becomes a source of a magnetic force.Just a few days ago, a child was born in France. The mother had been working in an atomic plant. While she was pregnant, for nine months she was exposed to atomic radiation and the doctors and the surgeons were very interested to know how it would affect the child. And they were surprised. The child was very healthy, very radiantly healthy. They were thinking he might be blind, they were thinking he might be crippled. Those people had never seen such a beautiful child – so alive and so vibrant.But then there was another shock and surprise: as they put the child on the table all the surgeons and the doctors’ instruments started moving toward the child. The child had become a magnetic force.Exposure to continuous radiation in very minute doses has been found by Japanese scientists to be very health-giving. Bigger doses can kill. As the quantity becomes bigger it becomes dangerous. A qualitative change comes in through greater quantity. At the very minimum, soft doses of radiation can create immense health and well-being.One scientist in Japan has been working for twenty years in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on this particular project: Is there any possibility of a certain quantity of radiation being life-affirmative? And when he came back after twenty years to the university he belongs to, his colleagues could not believe it. They had all aged twenty years and that man seemed to have become younger than when he had gone. He is sixty-five but he looks forty-five. He had discovered a tremendous thing.He loves me immensely, and he has sent me a few small things. You cannot think that they cost twenty thousand dollars, just a small bottle of radioactive material. He has been using it for one year. He just puts it in his bathtub and the water becomes radioactive, but in a very soft and minimum dose. He has sent me a belt that he has been using for one year. It is filled with radioactive material from Hiroshima, and that belt, he feels, has taken away his old age, has taken away his diseases.He was immensely concerned about my health. He is going to come. I have not used those things that he has sent because what is a soft dose to one person may be too much to another, and I have a very delicate physical structure. So I am waiting for him first to see the difference between me and himself, and then to decide.As you move from the disciple to the state of the devotee, suddenly you start radiating something that has been dormant in you for centuries. You become a magnet – not an ordinary magnet, but a spiritual magnet. People will start moving toward you, not knowing why, but a tremendous desire to be with you and a great feeling of well-being and a great turning inward.I started my journey alone, and without informing anybody I have found that my caravan is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. People have come from faraway lands around the world – wondering why they are going, not knowing the inner pull.Devageet has a heart of a small child, utterly innocent. His transformation from disciplehood to the glorious space of being a devotee has come to him very naturally, very spontaneously, without any effort on his part. Just being in my presence, just being with me, he has moved millions of light-years.It is natural, Devageet, that your curiosities will disappear. Soon you will find another thing disappearing: your longing for knowledge. These are good indications of coming back home. Perhaps just one step more and you will have forgotten curiosities, questions, quest for knowledge – and you will simply relax in the new light that you have found within yourself: perfectly at ease, cool and calm, not a single worry in the world, at ease with the trees and the birds and the ocean and the stars.You love to laugh, you have a great sense of humor – and according to me all the religions in the past have missed the great religious quality of the sense of humor. The reason was that they were all against life. They could not be for laughter: they were all against love – how could they be in favor of laughter? They were life-denying not life-affirming ideologies.Hence you don’t see a single instance in the life of Jesus when he would have laughed. Even before he was crucified he lived as though he was continuously being crucified. The crucifixion of Jesus seems to be the ultimate outcome: “This guy will never be satisfied unless he is crucified.”“Why were you kissing my young daughter in that dark corner last night?” said the angry father.“Now that I’ve seen her in the daylight,” said Ernie, “I sort of wonder myself.”In the darkness you have been curious and you have been many more things, but in the light you start sort of wondering, “What have I been doing?”It was the couple’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and the wife said, “Darling, you have been a very good husband over the years and I would like to show you my appreciation. Is there anything that you would like on this special day?”The husband thought for a while and then said, “Yes, actually there is. You have always forbidden me to look into the top drawer of your cupboard. I would really like to see what is in there.”His wife agreed and he opened it. Inside there were two eggs and about ten thousand dollars in cash. “What are the eggs for?” he inquired.“Well,” said his wife, “I guess it’s time you should know. Every time I was unfaithful to you, I put an egg in the drawer.”“Twice in twenty-five years,” smiled the husband, “that’s understandable. But what is all that money?”“Well, darling,” she replied, “Each time I had a dozen eggs, I sold them.”Devageet, it is very good not to be curious about unnecessary things, because one never knows…Osho,I really enjoy meditation and am absolutely contented with my life. But now it has been so long since I had any great passion or great joy or great pain that I am wondering if I have become dull and stuck, or if this is the way things are supposed to be.It is part of this great pilgrimage. The moment you become contented, in the beginning it feels like the journey is over and you are tremendously blissful. But as time passes, contentment settles down. You are peaceful, you are happy, you are at ease, but an old habit of millions of lives starts raising its head: there seems to be no excitement. Have you become dull or have you died? This is just an old habit and it has to be understood.Excitement is for those who are miserable. Without excitement they cannot live; their misery will be too heavy. A little excitement in their lives, a new love affair, getting a lottery opened in their name – these small things keep them going. These excitements function like lubricants and they go on in their miserable lives hoping another excitement may be coming. And what are your excitements? Moving into a new house and you are excited? Purchasing a new car and you are excited?I have heard about a man who was tired of his beautiful house. Finally, everything becomes tiring, boring. The house was beautiful and just behind the house was a beautiful lake and beyond the lake the mountains and the forest – but the same scene every day, morning, afternoon, evening. There was no excitement.He called a real estate agent and told him that he wanted to sell this boring house. The real estate man was completely puzzled. He had never in his life seen such a beautiful house with such peaceful surroundings. It was almost paradise. So he said, “I will advertise it and it will be sold, there is no problem.” And he advertised it in the newspapers.The next day the man read the advertisement and he was so excited: a beautiful marble house surrounded by a lake – and just beyond the lake a primeval forest, thick, with trees so high as if they are trying to touch the stars. The description was so poetic, and of course there was no mention of his name or his address, only the phone number of the real estate man.He immediately phoned and said, “Whatever the price, I want to purchase this house.”The real estate man said, “This is too difficult a problem. This is your house!”He said, “My God, you have written such a poetic piece about it. I had completely forgotten the lake; I had started taking it for granted. The forest, the mountains… Yes, I remember now; when I entered this house for the first time there was so much excitement.”But excitement is a momentary thing. You cannot remain excited forever; otherwise your blood pressure will rise so high you will simply pop off! Excitement always means going up to a certain point and then going down. It is always up and down. Falling back into misery, searching again for some excitement; this is the ordinary run of life.But when you attain contentment through meditation – when you come to a peaceful inner space where nothing moves, where time stops – in the beginning it is a tremendous ecstasy, not only excitement. But soon you will become accustomed to it, and that’s what is happening to you. You have neither become dull, nor are you stuck. It is just natural. It is the way things are supposed to be.You have to learn a new art of seeing your contentment, your peace, your silence, your happiness – not as something that you had yesterday too. You have to learn to forget the past completely. To be more exact, you have to die to the past so that every day your peace and your contentment are fresh, ecstatic, as if you have discovered them just now.Die every moment to the past and be reborn again and again. Each moment has to be a death and a resurrection. Unless you learn the art of dying and resurrecting you will feel a little bored because it is the same, always the same, nothing changes.You have lived your millions of lives in the past only through changes, hoping for some excitement. Arriving, you have to learn some new art. Some new dimension has to open into your being: how to live with the eternal. You have known only living with the changing, with the impermanent, with the ephemeral. Now learn the new art of living with the eternal, the unchanging, the absolutely still, unmoving – something beyond time and space.Once you have learned this new art, you will find every day new flowers in your contentment, new stars in your silence, new showers of blissfulness and ecstasy. But you have to forget your yesterdays otherwise it will look like the same repetition.I am not bored, and I have lived in utter contentment, in absolute peace. Nothing moves within my being. All is totally silent and still. But because I never think of yesterdays I am immensely ecstatic every moment. What is past is past; I have never looked back. It is the same contentment, the same peace, the same silence – but because I go on dropping the past it is always new for me.Learn the art of keeping the eternal always fresh. Don’t allow any dust to gather on the mirror of the eternal.A Zen story… In the world of Zen it is a beautiful tradition that masters send their disciples to other masters just to see the reality from some other angle. Even masters who have been contradicting each other their whole lives exchange disciples, so the disciple can see the truth from a totally different standpoint.It happened…One disciple was always getting into the same space as you. He was utterly content, there was no complaint, nothing was missing. But this eternal silence without any change was against the old, very deep-rooted habit of the search for excitement. Now there was no excitement possible.The master called him – he had not been calling him for many days – and then slapped him. The disciple could not believe it. He had not said anything. He had not done anything. He asked, “Why have you hit me?”The master said, “You needed a little change. And moreover you have to go to the opposing monastery of my eternal enemy. Now you have to live with that master!”The disciple said, “But you have always been contradicting him. You have never agreed on any point with that man, neither has he ever agreed with you. Why are you sending me to him?”The master said, “Never ask the master why. He knows, and there is no need for you to know it. Simply go and ask the other master to accept you as a disciple.”His whole contentment, meditation, silence – everything was disturbed. Tidal waves of thought that he had completely forgotten – this was too much! For what was he being punished? He forgot all about boredom and all about life having no excitement any more. Now there was great excitement. But if the master says, “You have to go…”He went to the other master very reluctantly, very unwillingly, almost in a state of split. He knew that this man was wrong: he had been listening to his master and he was so logical in his refutation of the other man.But finally he knocked on the door of the monastery. The master himself came out and he said, “What is the matter? What do you want? You belong to my enemy.”The disciple said, “I know. I never wanted to come here but your enemy, my master, has sent me to request that I should be accepted as your disciple.”The master said, “This is very strange. And you followed whatever he said?”The disciple said, “I had to. He has also hit me very hard – and he is a dangerous fellow! If I don’t follow, he will beat me every day: morning, afternoon, evening, in the middle of the night. He is not reliable. I thought it prudent to come to you.”The master closed his door in his face and said, “Your master is very compassionate. Go back to him.”This was even more puzzling. He said, “You have been contradicting my master, writing books against him, teaching your disciples not to listen to him – not even to talk to his disciples – and suddenly today you have changed your mind. You say, ‘Your master is very compassionate.’”The old man laughed and he said, “Yes, he is very compassionate. He disturbed you out of compassion, to give you a sense of: ‘Don’t be stupid! You are settling. All the waves in your mind are disappearing, all the thoughts becoming silent.’ It is out of his compassion that he has disturbed you and he has sent you to me so that I can disturb you more. I am against him, I am against everything that he says, but I am sorry: I cannot accept you. You will have to go back. You have already arrived; just one step more!”He went back to his master and said, “He has rejected me and the reason he gives is: ‘Your master is too compassionate. Go back to him.’”The master said, “Start meditating again.”And it was again excitement, and again a beginning into the unknown, but soon – because he was already a great adept – things settled; contentment, peace. But now there was no desire for excitement any more. It was stupid.But it comes to everybody out of a deep-rooted inheritance of your past lives. It is so deep-rooted that it has gone into your blood, into your bones, into your marrow.You are not becoming dull and you are not stuck. You yourself are saying, “I really enjoy meditation and am absolutely contented with my life, but now it has been so long since I had any great passion or great joy or great pain that I am wondering if I have become dull and stuck, or if this is the way things are supposed to be.” This is the way things are supposed to be.Bernie had been out of town and was surprised when he got back to find his wife, Stella, in bed with a strange man. The stranger, naked and obviously well-satisfied, was sprawled on the bed.“Why you son-of-a-bitch!” Bernie exploded.“Wait, darling,” cried Stella. “You know that fur coat I got last winter? This man gave it to me. Remember the diamond necklace you like so much? This man gave it to me. And remember when you could not afford a second car and I got a Toyota? This man gave it to me.”“For God’s sake, it’s drafty in here!” shouted Bernie. “Cover him so he doesn’t catch cold!”Just be a little understanding. Everything is going perfectly beautifully.Just a few jokes for you – not to disturb you, but just as a little holiday from your contentment. Just for a few moments to forget your meditation and contentment.It was a late night again in the bar when the door opened and a voice called out, “MacTavish your house is on fire!”One man rushed out and after running a hundred yards down the street, suddenly skidded to a halt. “Wait a minute!” he said to no one in particular. “My name is not MacTavish.”The veteran preacher was instructing a class of new ministers on the importance of facial expressions harmonizing with their sermons.“When you speak of heaven,” he said, “let your face light up, let it be bright with a heavenly gleam, let your eyes shine with reflected glory. But when you speak of hell – well, your ordinary face will do.”A Frenchman, a Swiss and an Italian are on a flight to Italy in their little private plane. As the weather gets bad they get lost in the clouds. The Frenchman puts his hand out of the window and suddenly says, “I touched the Eiffel Tower. This must be France.”After a while the Swiss man puts his hand out of the window and says, “We are home. This is Switzerland; I touched the mountains.”Finally the Italian sticks his hand out of the window and says, “This must-a be Italy.”“How do you know?” asked the others.The Italian pulls his hand in and says, “They stole-a my watch-a.”

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,How can I love better?Love is enough unto itself; it needs no betterment. It is perfect as it is; it is not in any way to be more perfect. The very desire shows a misunderstanding about love and its nature. Can you have a perfect circle? All circles are perfect; if they are not perfect, they are not circles.Perfection is intrinsic to a circle and the same is the law about love. You cannot love less, and you cannot love more because it is not a quantity; it is a quality that is immeasurable.Your very question shows that you have never tasted what love is, and you are trying to hide your lovelessness in a desire of: “how to love better.” No one who knows love can ask this question. Love has to be understood not as a biological infatuation. That is lust. That exists in all the animals: there is nothing special about it. It exists even in trees. It is nature’s way of reproduction. There is nothing spiritual in it, and nothing especially human.So the first thing is to make a clear-cut distinction between lust and love. Lust is a blind passion; love is the fragrance of a silent, peaceful, meditative heart. Love has nothing to do with biology or chemistry or hormones. Love is the flight of your consciousness to higher realms – beyond matter and beyond body. The moment you understand love as something transcendental then love is no longer a fundamental question.The fundamental question is: how to transcend the body, how to know something within you which is beyond – beyond all that is measurable. That is the meaning of the word matter. It comes from a Sanskrit root, matra, which means measurement. It means that which can be measured. The French word metre comes from the same root.The fundamental question is: how to get away from the measurable and how to enter into the immeasurable – in other words, how to go beyond matter and open your eyes toward more consciousness. And there is no limit to consciousness. The more you become conscious, the more you realize how much more is possible ahead. As you reach one peak, another peak arises in front of you. It is an eternal pilgrimage.Love is a by-product of a rising consciousness. It is just like the fragrance of a flower. Don’t search for it in the roots; it is not there. Your biology is your roots, your consciousness is your flowering.As you become more and more an open lotus of consciousness, you will be surprised, taken aback, with a tremendous experience that can only be called love. You are so full of joy, so full of bliss; each fiber of your being is dancing with ecstasy. You are just like a rain cloud that wants to rain and shower. The moment you are overflowing with bliss, a tremendous longing arises in you to share it. That sharing is love.Love is not something that you can have from someone who has not attained blissfulness. And this is the misery of the whole world: everybody is asking to be loved and pretending to love. You cannot love because you don’t know what consciousness is. You don’t know the satyam, the shivam, the sundaram.You don’t know truth, you don’t know the experience of the divine, and you don’t know the fragrance of beauty. What have you got to give? You are so empty, you are so hollow; nothing grows in your being, nothing is green. There are no flowers within you, your spring has not yet come.Love is a by-product. When the spring comes and you suddenly start flowering, blossoming, and you release your potential fragrance – sharing that fragrance, sharing that grace, sharing that beautitude is love. And there is no question of making it better. It is already perfect; it is always perfect. If it is, it is perfect. If it is not perfect, it is not there. Perfection and love cannot be separated.If you had asked me, “What is love?” it would have been more truthful, honest, sincere, authentic. But you are asking me, “How can I love better?” You have already accepted as a fact that you know what love is – not only that, your question implies that you already love. Now the question is how to better it.I don’t want to hurt you, but I am helpless. I have to say the truth to you: you don’t know what love is. You can’t know because you have not yet gone deeper in your consciousness. You have not experienced yourself. You know nothing of who you are. In this blindness, in this ignorance, in this unconsciousness, love does not grow. This is a desert in which you are living. In this darkness, in this desert, there is no possibility of love blossoming.First you have to be full of light and full of delight – so full that you start overflowing. That overflowing energy is love. Then love is known as the greatest perfection in the world. It is never less and never more. But our very upbringing is so neurotic, so psychologically sick that it destroys all possibilities of inner growth. You are being taught from the very beginning to be a perfectionist, and then naturally you go on applying your perfectionist ideas to everything – even to love.Just the other day I came across a statement: A perfectionist is a person who takes great pains, and gives even greater pains to others. And the outcome is just a miserable world.Everybody is trying to be perfect. And the moment somebody starts trying to be perfect, he starts expecting everybody else to be perfect. He becomes a condemner. He starts humiliating people. That’s what all your so-called saints have been doing down the ages. That’s what your religions have done to you – poisoned your being with an idea of perfection.Because you cannot be perfect, you start feeling guilty, you lose respect for yourself. And the man who has lost respect for himself has lost all the dignity of being human. Your pride has been crushed, your humanity has been destroyed by beautiful words like perfection.Man cannot be perfect. Yes, there is something that man can experience but which is beyond the ordinary conception of man. Unless man also experiences something of the divine, he cannot know perfection.Perfection is not something like a discipline, it is not something that you can practice, it is not something for which you have to go through rehearsals – but that is what is being taught to everybody. And the result is a world full of hypocrites, who know perfectly well that they are hollow and empty, but go on pretending all kinds of qualities which are nothing but empty words.When you say to someone, “I love you,” have you ever thought what you mean? Is it just biological infatuation between the two sexes? Then once you have satisfied your animal appetite, all so-called love will disappear. It was just a hunger and you have fulfilled your hunger and you are finished. The same woman who was looking the most beautiful in the world, the same man who was looking like Alexander the Great – you start thinking how to get rid of this fellow!It will be very enlightening for you, to understand this letter written by Paddy to his beloved Maureen.My darling Maureen,I met you last night but you did not show up. Next time I will meet you again whether you show up or not. If I am there first, I will write my name on the gatepost to let you know. And if it is you that is first, rub out my name and nobody will be any the wiser.Darling Maureen, I would climb the highest mountain for your sake, and swim the wildest sea. I would endure any hardships to spend a moment by your side.Your ever-loving,Paddy.PS I’ll be over to see you on Friday night if it is not raining.The moment you say to someone “I love you,” you don’t know what you are saying. You don’t know that it is just lust hiding behind a beautiful word, love. It will disappear. It is very momentary.Love is something eternal. It is the experience of the buddhas, not the unconscious people of whom the whole world is full. Only very few people have known what love is – and these same people are the most awakened, the most enlightened, the highest peaks of human consciousness.If you really want to know love, forget about love, remember about meditation. If you want to bring roses into your garden, forget about roses and take care of the rosebush. Give nourishment to it, water it, take care that it gets the right amount of sun, water. If everything is taken care of, the roses are destined to come in the right time. You cannot bring them earlier, you cannot force them to open up sooner, and you cannot ask a roseflower to be more perfect.Have you ever seen a roseflower that is not perfect? What more do you want? Every roseflower is perfect in its uniqueness. Dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun – can’t you see the tremendous beauty, the absolute joy? A small ordinary roseflower radiates the hidden splendor of existence.Love is a roseflower in your being, but prepare your being. Dispel the darkness and the unconsciousness. Become more and more alert and aware, and love will come of its own accord, in its own time. You need not worry about it. And whenever it comes it is always perfect.Love is a spiritual experience – nothing to do with sexes and nothing to do with bodies, but something to do with the innermost being.But you have not even entered into your own temple. You don’t know at all who you are and you are asking about love. First be thyself; first know thyself – and love will come as a reward. It is a reward from the beyond. It showers on you like flowers, fills your being. And it goes on showering on you, and it brings with it a tremendous longing to share. That sharing can only be indicated in human language as “love.” It does not say much, but it indicates the right direction. Love is a shadow of alertness, of consciousness.I teach you to be more conscious. And love will come as you become more conscious: it is a guest that comes, that comes inevitably to those who are ready and prepared to receive it. You are not even ready to recognize it.If love comes to your door, you will not recognize it. If love knocks on your doors, you may find a thousand and one excuses. You may perhaps think it is some strong wind, or some other excuse. You will not open the doors. And even if you open the doors you will not recognize love because you have never seen love before. How can you recognize it?You can only recognize something that you know. When love comes for the first time and fills your being, you are absolutely overwhelmed and mystified. You don’t know what is happening. You know your heart is dancing, you know you are surrounded by celestial music, you know fragrances that you have never known before, but it takes a little time to put all these experiences together and to remember that perhaps this is what love is. Slowly, slowly it sinks into your being.Love is not to be found in poetry. My own experience is that the people who write poetry about love are the people who do not know love. I am personally acquainted with great poets who have written beautiful poetry about love, and I know they have never experienced love. In fact their poems are just substitutes, consolations. By writing about love they are deceiving themselves and others that they know love.Only mystics know love. Other than mystics there is no category of human beings who have ever experienced love. Love is absolutely the monopoly of the mystic. If you want to know love you will have to enter into the world of the mystic.Jesus says, “God is love.” He has been part of a mystery school of the Essenes, an ancient school of mystics. But perhaps he did not graduate from the mystery school because what he is saying is just not right. God is not love; love is God. And the difference is tremendous; it is not just a change of words.The moment you say God is love you are simply saying that love is only an attribute of God. He is also wisdom, he is also compassion, he is also forgiveness. He can be millions of things besides love. Love is only one of the attributes of God. And, in fact, even to make it a small attribute of God is very irrational and illogical. Because if God is love then he cannot be just; if God is love then he cannot be cruel enough to throw sinners into eternal hell, if God is love then God cannot be the law.One great Sufi mystic, Omar Khayyam, shows more understanding than Jesus when he says, “I will go on just being myself. I am not going to take any notice of the priests and the preachers because I trust that God’s love is great enough. I cannot commit a sin that can be greater than his love. So why be worried? Our hands are small and our sins are small. Our reach is small – how can we commit sins that God’s love cannot forgive? If God is love then he cannot be present on the last judgment day to sort out the saints and throw the remaining millions and millions of people into hell for eternity.”The teachings of the Essenes were just the opposite. Jesus quotes them wrongly. Perhaps he was not very deeply rooted in their teachings. Their teaching was “Love is God.” That is such a tremendous difference. Now God becomes only an attribute of love; now God becomes only a quality of the tremendous experience of love. Now God is no longer a person but only an experience of those who have known love. Now God becomes secondary to love. And I say unto you, the Essenes were right.Love is the ultimate value, the final flowering. There is nothing beyond it; hence, you cannot perfect it. In fact, before you attain it you will have to disappear. When love will be there you will not be there.A great Eastern mystic, Kabir, has a very significant statement – a statement that can be made only by one who has experienced, who has realized, who has entered into the inner sanctum of ultimate reality. The statement is: “I had been searching for truth, but it is strange to say that as long as the searcher was there, truth was not found. And when the truth was found, I looked all around – I was absent. When the truth was found, the seeker was no more; and when the seeker was, truth was nowhere.”Truth and the seeker cannot exist together. You and love cannot exist together. There is no coexistence possible: either you or love. You can choose. If you are ready to disappear, melt and merge, leaving only a pure consciousness behind, love will blossom. You cannot perfect it because you will not be present. And it does not need perfection in the first place. It always comes as perfect.But love is one of those words that everybody uses and nobody understands. Parents are telling their children, “We love you,” and they are the people who destroy their children, they are the people who give their children all kinds of prejudices, all kinds of dead superstitions. They are the people who burden their children with the whole load of rubbish that generations have been carrying. And each generation goes on transferring it to another generation. The madness goes on, becoming mountainous.Yet all parents think they love their children. If they really loved their children, they would not like their children to be their images because they are just miserable and nothing else. What is their experience of life? – pure misery, suffering. Life has not been a blessing to them but a curse. And still they want their children to be just like themselves.I was a guest in a family. I was sitting in their garden in the evening. The sun was setting and it was a beautiful, silent evening. The birds were returning back to the trees, and the small child of the family was sitting by my side. I just asked him, “Do you know who you are?”And children are more clear, more perceptive than the grown-ups because the grown-ups are already spoiled, corrupted, polluted, with all kinds of ideologies, religions. That small child looked at me and he said, “You are asking me a very difficult question.”I said, “What is the difficulty in it?”He said, “The difficulty is that I am the only child of my parents, and as long as I can remember, whenever some guests come, somebody says my eyes look like my father’s, somebody says my nose looks like my mother’s, somebody says my face looks like my uncle’s. So I don’t know who I am because nobody says anything looks like me!”I said, “This is really difficult.”But this is what is being done to every child. You don’t leave the child alone to experience himself, and you don’t leave the child to become himself. You go on loading your own unfulfilled ambitions on the child.My personal physician is Dr. Amrito. His father was also a well-known physician. His father has left a strange condition in his will: Amrito will be able to get his inheritance if he fulfills the condition – and the condition is that the day he is accepted by the Royal College of Physicians as a fellow of the society, he will be able to get the money from the bank. If he never becomes a fellow, if he is not accepted by the Royal College of Physicians – which is the most significant fellowship in the whole world as far as physicians are concerned.When I came to know about it I could see the incomplete ambition of the poor father. He would have longed his whole life to become a fellow of this royal society. Now he is burdening his son with his ambition. He will be gone, but still he wants his ambition to be fulfilled. And if the son cannot fulfill the condition he will be left as a beggar on the streets, he will not be able to inherit his father’s lifelong savings. And he is the only son, the money will rot in the bank, but he cannot get it.Fortunately he managed, and managed far better than the father would ever have dreamed of. He was accepted as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians – the youngest in their whole history. People are accepted when they become old, experienced, when they have written many books and papers and done many researches and contributed much. Amrito did everything very quickly. He was the youngest fellow of the Royal College.Every parent wants his child to be in his image. But a child has a destiny of his own. If he becomes your image he will never become himself. And without becoming yourself you will never feel contentment, you will never feel at ease with existence. You will always be in a condition of missing something.Your parents love you, and they also tell you that you have to love them because they are your fathers, they are your mothers. It is a strange phenomenon and nobody seems to be aware of it. Just because you are a mother does not mean that the child has to love you. You have to be lovable; your being a mother is not enough. You may be a father; that does not mean that you automatically become lovable. Just because you are a father does not create a tremendous feeling of love in the child.But it is expected, and the poor child does not know what to do. He starts pretending, that’s the only possible way. He starts smiling when there is no smile in his heart; he starts showing love, respect, gratitude – and all are just false. He becomes an actor, a hypocrite from the very beginning, a politician. We are all living in this world where parents, teachers, priests – everybody has corrupted you, displaced you, has taken you away from yourself.My effort here is to give your center back to you. I call this centering, meditation. I want you simply to be yourself, with a great self-respect, with a dignity that existence needed you. And then you can start searching for yourself. First come to the center, and then start searching for who you are.Knowing one’s original face is the beginning of a life of love, of a life of celebration. You will be able to give so much love because it is not something that is exhaustible, because it is immeasurable it cannot be exhausted. The more you give it, the more you become capable of giving it.And the greatest experience in life is when you simply give without any conditions, without any expectations of even a simple “thank-you.” On the contrary, a real, authentic love feels obliged to the person who has accepted his love. He could have rejected it.When you start giving love with a deep sense of gratitude to all those who accept it, you will be surprised that you have become an emperor – no longer a beggar asking for love with a begging bowl, knocking on every door. And those people on whose doors you are knocking cannot give love to you. They are themselves beggars.I have heard about two great astrologers. Every morning they used to meet on a certain crossroad. From there their paths separated; they practiced in different parts of the city. But it was almost a daily ritual: meeting on the crossroad before departing toward their sections of the city. They used to show their hands to each other, asking, “What is my destiny today?” And they were great astrologers! They were telling people their destinies and they did not know their own destinies for which they had to consult another astrologer who was consulting them! They each read the lines of the other and predicted.Beggars are asking each other for love and feel frustrated, angry because the love is not coming. But this is bound to happen. Love belongs to the world of emperors, not of beggars. And a man is an emperor when he is so full of love that he can give it without any conditions.Then comes an even greater surprise: that when you start giving your love to anybody, even to strangers – because the question is not to whom you are giving it; just the very joy of giving is so much that who cares who is on the receiving end? When this space comes into your being, that you go on giving to each and everybody; not only to human beings but to animals, to the trees, to the faraway stars because love is something that can be transferred even to the farthest star just by your loving look. Just by your touch, love can be transferred to a tree – without saying a single word. It can be conveyed in absolute silence.And when I am saying it, I am not only saying it. I am a living example of whatever I am saying to you. Can’t you feel my love? – although I have never said it to you. It need not be said; it declares itself. It has its own ways of reaching into the very depths, into your being.First be full of love, then the sharing happens. And then the great surprise, that as you give you start receiving from unknown sources, from unknown corners, from unknown people; from trees, from rivers, from mountains. Love starts showering on you from all the nooks and corners of existence. The more you give, the more you get. Life becomes a sheer dance of love.To me, this is the state of enlightenment: pure love. And except pure love, there is no God.Osho,Could you tell me if you are crucifying me or burning me?Jayesh, just now I have been talking about love. Your question opens another dimension of love.There is a cross on which a man like Jesus was crucified. It is of destruction and death; hate, violence and anger. It does not create anything; it only destroys. It is ugly.But there is also another cross, the cross of love. It destroys in you all that is false, and it resurrects in you all that is authentic, all that is true. It kills you on one hand, and it revives you on the other hand. It kills only that which you are not, but what you have been identifying yourself with. It destroys your false identity, your personality, your hypocrisy.And as your falseness is destroyed, your truth shines forth, radiates with tremendous beauty. The ancient seers of the East have called the master a death and a resurrection. The disciple goes through the being of the master. All that is false will be burned, and all that is true will come out in its immense glory and splendor, freed from all chains and bondages, in absolute beauty, freedom, grace and eternal joy.Jayesh, I am certainly crucifying you – but this is the “you” that you are not. Every creator has to destroy to create. Just see a master sculptor…I am reminded of a very beautiful story about Michelangelo. He was passing through the market where marble rocks were sold, and in front of the greatest shop he saw a huge marble rock lying on the other side of the road. He asked the shopkeeper, “How much will it cost for me to take that rock?”The shopkeeper said, “It has been lying there for almost a decade. Nobody seems to have any interest in it. You are the first man in these ten years who has even inquired about it. I will give it to you for free. Just take it away; it is unnecessarily taking up my space. It is so ugly and so strange that I don’t think you can make anything out of it.”The sculptor took it, and after three years he came back to the shop and invited the owner to see something that he had made. He had made a beautiful statue of Jesus with his mother, when Jesus was brought down from the cross. He is lying almost dead, bleeding, unconscious, in the lap of his mother.Just a few years ago the statue was destroyed by a madman. It was thought to be one of the greatest pieces of art – and the madman destroyed it and said in the court, “I have destroyed it deliberately to become world famous.” He became world famous. His picture was all over in all the magazines and papers; his name suddenly became known throughout the world.But this beautiful statue – I have seen a picture of it. Jesus looks so beautiful, and his mother with tears in her eyes – the statue looks so alive that it seems Jesus is going to stand up. It is one of the most mysterious creations of man.The owner of the shop could not believe it when the sculptor said, “It is from the same rock that you gave me for free.”The shopkeeper asked him, “But how could you even dream that that ugly rock could be transformed into such a beautiful piece?”The sculptor said, “I did not dream about it. In fact, as I was passing by the side of the rock, Jesus called, ‘I am encaged in this rock. Help me to be freed.’ And all that I have done is not to create Jesus and Mary; I have simply taken away the unnecessary parts of the rock. My work has been only that of eliminating the false, the unnecessary, and what has remained is God’s grace.”The function of the master is the same – to take away all that is false in you. And the real, the true and the authentic will be revealed the moment the false is taken away. The master never gives you anything. He only takes away the false, and the truth is already there. Just the unnecessary has to be eliminated.Yes, Jayesh, I am crucifying you so that you can have a resurrection. But my cross is that of love; it is not to kill you. In fact you are dead as you are. It is to give you a taste of eternal life. It is to revive you, it is to call you from your grave to come out. Yes, in the beginning it looks like crucifixion, but it is really part of the process of resurrection.Your question is significant. And you are also asking me, “Could you tell me if you are crucifying me or burning me?” As far as burning is concerned…Just the other day, a woman came from England. Her sister was a sannyasin. Almost ten years ago, in an accident – and it was her own fault – she burned herself. We tried everything that was possible here and when we saw that perhaps she would not be able to recover in India – all her skin had been burned – I sent one of our doctors to take the girl back to England where better and more up-to-date facilities are available.He took her to England. We arranged all the expenses for her traveling, for her medical care in England, but she could not be cured. She died. And after ten years this woman comes very angrily, saying, “We cannot ever forget it. My mother is still angry and I am angry that you killed my sister.”Amrito said, “This is strange. It was her own fault she got burned. We managed every expense here, and seeing that perhaps she needs better facilities, more up-to-date technology, we took her to England. We made every arrangement. Accidents can happen anywhere.”When I heard this I said, “These people seem to be absolutely stupid. They don’t know anything about India.” Here, everybody finally gets burned! There is of course one alternative. You can get burned and then you can die, or you can die first and then you can be burned. The choice is yours. Most people choose the second, it is just a question of liking, but everybody here in this country has to be burned finally.So if you are asking about burning, it will happen – but not right now, Jayesh. There is much more for you to do. And as far as you are concerned, burning is not your problem. It is the problem of other sannyasins. You will be dead – unless you choose the other alternative.You are too young yet to think about such things. I will give you a few maxims to think over instead:“The saints are the sinners who keep on trying” – meditate over it.“Take a risk. Even a turtle gets nowhere until he sticks his neck out.”“A man does not need twenty-twenty eyesight to appreciate a thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six vision.”“Nothing wrong ever happens at the right time.”“Save your money.” It is particularly significant for Jayesh because he is my treasurer. “Save your money. You never know when your friends will need it.”Jayesh is a busy man, extremely busy, hence a special maxim for him: “A busy man is usually a happy man, unless he is busy scratching.”“Never judge a woman’s feet by the shape of her shoes.”“Success is when you have your name in everything except the phone book.”“Salesmanship is the difference between rape and rapture.”“Whiskey may not cure a cold, but no remedy fails with such satisfaction.”“Not all philosophers are married men, but all married men become philosophers.”Jayesh, this is not the time for you to be burned, this is the time to have a good time.The priest, traveling on a first class sleeper train, had a double compartment all to himself. Having just finished his dinner in the dining car, he returned to his compartment, but was shocked to find two scantily-dressed, sexy-looking girls inside.He immediately cried out, “You girls are in the wrong compartment. I’m a respectable man, the pillar of my community, and there has never, ever been the smallest whiff of scandal about me in my whole life. So,” the priest continued, pulling himself up to his full height, “one of you girls will have to go!”Jayesh, when the burning will come, it will come. We will celebrate it – it is a promise. Meanwhile, enjoy life as much as you can. It is none of your business to worry about things that are going to happen after your death.Life is so precious. Not a single moment has to be wasted in thinking what will happen after death. Here in India, it is certain that burning will happen. So you can be absolutely unworried and unconcerned. You will not be the one who will have to take care of the burning, and you will not be the one who will be burned on the funeral pyre. You will be a witness standing in the crowd of the celebrant sannyasins. The only difference will be that you will not be visible anymore.But that is not a misfortune. Just think of the great adventures when you become invisible!

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why is it so difficult to be in a state of let-go?The world needs workaholics. It needs people to be slaves, to be proletarians, to be laborers and function just like machines; hence all the so-called moralists and puritans have been teaching people that work has some intrinsic value. It has none.It has some value, but of the lowest kind: it is a need. Because people have stomachs, they need bread and butter, and they need clothes and a roof over their heads. This natural need has been exploited to the extreme. People are forced to work, but whatever they produce does not come to them. It goes to the people who don’t work.The society has been forever an exploitative society. It has been divided into the “haves” and the “have-nots.” The “have-nots” have to work just to survive, and the “haves” go on accumulating mountains of money. It is a very ugly situation – inhuman, primitive, insane. The people who work are poor, hungry, starving. They don’t have time for literature, for music, for paintings. They can’t even conceive that there are worlds of tremendous beauty, of art; they cannot even imagine that there is something like meditation. It is enough for them to get one meal a day.Just the other day I was informed that Ethiopia is ready for another famine. Just a year ago millions of people died in Ethiopia and the whole world watched. It not only watched: America destroyed billions of dollars worth of foodstuff in the ocean – but it could not be given to the poor who are starving. The countries of Europe destroyed even more because they had so much surplus – mountains of butter. And the new crops were coming so they needed the old crops to be taken out of their warehouses. They were short of warehouses and just by their side one thousand people in Ethiopia were dying every day, just out of hunger.And the European countries spent two billion dollars just to destroy the surplus foodstuff. It is not known how much the cost of the food was that they destroyed in the ocean; two billion dollars is only the cost of destroying it.And now, again, Ethiopia is facing another calamity. And the European countries have agreed with Ethiopia that they will give their surplus, but only on one condition. Man seems to be one of the most useless things in the world. It seems man exists for all kinds of conditions and ideologies, not vice versa. The European countries had a condition because in Ethiopia there is a Marxist government, and they made it a condition that: “We will give you food – we have a surplus, there is no problem – but you will have to stop your Marxist plans absolutely.”The food was supposed to have reached by now, but it has not even moved from the warehouses in Europe. And the reason the European countries are giving is that: “You are still continuing your Marxist plans.”Can you see the insanity of it? They are more concerned with Marxist plans, which have nothing to do with them. They are not concerned with millions of people dying again. And it is not only a question of other countries – naturally nobody has the responsibility for other countries. In the same country, for example, in America, thirty million people are on the streets without food, without clothes, without shelter. And it is a strange, ironical coincidence that exactly the same number of Americans, thirty million, are dying in hospitals, in nursing and care homes because they have stuffed their bodies with too much food, and they cannot stop. They will die because of eating too much, and a similar number of people will die because they don’t have anything to eat.These thirty million people are eating the share of the other thirty million who are on the streets. They are ready to work, but there is no work. And when there is no work, nobody is interested in feeding the poor. The poor are fed only if they are needed for work.Down the ages the majority has been poor, and their survival was dependent on their utility as productive mechanisms. The moment they were not needed they were left to die in hunger and starvation. And they are the real owners of the whole wealth of the world because they are the producers. But cunning people have managed conspiracies with politicians, with priests, to keep the society divided into two different categories: those who are really human beings – the people who are rich, super-rich – and those who are just human beings in name, but are being used as commodities, as productive mechanisms.Because of this situation the vested interests have been teaching only one thing down the ages: that is work, and work hard so that you can produce more, and the rich can become even richer.The value of work is only to produce enough for everybody. Perhaps four or five hours work a day would be enough for the whole of humanity to live peacefully and comfortably. But this insane desire to be rich, this insane greed which knows no limits; without any understanding that the more money you have, the less value your money has.It is a simple law of economics: the law of diminishing returns. You have one house: it is valuable, you have to live in it, you need it. You have two houses, you have three houses, you have hundreds of houses… The value goes on diminishing as the number of houses goes on growing.But there is a small class in the world, which has absolutely valueless money. For example, the richest man in the world is now a Japanese who has twenty-one billion dollars cash in his banks. What is he going to do with it? Can you eat it? And money attracts more money: just from sheer interest that man will go on becoming more and more rich. Beyond a certain limit money loses all value. But greed is absolutely mad. The whole human society has lived under a kind of insanity.That’s why it is so difficult to be in a state of let-go because it has always been condemned as laziness. It is against the workaholic society. Let-go means you start living in a saner way. You are no longer madly after money; you don’t go on working continuously. You work just for your material needs, but there are spiritual needs too. Work is a necessity for material needs, let-go is necessary for spiritual needs. But the majority of humanity has been completely boycotted from any spiritual growth.Let-go is one of the most beautiful spaces. You simply exist, doing nothing, sitting silently, and the grass grows by itself. You simply enjoy the songs of the birds, the greenness of the trees, the multidimensional, psychedelic colors of the flowers. You don’t have to do anything to experience existence; you have to stop doing. You have to be in an absolutely unoccupied state, with no tensions, with no worries.In this state of tranquility you come into a certain attuning with the music that surrounds us. You suddenly become aware of the beauty of the sun. There are millions of people who have never enjoyed a sunset, who have never enjoyed a sunrise. They cannot afford it. They are continuously working and producing – not for themselves, but for the cunning vested interests: those who are in power, those who are capable of manipulating human beings.Naturally they teach you that work is something great – it is in their interest. And the conditioning has become so deep that even you don’t know why you cannot relax.Even on holidays people go on doing something or other. They cannot enjoy a holiday, just relaxing on the sea beach and enjoying the ocean and the very fresh and salty air. No, they will do any stupid thing. If they have nothing to do they may take their refrigerator apart – which has been functioning perfectly well – or they may destroy an old grandfather clock, which has been functioning for centuries. They are trying to improve upon it, but basically they cannot sit silently, that is the problem. They have to do something, they have to go somewhere.On every holiday people are rushing to health resorts, sea beaches – not to rest there; they don’t have time to rest because millions of people are going there. Holidays are the best time to remain at home because the whole city has gone to the sea beach. Cars are going bumper to bumper, and by the time they reach the beach it is full of people; they cannot even find a small place to lie down. I have seen pictures of sea beaches. Even the ocean must be laughing at the stupidity of these people.For a few minutes they will lie down, and then they need ice cream and they need Coca-Cola. And they have brought their portable television sets and everybody is listening to his transistor… And then again the marathon race back home because the time is over. More accidents happen in the world on holidays than on any other days: more people are killed, more cars are crashed. It is strange! And for five days in the week – the working days – people are hoping, waiting with great longing for the holiday. And in those two days, which are the weekend, they are simply waiting for their offices and their factories to open. People have completely forgotten the language of relaxation. They have been made to forget it.Every child is born with an inner capacity; you don’t have to teach the child how to relax.You just watch a child – he is relaxed, he is in a let-go. But you won’t allow him to enjoy this state of paradise. You will soon civilize him – because every child is primitive, uncivilized. And the parents and the teachers, everybody, is after the children to civilize them, to make them part of the society – and nobody bothers that the society is absolutely insane. It will be good if the child remains as he is, is no longer initiated into the society and your so-called civilization.But with all good wishes the parents cannot leave the child alone. They have to teach him to work, they have to teach him to be productive, they have to teach him to be competitive. They have to teach him, “Unless you are at the top you have failed us.”So everybody is running to be at the top. How can you relax?When, for the first time in India, railway lines were being laid down… I have heard a beautiful story…The British engineer who was overseeing the work that was going on was amazed to see that every day a young Indian, a villager, would come and lie down under the shade of a big tree and watch the workers working and the engineers instructing them. The engineer became interested: This is a strange fellow! He comes every day, he brings his food with him, he takes his lunch and rests, he sleeps in the afternoon under the shade of the tree.Finally the engineer could not resist the temptation and he asked the villager, “Why don’t you start working? You come every day anyway, and you waste your time just lying down, watching.”The villager asked, “Working? But for what?”The engineer said, “You will earn money!”The villager asked, “But what will I do with the money?”The engineer said, “Stupid, you don’t know what can be done with the money? When you have money you can relax and enjoy!”The poor villager said, “This is strange because I am already relaxed and enjoying! Going in such a roundabout way: working hard, earning money and then enjoying and relaxing – but I am doing it already!”Children come with the intrinsic, intuitive quality of let-go. They are utterly relaxed. That’s why all children are beautiful. Have you ever thought about it? All children, without exception, have a tremendous grace, aliveness and beauty. And these children are going to grow, and all their beauty and their grace will disappear. It is very difficult to find a grown-up man with the same grace, with the same beauty, with the same aliveness.If you can find a man with childlike innocence and relaxation, you have found a sage.That’s how we have defined the sage in the East: he attains his childhood again. After experiencing all the ups and downs in life, finally he decides – the decision comes by itself out of experience – that before death comes, he has to be again the same as he was in his childhood.I teach you let-go because that’s the only thing that can make you a sage. No church will help, no theology, no religion because none of them teach you let-go. They all insist on work, on the dignity of labor. They use beautiful words to enslave you, to exploit you. They are in conspiracy with the parasites of the society.I am not against work; work has its own utility – but only utility. It cannot become your life’s be all and end all. It is an absolute necessity that you need food, that you need clothes, that you need a shelter. Work, but don’t become addicted to work. The moment you are out of work, you should know how to relax. It does not need much wisdom to relax. It is a simple art, and it is very simple because you already knew it when you were born. So it is already there; it just has to be made active from a dormant position, it has to be provoked.All methods of meditation are nothing but methods to help you to remember the art of let-go. I say remember because you know it already. And you know it still, but that knowledge is being repressed by the society.Simple principles have to be remembered. The body should be the beginning. Lying down on your bed – and you lie down on your bed every day, so there is no special necessity to do so. When you lie down on the bed, before sleep comes, start watching with closed eyes the energy from your feet. Move from there, just watch inside: Is there some tension somewhere – in the legs, in the thighs, in the stomach? Is there some strain, some tension? If you find some tension somewhere, simply try to relax it, and don’t move from that point unless you feel the relaxation has come.Go through the hands because your hands are your mind; they are connected with your mind. If your right hand is tense, the left side of your brain will be tense. If your left hand is tense, the right side of your brain will be tense. So first go through the hands – they are almost the branches of your mind – and then reach finally to the mind.When the whole body is relaxed the mind is already ninety percent relaxed because the body is nothing but extensions of the mind. Then simply watch the ten percent tension that is in your mind, and just by watching the clouds will disappear. It will take a few days for you. It is a knack. And it will revive your childhood experience – when you were so relaxed.Have you ever watched? Children go on falling every day, but they don’t get hurt, they don’t get fractures. You try it; whenever the child falls you also fall.A psychoanalyst tried an experiment. He announced in the newspapers, “I will pay enough money if somebody is ready to come to my house and just follow my child for the whole day. Whatever my child does, you have to do that.”A young wrestler turned up and he said, “I am ready. Where is the child?”But by the middle of the day the wrestler was flat on his back! He already had two fractures because everything that the child was doing he had to do. And the child got excited because this was strange, so he would jump unnecessarily, and the wrestler had to jump; he would climb the tree, and the wrestler had to climb; and he would jump from the tree, and the wrestler had to jump.And this continued. The child completely forgot about food, about everything; he was enjoying the misery of the wrestler so much.By the afternoon the wrestler simply refused. He said to the psychoanalyst, “Keep your money! This child of yours will kill me by the end of the day. I am already ready to go to the hospital. This child is dangerous! Don’t do this experiment with anybody else.”Every child has so much energy, and still he is not tense. Have you watched a child sleeping? Have you watched a child just sucking his own thumb – enjoying it, dreaming beautiful dreams? His whole body is in a deep let-go.It happens, it is a known fact: every day, all over the world, drunkards fall, but they don’t get fractures. Every morning they are found in some gutter and brought home. But it is a strange fact that they go on falling.I have heard about a drunkard who was coming home and got hit on the head by an electric pole. He looked at the pole and he saw at least eight poles. He said, “My God, how am I going to reach home?”He tried this way and that way, but nothing helped. Every time the same electric pole would hit him hard. Finally he shouted for help.A policeman came and asked, “What is the matter?”He said, “I am surrounded by electric poles and I cannot get out. And you know my wife! I have to reach home. I have been struggling for almost two hours. Who has done this? – because in the day I saw that there was only one electric pole!”The policeman took him away from those imaginary poles. He had been struggling for two hours, but he was not hurt because a drunkard is relaxed.I have known accidents in which only drunkards remained unhurt; everybody else was hurt.Once a train fell from a bridge. That happens almost every year in India, two or three times. Bridges simply collapse, particularly the newly built bridges because there are so many people to be bribed before you can get the government’s permission to build the bridge. Finally the constructor, the builder, has to make money out of the bridge – he has spent so much. You have to bribe almost every person who is concerned.Naturally he does not use cement, but only sand. So the first time the train comes onto the bridge, the whole train goes into the river with the bridge.Once it happened just near my village. I rushed to look. Only one man had remained unhurt, and that was the village drunkard. When I saw him he asked me, “What has happened? In fact, I don’t know why I was traveling in this train. Some idiots put me in the train. I resisted, but before I could get out, the train moved and then suddenly I found myself swimming in the river. I don’t know what happened in the middle. The middle portion of the story is completely missing.”I said, “Just come home with me because everybody else has to go to the hospital.” A few people were unconscious, a few had died, a few had many fractures – multiple fractures. Everybody was in a mess except that drunkard, who was asking me, “What has happened?”I took him back home. He was asking me again and again on the way, “You can tell me, I will not tell anybody.”I said, “I don’t know. You were on the train!”He said, “That I know. I remember a few people pushed me into the train, and I was absolutely reluctant because I didn’t want to go anywhere. I was going to my home. I thought, ‘Perhaps the train is going toward my home.’ And then finally I found myself in the river! But in a way it is good because for at least two, three months I have not taken a bath. And the cold water in the river has also made my senses come back. I am a little conscious.”The drunkard will not get hurt because he does not know he is falling, so he does not become tense. He simply falls without becoming tense. It is the tenseness that gives you fractures. If you can fall in a relaxed way you will not be hurt. Drunkards know it, children know it – how did you manage to forget?Start from your bed, every night, and within a few days you will be able to catch the knack. Once you know the secret – nobody can teach it to you, you will have to search within your own body – then even in the day, at any time, you can relax. And to be a master of relaxation is one of the most beautiful experiences in the world. It is the beginning of a great journey toward spirituality because when you are completely in a let-go, you are no longer a body.Have you ever observed a simple fact: that you become aware of your body only when there is some tension, some strain, some pain? Have you ever become aware of your head without a headache? If your whole body is relaxed, you simply forget that you are a body. And in that forgetting of the body is the remembering of a new phenomenon that is hidden inside the body: your spiritual being.Let-go is the way to know that you are not the body, but something eternal, immortal. There is no need for any other religion in the world. Just the simple art of let-go will turn every human being into a religious person – because religion is not believing in God, religion is not believing in the pope, religion is not believing in any ideological system. Religion is knowing that which is eternal within you – satyam shivam sundaram – that which is the truth of your existence, that which is your divinity, and that which is your beauty, your grace, your splendor.The art of let-go is synonymous with experiencing the immaterial, the immeasurable: your authentic being.There are a few moments when, without being aware, you are in a let-go. For example, when you are really laughing – not just from the head but also from your belly, belly laughter – you are relaxed without your knowing, you are in a let-go. That’s why laughter is so health-giving. There is no other medicine which can help you more in attaining well-being. But the same conspirators who have stopped your awareness of let-go have stopped laughter. The whole of humanity has been turned into a serious, psychologically sick mass.Have you heard the giggle of a small child? His whole body participates in it. And when you laugh, it is very rare that your whole body laughs – it is just an intellectual, heady thing.My own understanding is that laughter is far more important than any prayer because prayer will not relax you. On the contrary, it may make you more tense. In laughter you suddenly forget all the conditioning, all the training, all seriousness. Suddenly you are out of it – just for a moment. Next time you laugh, be alert about how relaxed you are. And find out other times when you are relaxed.After making love you are relaxed, although the same company of conspirators does not allow you to be relaxed even after making love. The man simply turns to the other side and pretends to go to sleep, but deep down he is feeling guilty that he has committed the sin again. The woman is crying because she feels she has been used. And it is absolutely natural to feel so because she gets no nourishment from love. She never gets any orgasmic experience. Just fifty years ago there was not a single woman in the whole world who had experienced orgasm. In India it is extremely difficult to find a woman who knows what orgasm is.There cannot be a greater conspiracy against humanity. The man wants to finish the whole thing as quickly as possible. Inside him he is carrying The Bible, the Koran, Shrimad Bhagavadgita, and they are all against what he is doing. He is also convinced that he is doing something wrong. So naturally, the quicker it is over the better. And afterward he feels tremendously bad. How can he relax? He becomes more tense. And because he is so quick the woman never comes to the peak. By the time she starts, he is finished! Naturally, the woman starts believing that man is something more like an animal.In the churches, in the temples, you will find only women, old women particularly. And when the priest talks about sin, they know! It was absolutely sin because they had gained no pleasure out of it; they were used like any commodity – sexual objects. Otherwise, if you are free of guilt, free of all inhibitions, love will give you a tremendous experience of let-go.So you have to look into your life, for where you can find some natural experience of let-go. Listening to me you can experience a let-go. It happens every day, but you are not aware of it. I can see your faces changing, I can see your silences deepening. I can see when you laugh that your laughter is no longer chained and handcuffed, that your laughter is now your freedom. I can observe every day that you go on becoming more and more relaxed: as if you are not listening to a talk but listening to soft music, not to words but to my silences. If you cannot experience a let-go in my presence here, it will be very difficult for you to find it anywhere else.But there are moments when you are swimming… If you are really a swimmer, you can manage just to float, not to swim. And you will find tremendous let-go, just going with the river, not even making any movement against the current; becoming part of the current.You have to gather experiences of let-go from different sources, and soon you will have the whole secret in your hands. And it is one of the most fundamental things, particularly for my people. It will free you from workaholic conditioning.It does not mean that you will become lazy. On the contrary, the more relaxed you are, the more powerful you are, the more energy gathers when you are relaxed. Your work will start having a quality of creativity – not production. Whatever you will do, you will do with such totality, with such love, and you will have tremendous energy to do it.So let-go is not against work. In fact, let-go transforms work into a creative experience.A few jokes for you and for you all. Have a total laugh, which takes away all tensions from your face, from your body, from your stomach, and you will suddenly feel a totally different kind of energy within you. Otherwise most people are continuously feeling knots in their stomachs.Nathan Nussbaum went to consult a world-famous specialist about his medical problem.“How much do I owe you?” asked Nat.“My fee is five hundred dollars,” replied the quack.“Five hundred dollars? That’s impossible!” exclaimed Nathan.“In your case,” the specialist replied, “I suppose I could adjust my fee to three hundred dollars.”“Three hundred dollars for one visit? Ridiculous!” cried Nathan.“Well then,” asked the doctor, “can you afford one hundred and fifty dollars?”“Who has so much money?” Nathan moaned.“Listen,” said the quack, “just give me fifty dollars and be gone.”“I can give you twenty dollars,” said Nathan. “Take it or leave it.”“I don’t understand you,” said the specialist. “Why did you come to the most expensive doctor in New York?”“Listen, doctor,” explained Nathan, “when it comes to my health, nothing is too expensive.”Paddy’s friend, Joe, was taking a night course in adult education. “Who is Ronald Reagan?” he asked Paddy.“I don’t know,” Paddy replied.“He is the president of the United States,” said Joe. “Now, do you know who Margaret Thatcher is?”“No,” said Paddy.“She is the prime minister of Britain,” said Joe. “You see? You should go to night school like I do.”“Now I have a question for you,” said Paddy. “Do you know who Mick O’Sullivan is?”“I don’t,” admitted Joe.“Well,” said Paddy, “he is the guy who is screwing your wife while you are at night school.”Jesus and Moses are out one Sunday afternoon for a round of golf. Moses drives first and the ball goes straight down the fairway. Jesus gets ready and on his first drive slices the ball into some tall grass.“Holy Moses!” cries Jesus. But Moses, being a good fellow, offers Jesus the chance to place his ball on the fairway with no penalty. But Jesus is stubborn and turns down the offer. Moses then says, “Come on Jesus, you can’t take a shot in such tall grass.”“If Arnold Palmer can do it,” replies Jesus, “so can I.” Jesus then takes a smash and knocks the ball, “splash!” into a pond. Then Moses hits his second shot straight onto the green and returns to watch Jesus. Jesus is rolling up his jeans.“Jesus, please!” cries Moses, “I implore you to just place your ball on the fairway. It will take a miracle to make such a shot!”“If Arnold Palmer can do it,” replies Jesus, “so can I,” and he strides off across the top of the water.A gardener, who has been watching the scene, approaches Moses and says, “Just who does that guy think he is, Jesus Christ?”“No such luck,” replies Moses. “He thinks he is Arnold Palmer!”Osho,What is it to give and what is it to receive? I understand now that I am only just beginning to glimpse these. Receptiveness feels like dying to me, and automatically everything inside goes on red alert! Help! Existence seems so huge.Prem Dhiresha, I can understand what is troubling you. It is troubling almost everybody. It is good that you have recognized it because now, changing the situation is possible. Unfortunate are those who are suffering from the same problem but are not aware of it. Because of their unawareness there is no possibility of any transformation.You have taken courage to expose yourself. I am immensely glad about it. I want all my people to be courageous enough to expose themselves, howsoever ugly it seems.The conditioning is to go on hiding the ugly and go on pretending about the beautiful. That creates a schizophrenic situation. You go on showing yourself – what you are not; and you go on repressing yourself – what you are. Your life becomes a continuous civil war. You are fighting with yourself, and any fight with yourself is going to destroy you. Nobody can win.If my right hand and left hand start fighting, do you think any hand can win? I can manage sometimes to let the right hand feel good as a winner, and sometimes to change the situation and let the left hand feel it is the winner. But nobody can really be the winner because they are both my hands.Almost every human being is carrying a split personality. And the most significant fact is that he identifies himself with the false part and he denies his reality. In this situation you cannot hope to grow up as a spiritual being.What Dhiresha is saying is tremendously important to understand. She is asking, “What is it to give?” Have you ever asked yourself what it is to give? You think you are already giving too much to your children, to your wife, to your girlfriend, to the society, to the Rotary Club, to the Lions Club – you are giving so much. But the fact is, you don’t know what it is to give.Unless you give yourself you don’t give at all.You can give money, but you are not the money. Unless you give yourself, that means unless you give love, you don’t know what giving is.“…And what is it to receive?” Almost everybody thinks he knows what it is to receive. But Dhiresha is right in questioning and exposing herself that she does not know what it is to receive. Just as unless you give love you don’t know what it is to give, the same is true about receiving: unless you are capable of receiving love, you don’t know what it is to receive. You want to be loved, but you have not thought about it: are you capable of receiving love?There are so many hindrances which won’t allow you to receive it. The first is that you don’t have any self-respect; hence when love comes toward you, you don’t feel yourself adequate, enough to receive it. But you are in such a mess that you cannot even see a simple fact, that because you have never accepted yourself as you are, you have never loved yourself, how can you manage to receive somebody else’s love? You know you are not worthy of it, but you don’t want to accept and recognize this stupid idea that has been fed to you – that you are not worthy of it.So what do you do? You simply refuse love. And to refuse love you have to find excuses.The first and the most prominent excuse is, “It is not love. That’s why I cannot accept it.” You cannot believe that somebody can love you. When you yourself cannot love you, when you have not seen your beauty and your grace and your grandeur, how can you believe it when somebody says, “You are beautiful. I can see a depth in your eyes, unfathomable, of tremendous grace. I can see in your heart a rhythm, in tune with the universe.”You cannot believe all this; it is too much. You are accustomed to being condemned, you are accustomed to being punished, you are accustomed to being rejected, you are accustomed to not being accepted as you are. These things you can take very easily.Love will have a tremendous impact on you because you will have to go through a great transformation before you can receive it. First you have to accept yourself without any guilt. You are not a sinner as the Christians and other religions go on teaching you.You don’t see the stupidity of the whole thing. Some guy far away in the past, one Adam, disobeyed God – which is not much of a sin. In fact, he was absolutely right to disobey him. If anybody committed a sin it was God, by prohibiting his own son, his own daughter, from eating the fruit of knowledge and eating the fruit of eternal life. What kind of father? What kind of God? What kind of love?Love demands that God should have told Adam and Eve: “Before you eat anything else, these two trees have to be remembered. Eat as much from the Tree of Wisdom and eat as much from the Tree of Eternal Life as you like, so that you can also be in the same space of immortality in which I am.”That should be a simple thing for anyone who loves. But God prohibiting Adam from wisdom means he wants him to remain ignorant. Perhaps he is jealous, afraid, apprehensive that if Adam becomes wise, he will become equal to him. He wants to keep Adam in his ignorance so that he remains inferior. If he eats the fruit of eternal life, then he will be a god himself.This God who prevented Adam and Eve must have been very jealous, utterly ugly, inhuman, unloving. And if all these things are not sin, then what can sin be? But religions have been teaching you, Jews and Christians and Mohammedans, that you are still carrying the sin that Adam committed. There is a limit to stretching lies out for so long. Even if Adam had committed a sin, you cannot carry it. According to these religions, you were created by God but you are not carrying godliness. You are carrying Adam and Eve’s disobedience.This is the Western way to condemn you: you are a sinner. The Eastern way comes to the same conclusion but from different premises. They say everybody is loaded with immense sin and evil deeds, committed in millions of past lives. In fact, the burden of a Christian or a Jew or a Mohammedan is far less. You are only carrying the sin that Adam and Eve committed. And it must have become very diluted, centuries upon centuries. You are not a direct inheritor of Adam and Eve’s sin. It has passed through many millions of hands: by now the quantity must be almost homeopathic!But the Eastern concept is even more dangerous. You are not carrying somebody else’s sin. In the first place, you cannot carry somebody else’s sin. Your father commits a crime – you cannot be sent to jail. Even ordinary human common sense will say that if the father has committed the sin or the crime, he has to suffer. The son or the grandson cannot be sent to the gallows because the grandfather committed a murder.But the Eastern concept is much more dangerous and poisonous: it is your own sin that you are carrying, not that of Adam and Eve. And it is not a small quantity; it has been growing with each life! And you have lived millions of lives before this life, and each life you have committed so many sins. They have all accumulated on your chest. The burden is Himalayan; you are crushed under it.This is a strange strategy to destroy your dignity, to reduce you into a subhuman being. How can you love yourself? You can hate, but you cannot love. How can you think that somebody may be able to love you? It is better to reject it because sooner or later the person who is offering you his love is going to discover your reality, which is very ugly – just a long, long burden of sin. And then that person is going to reject you. To avoid rejection it is better to reject love. That’s why people don’t accept love.They desire it, they long for it. But when the moment comes and somebody is ready to shower you with love, you shrink back. Your shrinking has a deep psychology. You are afraid. “This is beautiful, but how long will it last? Sooner or later my reality will be revealed. It is better from the very beginning to be alert.”Love means intimacy, love means two persons coming closer, love means two bodies but one soul. You are afraid. Your soul, a sinner’s soul, burdened with the evil deeds of millions of lives… No, it is better to hide it; it is better not to come into a position where the person who wanted to love you rejects you. It is the fear of rejection that does not allow you to receive love.You cannot give love because nobody has ever told you that you are born a loving being. They have told you, “You are born in sin!” You cannot love and you cannot receive love either. This has diminished all possibilities of your growth.Dhiresha is saying, “I understand now that I am only just beginning to glimpse this.”You are fortunate because there are millions of people in the world who have become completely blind to their own conditionings, to the ugly burdens that the older generation has given them. It is hurting so much that it is better to forget all about it.But by forgetting it you cannot remove it. By forgetting a cancer you cannot operate upon it. By not recognizing it, keeping it in the dark, you are taking the greatest unnecessary risk against yourself. It will go on growing. It needs darkness; it needs you not to know about it. Sooner or later it will cover up your whole being, and nobody else will be responsible for it except you.So if, Dhiresha, you feel that you are glimpsing, a few windows are opening in you.“Receptiveness feels like dying to me.” Have you ever thought about it, that receptiveness feels like dying to you? But it is true. Receptiveness feels like dying because receptiveness looks like humiliation. To receive something, particularly love, means you are a beggar. Nobody wants to be on the receiving end because that makes you inferior to the giver.“Receptiveness feels like dying to me and automatically everything inside goes on red alert.” This red alert is implanted in you by the society that you have always respected, by the same people you thought were your well-wishers. And I don’t say that they are intentionally trying to harm you. They have been harmed by others and they are simply transferring whatsoever they have received from their parents, from their teachers, from the older generation.Each generation goes on giving its diseases to the new generation, and naturally the new generation becomes more and more burdened. You are the inheritor of all the superstitious, repressive concepts from the whole of history. What goes on red alert is not something that belongs to you, Dhiresha. It is your conditioning that goes on red alert. And your last sentence is just an effort to find a rationalization for it.That is also one of the great dangers everybody has to be aware of. Don’t rationalize. Go to the very roots of every problem, but don’t find excuses because if you find excuses you cannot remove those roots.The last statement of Dhiresha’s is a rationalization. Perhaps she has not been able to see its intrinsic quality. She says, “Help! Existence seems so huge.”Now she is thinking that she is afraid of receiving because existence is so huge, she is afraid of giving because existence is so huge. What is the point of giving your small love, just like a dewdrop, to the ocean? The ocean will never know about it; hence there is no point in giving and there is no point in receiving either. Because the ocean is so huge, you will be drowned in it. Hence it looks like death. But this is your rationalization.You don’t know anything about existence; you don’t know anything about yourself – which is the closest point of existence to you. Unless you start from your own being, you will never know existence. That is the starting point, and everything has to begin from the very beginning.Knowing yourself, you will know your existence. But the taste and the fragrance of your existence will give you courage to go a little deeper into the existence of others. If your own existence has made you so blissful, it is a natural longing to enter into other mysteries that surround you: human mysteries, mysteries of the animals, mysteries of the trees, mysteries of the stars…And once you have known your existence you are no longer afraid of death. Death is a fiction; it does not happen, it only appears. It appears from the outside.Have you ever seen your own death? You have always seen somebody else dying, but have you seen yourself dying? Nobody has; otherwise even this minimum of life would become impossible. You see every day that somebody is dying, but it is always somebody else; it is never you.The poet who wrote, “Never ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,” has a deeper understanding than you. He must have been a Christian because when somebody dies in a Christian village the church bell rings to inform everybody – people who have gone to their farms, to their orchards, people who have gone to work somewhere. The church bell reminds them: somebody has died. So they all have to come back to give the last farewell.But the poet has a tremendous insight when he says, “Never ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”But in your actual life it never rings for thee. One day it will ring, but then you will no longer be here to hear it. You never think of yourself at the threshold of death – and everybody is standing on the threshold. You always see somebody else dying; hence the experience is objective, not subjective.The other is not really dying, but only changing houses. His life force is moving into a new form, into a new plane. Only the body is left without life energy – but the body never had it.It is just like in a dark house when a candle is burning and the whole house is lighted. Even from the outside you can see the light: from the windows, from the doors – but the house does not have the light as an intrinsic part of it. The moment the candle finishes, the house will be in darkness. In fact it has always been in darkness; it was the candle that was the light.Your body is already dead. What gives you the impression that it is alive is your life force, your being, which radiates through the body, which fills the body with aliveness. All that you see when people die is that something has disappeared. You don’t know where it has gone – whether it has gone anywhere or simply ceased to be. So from the outside the fiction of death has been created.Those who have known themselves know, without any doubt, that they are eternal beings. They have died many times, yet they are alive.Death and birth are only small episodes in the great pilgrimage of the soul. The moment you come in contact with yourself, your fear of death will immediately disappear. And that opens a totally new sky to be explored. Once you know that there is no death, all fear disappears: the fear of the unknown, the fear of the dark; whatever the form, all fears disappear. For the first time you start being a real adventurer. You start moving into different mysteries that surround you. For the first time existence becomes your home.There is nothing to be feared: it is your mother; you are a part of it. It cannot drown you, it cannot destroy you. The more you know it, the more you will feel nourished; the more you know it, the more you will feel blessed; the more you know it, the more you will be. And then you can give love because you have it. And then you can receive love because there is no question of rejection.Prem Dhiresha, your question will be helpful to all my people. I thank you for your question and for your courage to expose yourself. This courage is needed by everyone because without this courage you cannot hope for any possibility of transformation – into a new world, into a new consciousness, into your authentic being, which is the door to ultimate reality and to ultimate benediction.

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I don't understand why enlightened masters are critical of each other. Are they not all working toward the higher good? Are they not different flavors of the same truth?The question you have asked is almost impossible to answer for the simple reason that you are not enlightened yet. You don’t know the ways of the enlightened ones. You don’t know their devices, you don’t know their methods; hence the misunderstanding.An ancient story may help you. In a great city there were two big sweet shops, and one day the owners of both the shops started fighting with each other for some reason. Naturally, they had no other way to fight, so they started throwing sweets at each other. And the whole city gathered and people were enjoying the sweets that were falling on the street.When two enlightened masters criticize each other it brings tremendous joy to those who can understand. Its taste is just unbelievable. They are not enemies: their fight is not of the ego. Their fight has a totally different context.They fight because they know one thing: that the goal is one, but the paths are many. And each master has to defend his path, knowing perfectly well that the other paths are as valid as his. But if he starts saying that all the paths are valid, he will not have the impact, the influence on his people. The journey is long and he needs absolute trust.He is not a philosopher propounding a system of philosophy. His basic concern is that your commitment to the path should be total. To make it total he condemns all other paths, he criticizes all other ways. It is just out of compassion for you. He knows the people on the other path will also reach, and he knows that out of compassion the master on the other path has to criticize him, has to criticize his ways.This is just a simple methodology to protect the disciple from influences that can take him astray. And the mind is very, very clever in going astray. If all the paths are valid, then what is the necessity of commitment? If all the paths are valid, then what is the necessity of being total?If all the paths are valid, then why not travel all the paths? Why not go on changing, enjoying different ways, different methods, different sceneries? Each path will pass through different lands: there are paths that will go through the desert, and there are paths that will go through the mountains, and there are paths that will pass through beautiful, flowering trees.But if you travel for some time on one path and then you change the path, you will have to start again from ABC. Whatever you have learned on one path is invalid on another path, and if you go on keeping it within you it is going to create tremendous confusion. You are already in a great mess. No master wants you to be more confused.Your mind always wants change. It does not know devotion; it loves fashions, its interest is always in some novelty. So it will go on moving from one path to another path, becoming more and more confused because each path has its own language, each path has its own unique methods, and each master is going to defend his path against all the other paths.If you move on many paths you will collect contradictory arguments; you will become so much divided you will not know what to do. And if it becomes your habit to change paths – because the new has a certain attraction for the mind – you will move a few feet on one path, a few feet on another path, but you will never complete the journey.One day Jalaluddin Rumi took all his students, disciples and devotees to a field. That was his way to teach them things of the beyond, through the examples of this world. He was not a theoretician; he was a very practical man. The disciples were thinking, “What could be the message, going to that faraway field and why can’t he say it here?”But when they reached the field, they understood that they were wrong and he was right. The farmer seemed to be an almost insane man. He was digging a well in the field – and he had already dug eight incomplete wells. He would go a few feet and then he would find that there was no water. Then he would start digging another well – and the same story continued. He had destroyed the whole field and he had not yet found water.The master, Jalaluddin Rumi, told his disciples, “Can you understand something? If this man had been total and had put his whole energy into only one well he would have reached the deepest sources of water long ago. But the way he is going he will destroy the whole field and he will never be able to make a single well. With so much effort he is simply destroying his own land, and getting more and more frustrated, disappointed. What kind of a desert has he purchased? It is not a desert, but one has to go deep to find the sources of water.”He turned to his disciples and asked them, “Are you going to follow this insane farmer? Sometimes on one path, sometimes on another path, sometimes listening to one, sometimes listening to another… You will collect much knowledge, but all that knowledge is simply junk because it is not going to give you the enlightenment that you were looking for. It is not going to lead you to the waters of eternal life.”Masters tremendously enjoy criticizing others. If the others are really enlightened, they also enjoy being criticized. They know that the purpose of both is the same: to protect the vagrant mind of the disciple, to keep him on one track. They have to deny that there is any other path anywhere that can lead you except this one.This is not said out of an egoistical attitude; this is said out of love. This is simply a device to make you committed, devoted. The journey is long, the night is long, and if you go astray you can go on round and round for eternity without finding anything.But in your unconscious state of mind, in your unenlightened space of being, the question seems to be relevant. You are asking: “I don’t understand why enlightened masters are critical of each other.”Don’t bother why they are critical about each other; you will understand it when you become enlightened. Before that it is none of your business! If enlightened people enjoy criticizing, they must have some reason of their own, and you are not in a state to understand.Gautam Buddha, one of the most famous enlightened persons in human history, had eight contemporaries who were enlightened in the same small state of Bihar in India. Even the name “Bihar” came about because eight enlightened masters were continuously wandering, finding their people, searching for those who could fall in tune with them. Bihar means wandering; the name has come from those eight enlightened people. And they were condemning each other like anything.Two out of the eight have left traditions that are still alive. One was Gautam Buddha; the other was Vardhaman Mahavira. Gautam Buddha has left the great tradition of Buddhism. Mahavira has left another tradition, Jainism. Both were in the same space, but immensely critical of each other – no agreement on any single point.It happened many times that they were in the same city. Once it happened that they were staying in the same caravanserai. Half of the serai was occupied by Gautam Buddha and his disciples and half of the serai was occupied by Mahavira and his disciples. Traditionally it has been asked why they did not meet. Neither the Buddhists have the answer, nor the Jainas have the answer. Both were enlightened; it would have been tremendously beautiful for them to have met.But I know why they did not meet. They did not want their disciples to be confused because Mahavira had a totally different approach: of utter austerity, of great discipline, of arduous effort. His way was the way of the warrior. Gautam Buddha’s approach was not that of a warrior, but that of an utterly relaxed human being. In comparison to Gautam Buddha’s path, Mahavira was an extremist – while Gautam Buddha insisted on the middle way: avoid all extremes. Just be exactly in the middle and you are right. Every extreme is dangerous because it excludes the other extreme, and the truth should not exclude anything. The truth should be inclusive of all. So just be in the middle and both the extremes become just like the two wings of a bird and the bird is just in the middle. And you can use both the extremes to fly across the sun to the farthest star.Mahavira’s standpoint was: unless you choose a single dimension of effort and unless you are totally devoted to it, without being worried that you are becoming an extremist – because only from the extreme point can you jump into the beyond.Now, both are right. But if a person who has never followed any path hears that both are right, he will be simply confused. Before your enlightenment you have to choose. After your enlightenment you are absolutely free to declare that all paths lead to the same place. But while you are leading people on the path you have to be consistently insistent that except this path everything else has to be completely forgotten.You have to be one-pointed, just like an arrow moving toward the target, not bothering about other arrows moving from different angles, different aspects. If the arrow starts thinking of different angles and different aspects it is not going to reach the target. It will be lost in utter confusion.People who have followed Mahavira have arrived and people who have followed Gautam Buddha have also arrived. If you ask me what brings them home, it is totality, absolute dedication and unconditional commitment. It does not matter which path you are on, these conditions will have to be fulfilled. In fact, the path does not matter at all: what matters are these three conditions. If you can fulfill these three conditions, even the wrong path will lead you to the right goal. And if you cannot fulfill these three conditions, the path may be absolutely right, but you are not going anywhere.And one thing more has to be understood. I was saying this about the enlightened ones, but there are many who are simply fakes. You cannot make the distinction.Just a few days ago I received a big letter from one of my very learned sannyasins, Swami Doctor Amrito. He has many Ph.D.’s and D.Litt.’s, and has written many books. He has written eight books about me. Now there is some man who talks as if he were enlightened, and many sannyasins in Holland are going to him. Seeing the situation my international secretary, Prem Hasya, has announced in all the newspapers that the man is a fake and sannyasins should not go there.Amrito himself was going there, so he was very much shocked because he was also thinking that the man seems to be enlightened. And without knowing him I know that man cannot be enlightened because I know his master. I don’t know that man; I know his master. He used to live in Mumbai and once I went just to have a look at him.He was known as Beedie Baba because he was continuously smoking beedies. Great enlightenment! Except that I could not see any indication of enlightenment. A great chain-smoker…This Dutchman became his follower. He was surrounded by a few uneducated, uncultured Indians because he used to smoke beedies and talk about the ultimate. In India every village has one or two idiots doing the same business. This is the country of idiots and enlightened ones!But for centuries the enlightened people have talked and the idiots have gathered all the beautiful words. It is very easy to talk about the ultimate, brahma, and quote a few statements from the scriptures. Every Indian is spiritual, but just on the surface. Deep down I have not seen a more materialistic people anywhere in the world: so much greed, so much ambition, so much repressed lust – and on the surface, a parrot-like spiritual talk.The Indian consists not of one person, but two. The real population of India is not nine hundred million, it is double that because each Indian is two Indians! One is the real, which is hidden in darkness, and one is the unreal, which goes on repeating beautiful phrases.The Western seekers don’t have any understanding about these parrots, so when they hear great words about which their tradition knows nothing… Their minds are conditioned by a very poor Christianity, mundane, ordinary, which does not have great philosophical flights.But in India you can talk to anybody and you will be surprised that everybody knows about reincarnation, and everybody is afraid of death. Strange! If you know about reincarnation, why should you be afraid of death? Indians are the most cowardly people in the whole world. And when I say this I have absolute evidence for it. There is no other country in the world that has been enslaved for two thousand years continuously.Why did India remain enslaved for two thousand years? A country that knows about reincarnation, which knows that the soul is eternal, which knows that you cannot be killed… But this knowledge is only parrot-knowledge; when the time comes, this knowledge is not of any help.Small tribes have ruled over this big, vast continent because nobody wants to get into trouble unnecessarily. And because for centuries this country has been hearing beautiful words, tremendous revelations, by and by everybody has become saturated with them. So they are capable of rationalizing everything, even slavery.For twenty centuries Indian scholars, Indian saints were even rationalizing the state of slavery: that it is a fire test of your patience, of your trust in God, of your nonviolence. And behind these beautiful words there was nothing but cowardliness – because Indians are afraid of being killed. That’s why they don’t kill others: it is dangerous. If you start killing others, you have to risk your life too. Indians have chosen not to fight and they have made a great philosophy out of it, of “nonviolence.” It is protective of their cowardly souls.They are the poorest people in the world. Half of the population is starving and any day in the coming thirteen years, five hundred million people are going to die in this country. But still they will go on rationalizing that it is fate, it is destiny; that everything is in the hands of God. Not even a leaf on a tree moves without God’s orders; everything happens according to God. If he wants us to be slaves, what can we do? If he wants us to be poor, what can we do? If he wants us to have more and more children, what can we do?The rich go on becoming richer and the poor go on producing more and more children.Even the poorest beggar knows more about metaphysics, about great ideologies. And when the Western man comes – he may be well educated but his education is in science, his education is in logic, his education makes him a great intellectual. But in the heart he remains very naive. Then any Beedie Baba, any idiot can make a great impact on him.This Dutch man lived for months together with Beedie Baba. He does not mention his well-known name, Beedie Baba; he mentions only his legal name, Nisarg Datta Maharaj. He has written many books on Nisarg Datta Maharaj; he has made Nisarg Datta famous all over the world. I have looked through those books – sheer nonsense!Now Amrito has written to me, “Osho, you have to tell Hasya to withdraw her statement because I have seen this Dutch man and to me he looks enlightened.”Enlightened people don’t look enlightened, they are enlightened! And poor Amrito, this is not for the first time… He gets caught anywhere; it has happened many times. And he is going round and round. He met another idiot’s follower, that idiot was Muktananda, and he had an American follower, Baba Free John. Now he has changed his name because now he declares himself enlightened and he has dropped any connection with Muktananda. Now he has become Da Free John.And Amrito went there and inquired of me, “Can I write a book on Da Free John?”I said, “Amrito, if your whole life is just to write about any idiot you come across, then don’t waste your time in Holland – come to India, and you will find so many people. Go on writing.”He has written about Sri Aurobindo, he has written about J. Krishnamurti, he has written about Da Free John, he has written about me, and now he is caught up with this other Dutch fellow.I said, “If this is going to be just your profession, to write, if you are some kind of spiritual journalist, then it is okay. But this is not going to lead you toward enlightenment.”He became very confused. It was bound to happen because when he read my statement about Sri Aurobindo – that he was not enlightened – Amrito was shocked. Now, what can I do about it? I know he was not enlightened and he was befooling people. He was declaring to people – and that was the only attraction because thousands of people around the world became interested in Sri Aurobindo for a single reason.He was telling people, “Up to now there have been enlightened people, self-realized people; they have attained immortality. But now I have come to bring a new experience to the world and that experience is physical immortality. Spiritual immortality many have attained; I have brought the whole alchemy of making you physically immortal.”Naturally all kinds of people who are afraid of death immediately became interested – and these kinds of statements have a beauty. Naturally, you cannot contradict Sri Aurobindo while he is alive; he is the proof that he is immortal. And you cannot contradict him when he dies – who to contradict!One day he died. And, one of my friends was also there in his ashram. “For three days,” he told me, “it was not declared to the world that Sri Aurobindo had died.” They kept it a secret because this would shatter all the following and the whole business.But how long can you keep a dead body? And in Sri Aurobindo’s ashram they were thinking and believing that he had gone deep into samadhi, that he would come back. But instead of coming back, his whole body started stinking. When the body started stinking, they became worried: “It seems the fellow is gone!”Then they declared to the world: “Sri Aurobindo has gone so deep in his samadhi that the doctors are saying he is dead.”So they have made a beautiful marble grave for him and they still believe… Many have left, but a few idiots are absolutely impossible – they are still waiting for that one day when he will knock from inside. He has gone in search of the alchemy for his disciples to become physically immortal.Then there was a woman who was really running the ashram. She was a film actress from France, and she had become attracted to the idea of immortality. Women will be very much attracted to it, particularly film actresses whose professional life is very short, just five to seven years. Before that they are extras, after that again they are extras. Naturally they want physical immortality, and if in the middle of youth they can become physically immortal, they can remain always on the top of the list of celebrities.This French actress became the mother of the ashram. After Sri Aurobindo died, and while she was alive, she managed the false and absolute lie of Aurobindo. She said, “He has gone in search of a few missing links. But I am here; I am immortal.” And by coincidence she lived for almost a hundred years, so naturally she created the idea in many that perhaps she was the chief disciple and Aurobindo had made her immortal. But one day she also popped off!And when I told Amrito, “Don’t get into all this nonsense,” he said, “I had never thought about all this.” But he goes on from one person to another person. Just curiosity; it seems to be an unquenchable curiosity.Not only do enlightened people criticize other enlightened people; they also have to criticize those who are not enlightened and are pretending to be so. It is an absolute necessity that the false should be exposed. That too is part of compassion, so you don’t get caught up with the false.And you are asking, “Are they not all working toward the higher good?” You cannot understand anything about the people who are enlightened. They are not working at all – neither for higher good nor for anything else. They are simply delighting and sharing their love, their light, their life – everything they have, their blissfulness and their peace and their silence. And this is simply a delight; it is not a work. They are not working for some higher good. They themselves are the highest good. There is no need for them to work for any higher good – that is Christian language.I have told you that the man who is enlightened is satyam shivam sundaram. He is the very truth itself, he is not working for any other truth. He is godliness himself; he is not working for any other good. And he is beauty himself; he is not trying to lead you toward some beauty.He is present. You can drink out of his well and be absolutely contented, right now, this very moment. A man of enlightenment is no longer interested in the future. There is no future as far as he is concerned; everything is always in the present. Existence is always in the present. His whole joy is not to lead you toward some good, but just to bring you back to yourself – because all that is beautiful, all that is good and all that is great is within you, not anywhere else.And finally you are asking, “Are they not different flavors of the same truth?”By the very nature of the situation you cannot ask the right question. And I am compelled to give you the right answer although you are asking the wrong question: every enlightened man has all the flavors of truth. It is not that one enlightened man has one flavor, another enlightened man has another flavor; that this one has a different perfume, that one has a different perfume.The moment you are enlightened truth blossoms in you with all the flavors together simultaneously. Every enlightened man is complete and perfect in himself. There is nothing missing in him.It will be good for you, rather than asking about enlightened people and worrying about what they are doing and why they are doing it… The simple way is to become enlightened and you will know!Between enlightenment and the state of unenlightenment, it is a very long distance call! And languages are different: something is said, something else is heard – and this has been going on for centuries, misunderstanding upon misunderstanding.The phone rang at the maternity hospital and an excited voice at the other end of the line said, “Send an ambulance quickly. My wife Maureen is about to have a baby!”“Calm down,” replied the nurse. “Tell me, is this her first baby?”“No,” said Paddy, “this is her husband speaking.”Paddy was very, very ill indeed, so Maureen sent for the doctor. After a brief examination the doctor announced that Paddy was dead.“I am not,” said Paddy from his bed.“Be quiet!” said Maureen. “Do you think you know better than the doctor?”“My wife, Bridget,” Sean confided to Paddy, “is an angel.”“You are lucky,” said Paddy, “my wife Maureen is still alive.”Hymie Goldberg was having his first session with the psychoanalyst.“Do you cheat on your wife?” asked the shrink.“My God,” said Hymie, “who else could I cheat on?”A Californian psychiatrist was driving along in his car, when he saw a man lying on the sidewalk. He stopped his car and got out. It turned out the man had been mugged and left for dead.“Quick,” said the shrink, “tell me who did this to you; he needs help immediately!”An Indian businessman who had made millions after a childhood of poverty was on his deathbed giving advice to his son.“Listen, son,” he said, “I owe my success to two principles: honesty and wisdom. Honesty is if you promise to deliver some goods, no matter what happens, even if it means bankruptcy, deliver!”“I will try to remember, father,” replied the boy. “And what about wisdom?”“Wisdom is simple, my boy,” continued the father. “Never make any promises.”From the place where you are, don’t be worried about the actions of people who are existing on a totally different plane. If you really want to understand them, reach to the same consciousness and you will understand without fail.I have been acquainted with almost all the enlightened people who have lived on the earth. My whole life I have been searching in every nook and corner of the earth, and a few things have emerged out of my research into the enlightened being.They are absolutely perfect in all dimensions possible, with all flavors. And it is a sheer necessity for them to criticize others, knowing perfectly well that the people they are criticizing will understand their compassion. They may have moved through different paths; they have moved. It is almost like a mountain: you can move from different directions, you can choose different pathways, you will have different experiences on the way, but when you reach to the top it is the same experience, absolutely the same sweetness, the same fragrance.But if you belong to the category of the arhats you may remain silent, without criticizing anybody because you don’t have any followers.There are two categories of people who have achieved enlightenment; one is called the arhat. The literal meaning of the word is one who has conquered. The second is the bodhisattva; the literal meaning is one who has awakened. The ultimate experience is the same, whether you are an arhat or a bodhisattva. But there are differences in their actions and in their words.Therefore arhats have remained silent. Naturally there is no question of criticizing anybody. They have never asserted any truth, they have never tried to manifest any of their experience. They have never bothered that somebody may be there who can be helped. They never become saviors of anybody. They have a very small boat; only one can sit in their small boat, and they go to the further shore alone. And because they don’t have disciples, there is no question of any criticism. They are the silent ones.But the bodhisattvas are people of immense compassion. The arhats in comparison look a little hard, unconcerned about others who are struggling in darkness and death. Bodhisattvas are tremendously interested in giving you a hand and pulling you up from your ditch and putting you on the right path. And of course the right path is the path that they have followed; that is the only path they know exactly. They don’t know about any other path because they have never followed it. And it is absolutely correct to make it completely clear to the disciple that this is the only path, so he does not go astray.By the time the arhats and the bodhisattvas reach to the peak, they experience the same light and the same bliss and the same ecstasy. But the arhats still remain silent. Bodhisattvas still remain concerned about people who have been left behind on the path.There is a beautiful story about Gautam Buddha, who is a bodhisattva. When he reached the gate of paradise there was a great celebration because never before had such a great enlightened being reached paradise. He has a beauty of his own, a grace that is incomparable, and a compassion that is infinite.The doors were wide open; there was celebration in paradise. But the story is that Gautam Buddha refused to enter paradise, on the grounds that he had left many on the way. He would stand at the gate until the last human being had entered the gate. He would be ultimately the last.The story says that he is still standing outside the gate, waiting for his disciples and devotees whom he has promised. He cannot go against his promise.Gautam Buddha criticized the seers of the Vedas, he criticized the seers of the Upanishads, he criticized Mahavira, he criticized everybody that he could find – Krishna, Rama, all the Hindu gods. For forty-two years continuously he was criticizing every old scripture, every old prophet, every old savior – but he is not an enemy of anyone. He was criticizing all those people so that you can be unconditioned, so that you can be freed from the clinging with the past – which cannot help you.When a living enlightened being is present, he cannot allow you to remain clinging with the dead, which can only be a weight on your heart but cannot become wings for your freedom.It needs tremendous insight and meditative understanding to have a little glimpse of the world of the enlightened person. I have criticized many. Only a few of them were enlightened; most of them were simply frauds. The frauds have to be absolutely exposed to humanity.Even those who were enlightened have become only a tradition, a convention, a dead belief. You have to be freed from their grip too because they cannot help you, they can only hinder your path. They can become your chains, but they cannot become your freedom.I can become your freedom. I am your freedom.When I am gone I hope there may still be courageous people in the world to criticize me, so that I don’t become a hindrance on anybody’s path. And those who will criticize me will not be my enemies; neither am I the enemy of those whom I have criticized. The working of the enlightened masters just has to be understood.You should remember only one word, and that is compassion – compassion for you, compassion for all those who are still not centered in their being, who are still far away from themselves, who have to be called back home.

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,How does watching lead to no-mind? I am more and more able to watch my body, my thoughts and feelings and this feels beautiful. But moments of no thoughts are few and far between. When I hear you saying, “Meditation is witnessing,” I feel I understand. But when you talk about no-mind, it doesn't sound easy at all. Would you please comment?Meditation covers a very long pilgrimage. When I say, “meditation is witnessing,” it is the beginning of meditation. And when I say, “Meditation is no-mind,” it is the completion of the pilgrimage. Witnessing is the beginning, and no-mind is the fulfillment. Witnessing is the method to reach to no-mind. Naturally you will feel witnessing is easier. It is close to you.But witnessing is only like a seed, and then comes the long waiting period. Not only waiting, but trusting that this seed is going to sprout, that it is going to become a bush; that one day the spring will come and the bush will have flowers. No-mind is the last stage of flowering.Sowing the seeds is of course very easy; it is in your hands. But bringing forth the flowers is beyond you. You can prepare the whole ground, but the flowers will come on their own accord; you cannot manage to force them to come. The spring is beyond your reach – but if your preparation is perfect, spring comes; that is absolutely guaranteed.The way you are moving is perfectly good. Witnessing is the path and you are starting to feel, once in a while, a thought-less moment. These are glimpses of no-mind, but just for a moment.Remember one fundamental law: that which can exist just for a moment can also become eternal because you are given not two moments together, but always one moment. And if you can transform one moment into a thought-less state, you are learning the secret. Then there is no hindrance to changing the second moment, which will also come alone with the same potential and the same capacity.If you know the secret you have the master key, which can open every moment into a glimpse of no-mind. No-mind is the final stage: when mind disappears forever and the thoughtless gap becomes your intrinsic reality. If these few glimpses are coming, they show you are on the right path and you are using the right method.But don’t be impatient. Existence needs immense patience. The ultimate mysteries are opened only to those who have immense patience.I am reminded… In old Tibet it was customary, respectful, that every family should contribute to the great experiment of expanding consciousness. So the first child of each family was given to the monasteries to be trained in meditation. Perhaps no country has done such a vast experiment in consciousness.The destruction of Tibet at the hands of communist China is one of the greatest calamities that could have happened to humanity. It is not only a question of a small country; it is a question of a great experiment that was going on for centuries in Tibet. The first child was given to the monasteries when he was very small – five, or at the most six, years old. I am reminded of one incident: there would have been millions like it…A six-year-old child… Tibet knew that children can learn witnessing better than grown-ups. The grown-ups are already utterly spoiled. The child is innocent and as yet the slate of his mind is empty. To teach him emptiness is absolutely easy. But the entrance of a child into a monastery was very difficult, particularly for a small child. I am telling you about only one incident but there would have been hundreds of incidents happening like this. It is bound to be so.A small child, six years old, is leaving. His mother is crying because life in a monastery for a small child is going to be so arduous. The father tells the child, “Don’t look back! It is a question of our family’s respectability. In the whole history of our family a child has never looked back – not even once. Whatever the entrance test for the monastery is, even if your life is at risk, don’t look back. Don’t think of me or your mother and her tears.“We are sending you for the ultimate experiment in human consciousness with great joy, even though the separation is painful. But we know you will pass through all the tests. You are our blood, and of course you will keep the dignity of your family.”The small child rides on the horse with a servant riding on another horse. A tremendous desire arises in him when the road turns, just to have a look again back to the family house, to its garden. His father must be standing there, his mother must be crying, but he remembers that his father has said, “Don’t look back.”And he does not look back. With tears in his eyes, he turns with the road. Now he cannot see his house anymore and one never knows how long it will take – perhaps years and years – until he will be able to see his father and mother and his family again.He reaches the monastery. At the gate of the monastery the abbot meets him, receives him gracefully, as if he is a grown-up, bows down to him as he bows down to the abbot. And the abbot says, “Your first test will be to sit outside the gate with closed eyes, unmoving, unless you are called in.”The small child sits at the gate, outside the gate with closed eyes. Hours pass, and he cannot even move. There are flies sitting on his face, but he cannot remove them. It is a question of the dignity that the abbot has shown to him. He does not think any more like a child; so respected, he has to fulfill his family’s longing, the abbot’s expectations.The whole day passes, and even other monks in the monastery start feeling sorry for the child. Hungry, thirsty – he is simply waiting. They start feeling that the child may be small, but he has great courage and guts.Finally, by the time the sun is setting and the whole day has passed, the abbot comes and takes the child in. He says, “You have passed the first test, but there are many more peaks ahead. I respect your patience, being such a small child. You remained unmoving, you did not open your eyes. You did not lose courage, you trusted that whenever the time is right you will be called in.”And then years of training in witnessing: the child was only allowed to see his parents again after perhaps ten years, twenty years had elapsed. But the criterion was that until he experienced no-mind, he could not be allowed to see his parents, his family. Once he achieves no-mind, then he can move back into the world. Then there is no problem.Once a man is in a state of no-mind, nothing can distract him from his being. There is no power bigger than the power of no-mind. No harm can be done to such a person. No attachment, no greed, no jealousy, no anger – nothing can arise in him. No-mind is an absolutely pure sky without any clouds.You say, “How does watching lead to no-mind?”There is an intrinsic law: thoughts don’t have their own life. They are parasites; they live on your identifying with them. When you say, “I am angry,” you are pouring life energy into anger because you are getting identified with anger.But when you say, “I am watching anger flashing on the screen of the mind within me,” you are not giving any life, any juice, any energy to anger anymore. You will be able to see that because you are not identified the anger is absolutely impotent, has no impact on you, does not change you, does not affect you. It is absolutely hollow and dead. It will pass on and it will leave the sky clean, the screen of the mind empty.Slowly, slowly you start getting out of your thoughts. That’s the whole process of witnessing and watching. George Gurdjieff used to call it “non-identification.” In other words you are no longer identifying with your thoughts. You are simply standing aloof and away – indifferent, as if they might be anybody’s thoughts. You have broken your connections with them. Only then can you watch them.Watching needs a certain distance. If you are identified there is no distance, they are too close. It is as if you are putting the mirror too close to your eyes: you cannot see your face. A certain distance is needed. Only then can you see your face in the mirror.If thoughts are too close to you, you cannot watch. You become impressed and colored by your thoughts. Anger makes you angry, greed makes you greedy, lust makes you lustful because there is no distance at all. They are so close that you are bound to think that you and your thoughts are one.Watching destroys this oneness and creates a separation. The more you watch, the bigger is the distance. The bigger the distance, the less energy your thoughts are getting from you. And they don’t have any other source of energy. Soon they start dying, disappearing. In these disappearing moments you will have the first glimpses of no-mind.That is what you are experiencing. You say: “I am more and more able to watch my body, my thoughts and feelings, and this feels beautiful.” This is just the beginning. Even the beginning is immensely beautiful – just to be on the right path, even without taking a single step, will give you immense joy for no reason at all.And once you start moving on the right path, your blissfulness, your beautiful experiences are going to become more and more deep, more and more wide, with new nuances, with new flavors, with new fragrances.You say, “But moments of no thoughts are few and far between.” It is a great achievement because people don’t know even a single gap. Their thoughts are always in a rush hour: thoughts upon thoughts, bumper-to-bumper – the line continues, whether they are awake or asleep. What you call your dreams are nothing but thoughts in the form of pictures because the unconscious mind does not know alphabetical languages. There is no school, no training institute that teaches the unconscious language.The unconscious is very primitive; it is just like a small child. Have you looked at the books of your small children? If you want to teach the child, you have to make a big picture first. So in children’s books you will see pictures, colorful pictures, with very little writing. The child is more interested in the pictures. He is primitive, he understands the language of pictures.Slowly, slowly you make the pictures and the language associate. Whenever he sees the mango he knows, “it is a mango,” and he starts learning that underneath the picture of the mango there is a certain word describing it. His interest is in the mango, but the word mango slowly becomes associated. As the child grows, the pictures will become smaller and there will be more language. By the time he enters university, the pictures will have disappeared from the book; only language will remain.By the way, this reminds me to tell you that television has brought humanity back to a primitive stage because people are again looking at pictures. There is a danger in the future: it is already apparent that people have stopped reading great literature. Who bothers to read, when you can see the film on the TV? This is a dangerous phenomenon because there are things that cannot be reproduced in pictures. Great literature can be only partially reproduced in pictures. The danger is that people will slowly start forgetting language and its beauty and magic, and they will again become primitives, watching the television.Now the average American is watching television for seven and a half hours every day. This is going to destroy something that we have achieved with great difficulty. Now, this man who is watching television for seven and a half hours per day – you cannot expect him to read Shakespeare, Kalidas, Rabindranath Tagore, Herman Hesse or Martin Buber or Jean Paul Sartre. The greater the literature, the less the possibility of putting it into pictures.Pictures are colorful, exciting, easy, but they are no comparison to language. The future has to be protected from many things. Computers can destroy people’s memory systems because there will be no need. You can keep a small computer the size of a cigarette packet in your pocket: it contains everything that you will ever need to know. Now there is no need to have your own memory. Just push a button and the computer is ready to give you any information you need.The computer can destroy the whole memory system of humanity that has been developed for centuries with great difficulty. Television can take away all great literature, and the possibility of people like Shelley or Byron being born again in the world. These are great inventions, but nobody has looked at the implications. They will reduce the whole of humanity into a retarded state.What you are feeling is a great indication that you are on the right path. It is always a question for the seeker whether he is moving in the right direction or not. There is no security, no insurance, no guarantee. All the dimensions are open: how are you going to choose the right one?These are the ways and the criteria of how one has to choose. If you move on any path – any methodology – and it brings you joy, more sensitivity, more watchfulness, and gives a feeling of immense well-being, this is the only criterion that you are going on the right path. If you become more miserable, more angry, more of an egoist, more greedy, more lustful, those are the indications you are moving on a wrong path.On the right path your blissfulness is going to grow more and more every day, and your experiences of beautiful feelings will become tremendously psychedelic, more colorful – colors that you have never seen in the world, fragrances that you have never experienced in the world. Then you can walk on the path without any fear that you can go wrong.These inner experiences will always keep you on the right path. Just remember that if they are growing, that means you are moving. Now you have only a few moments of thoughtlessness. It is not a simple attainment; it is a great achievement because in their whole lives people do not know even a single moment when there is no thought. These gaps will grow.As you become more and more centered, more and more watchful, these gaps will start growing bigger. And if you go on moving without looking back, without going astray, if you keep going straight the day is not far away when you will feel for the first time that the gaps have become so big that hours pass and not even a single thought arises. Now you are having bigger experiences of no-mind.The ultimate achievement is when twenty-four hours a day you are surrounded with no-mind.This does not mean that you cannot use your mind. That is a fallacy propounded by those who know nothing about no-mind. No-mind does not mean that you cannot use the mind; it simply means that the mind cannot use you.No-mind does not mean that the mind is destroyed. No-mind simply means that the mind is put aside. You can bring it into action any moment you need to communicate with the world. It will be your servant. Right now it is your master. Even when you are sitting alone it goes on, yakkety-yak, yakkety-yak – and you cannot do anything, you are so utterly helpless.No-mind simply means that the mind has been put in its right place. As a servant it is a great instrument. As a master it is very unfortunate, it is dangerous, it will destroy your whole life.Mind is only a medium for when you want to communicate with others. But when you are alone, there is no need of the mind. So whenever you want to use it, you can use it.And remember one thing more: when the mind remains silent for hours, it becomes fresh, young, more creative, more sensitive, rejuvenated through rest.Ordinary people’s minds start somewhere around three or four years of age, and then they go on continuing for seventy years, eighty years without any holiday. Naturally they cannot be very creative. They are utterly tired – and tired with rubbish. Millions of people in the world live without any creativity. Creativity is one of the greatest blissful experiences. But their minds are so tired, they are not in a state of overflowing energy.The man of no-mind keeps the mind in rest, full of energy, immensely sensitive, ready to jump into action the moment it is ordered. It is not a coincidence that the words of the people who have experienced no-mind, start having a magic of their own. When they use their mind, it has a charisma, it has a magnetic force, it has tremendous spontaneity, and the freshness of the dewdrops in the early morning before the sun rises. And the mind is nature’s greatest, evolved medium of expression and creativity.So the man of meditation – or in other words, the man of no-mind – changes even his prose into poetry. Without any effort, his words become so full of authority that they don’t need any arguments. They become their own arguments. The force that they carry becomes a self-evident truth. There is no need for any other support from logic or from scriptures. The words of a man of no-mind have an intrinsic certainty about them. If you are ready to receive and listen, you will feel it in your heart – the self-evident truth.Look down the ages: Gautam Buddha has never been contradicted by any of his disciples; neither has Mahavira, nor Moses, nor Jesus. There is something in their very words, in their very presence that convinces you. Without any effort to convert you, you are converted. None of the great masters have been missionaries; they have never tried to convert anyone, but they have converted millions.It is a miracle – but the miracle consists of a rested mind, of a mind that is always full of energy and is used only once in a while.When I speak to you, I have to use the mind. When I am sitting in my room almost the whole day, I forget all about the mind. I am just a pure silence, and meanwhile the mind is resting. When I speak to you, those are the only moments when I use the mind. When I am alone, I am utterly alone, and there is no need to use the mind.You say: “When I hear you say, ‘Meditation is witnessing,’ I feel I understand. But when you talk about no-mind, it doesn’t sound easy at all.”How can it sound easy? It is your future possibility. You have started meditation: it may be in the beginning stages but you have a certain experience of it that makes you understand me. But if you can understand meditation, don’t be worried at all.Meditation surely leads to no-mind, just as every river moves toward the ocean without any maps, without any guides. Every river, without exception, finally reaches the ocean. Every meditation, without exception, finally reaches the state of no-mind.But naturally, when the Ganges is in the Himalayas wandering in the mountains and in the valleys, it has no idea what the ocean is, it cannot conceive of the existence of the ocean. But it is moving toward the ocean because water has the intrinsic capacity of always finding the lowest place, and the oceans are the lowest place. So rivers are born on the peaks of the Himalayas and start moving immediately toward lower spaces, and finally they are bound to find the ocean.Just the reverse is the process of meditation. It moves upward to higher peaks, and the ultimate peak is no-mind. No-mind is a simple word, but it exactly means enlightenment, liberation, freedom from all bondage, the experience of deathlessness and immortality.Those are big words and I don’t want you to be frightened, so I use a simple word, no-mind. You know the mind, you can conceive of a state when this mind will be non-functioning.Once this mind is non-functioning, you become part of the mind of the cosmos, the universal mind. When you are part of the universal mind your individual mind functions as a beautiful servant. It has recognized the master, and it brings news from the universal mind to those who are still chained by the individual mind.In fact when I am speaking to you, it is the universe using me. My words are not my words; they belong to the universal truth. That is their power, that is their charisma, that is their magic.Osho,Are there real differences in different races, or is it just superstition?There are differences not only between the races, but even in the individuals. Each individual has a uniqueness about himself. There is no other individual exactly like you. You are alone.And this is the dignity of the individual – that he is not a replica, not a repetition, not a carbon copy. What is true about individuals is in a different way true about races. Because each race of humanity has passed through a different terrain, a different history, it has grown different psychologies, different minds. It is absolutely natural that the Eskimos will certainly be different from the people who have not even known how it feels when snow is falling.Eskimos have eleven names for snow. No other language has eleven names for snow because only Eskimos know the slight differences which make the eleven names, which are not synonymous. But to know those slight and subtle differences you have to be in the same geography, in the same climate, and you have to pass through the same experiences.Different races have passed through different lands, through different experiences, and naturally they have grown certain characteristics. According to me, that makes the earth more beautiful because it gives variety.But your question is: “Are there real differences…or is it just superstition?”There are real differences – and there are many more which are only superstitions, which are not real differences. Naturally, a man born in Tibet will have different superstitions from a man born in India. For example: heaven, according to the Indian tradition, is a very cool place, almost air-conditioned; cool breezes all day long, never hot. But Eskimos and Tibetans will not agree with this heaven! They are tired of the cold.In fact, in Tibet for centuries there has been a strange tradition that whenever a child is born, he is immediately dipped into ice-cold water nine times – a newborn child! Nine children out of ten die, but the reasoning behind such an act is out of a deep understanding of Tibet. If a child is not strong enough to survive those nine dips in the ice-cold water it is better for him to die because he will remain sick, unhealthy, miserable his whole life.It looks cruel because it is killing almost nine children out of ten. But it is out of compassion, not out of cruelty. They know perfectly well what is ahead. If the child is not capable, has not the stamina to face Tibetan ice – eternal ice that has never melted all year round – if he is weak from the very beginning, his whole life will be miserable. It is better to die before suffering a life of unnecessary pain and misery. And the child who survives certainly proves he is capable of living in the eternal snows, perfectly healthy.Tibetans are very healthy people, but the reason is that the unhealthy ones have been canceled from the very beginning. Their heaven is warm and remains warm all the year round. Snow never falls in their heaven; it falls in their hell. Their hell is utterly cold, far worse than Tibet.These are all superstitions: they also make differences.One of my friends, a professor of Sanskrit, wanted to go to Tibet. He was doing some research on a few Sanskrit scriptures that had disappeared from India. But their translations were in existence in Tibet: he wanted to translate them back into Sanskrit.Those were very important scriptures, particularly concerned with Gautam Buddha. Perhaps Hindus burned those scriptures in India, but because Tibet became Buddhist, before they were destroyed they were translated into Tibetan. They exist in Chinese, they exist in Japanese; only in Indian languages do they not exist – and Buddha was born in this land, he was speaking the language of the people of this land.So this man’s research was really very significant in bringing Buddha back to his own land. But he was a high-caste brahmin, and he had learned Tibetan with great effort. Of course Sanskrit was his family language. He belonged to a very learned family; they used Sanskrit in their family instead of any other language of the people, so he was perfectly capable of translating from Tibetan into Sanskrit.But I told him, “I expect to see you back within three days.”He said, “What are you saying? It will take at least three years.”I said, “Forget all about it! I know you – and I know something about Tibet.”He said, “I don’t understand, you always make strange statements.”He went to Tibet. He was a high-caste brahmin with all the superstitions of the brahmins. The brahmin has to take a cold bath in the river before sunrise; then he has to do his religious worship – and only after that can he take his breakfast. As he reached Tibet, he remembered me. My statement was not wrong. He took only one bath and that was enough. He forgot all about translations.By the third day I had to receive him at the airport. I said, “What do you think about my statement?”He said, “I would have been killed in three years. Just one day was enough. Even now I am still shivering; the coldness has entered into my bones. Without taking a bath before sunrise I cannot even take my breakfast. So the choice was either to live without food or to have a cold bath before sunrise.”I said, “That’s why I had said what I said. You are a fanatic brahmin; you will not drop your stupid idea. It is perfectly good in India, in fact the best time to take a bath is before the sun rises; only then is it cool. As the sun rises things become hotter. The moments before sunrise are the most beautiful in India. But that is not the case with Tibet.”Now, the Dalai Lama, the head of the state of Tibet and also the head of the Buddhist church of Tibet, has escaped from Tibet. He lives in India and thousands of Tibetans have come with him.I was giving a meditation camp in Bodhgaya, where Gautam Buddha became enlightened, and thousands of Tibetans had come just to pay their respects to Gautam Buddha and the place and the tree under which he became enlightened. Hearing that I was also staying just near the place where Gautam Buddha became enlightened, and that hundreds of my people were meditating there, they became curious. They came to see me.I have never felt so miserable in my life because they stink and I am allergic to smells. They are the smelliest fellows in the whole world! Their holy scripture says: “At least one bath every year is absolutely necessary.” They are covered with the dust of Indian roads, perspiring – but they will not take a bath. Only one bath per year is allowed. They use the same clothes they were using in Tibet, many layers of clothes. It is very difficult to make a Tibetan naked: you take off one layer of clothes, another layer; you take that off and you find another layer. And each layer becomes dirtier!I had to tell my people, “Prevent these people from coming to me. They have been living for years now in India, but they have not changed their superstition.”A more intelligent humanity will not follow superstitions, will not follow what is right in one place but may not be right in another place. Intelligence demands that you respond to the situation in which you are. So there are superstitious differences, and those differences make humanity not beautiful, they make humanity stupid.I believe in the old saying: When in Rome, act like the Romans – order spaghetti. That is why I have refused my sannyasins… They have been continuously trying to persuade me to come to Italy and I am saying, “No. Either spaghetti or me!” And this is not a superstition!One of my secretaries was a beautiful Italian woman, well educated. She was a professor in the university of Rome. She had all the degrees in philosophy, post graduation, Ph.D., D.Litt., and she was the first Italian to come into contact with me. She destroyed my interest in spaghetti because one day she prepared spaghetti for me.That woman never used to take a bath, I don’t think she had ever taken one in her whole life. Her face had layers of powder, centuries old! She went on putting on more powder but she would not take a bath. I used to tell her to sit a little far away.Very lovingly she brought the spaghetti. I could not refuse – it looked too unmannerly – so I said to her, “Leave it on my dining table, but you leave the room.”She said, “I would just like to see you eating spaghetti.”I said, “Please leave the room, and then I will take care of the spaghetti.” And as I went close to my dining table, the spaghetti smelled exactly like the woman smelled. I had to throw it down the toilet. Even after twenty years, whenever I remember I start smelling the spaghetti. I don’t know the real smell of spaghetti, but I don’t want to know.But there are beautiful differences that should be protected. Humanity should remain a beautiful garden with all kinds of flowers. Even the wild flowers should be protected. They all make life richer, more beautiful, more adventurous.The people that run international car shows have discovered that the nationality of the visitors can be determined by the way in which the visitors approach a car. If a visitor opens the hood to look at the engine, he is a German. If he is interested in the style and the lines of a car, he is French. If he tries the horn, he is Italian. And if he checks the size and the price tag, he is a Jew.“Man, am I scared!” confided Paddy to Seamus, looking furtively around the pub. “I just got a card from a guy saying that he would shoot me if I did not stay away from his wife.”“Well, stay away from his wife,” advised Seamus, “and you have got no problem.”“How can I?” moaned Paddy, “he did not sign his name.”Hymie Goldberg was telling his friends about his sailing holiday and how his boat had capsized in rough weather, throwing him into the water.“I had abandoned all hope,” said Hymie, “and as I sank for the third time, my past lives seemed to rise up before me in a series of grim, realistic pictures.”A murmur of sympathy came from the group listening. But before Hymie could continue, his friend Moishe Finkelstein spoke up sharply saying, “And did you happen to notice a picture of me lending you five dollars late in 1960?”The sun never sets on the British Empire because God would not trust an Englishman in the dark.Nathan Nussbaum from Israel is visiting Paris. He goes to a brothel and insists on the services of a girl called Gloria. Gloria is unavailable, but when Nathan shows a thousand-dollar bill, she is brought to him and they spend the night together.On the following two nights again a thousand-dollar bill changes hands and Nathan and Gloria spend the nights in passion.Finally Gloria asks why she is receiving such generous attention.“Well,” says Nathan, “you see, I am from Israel.”“Why, so am I,” exclaims Gloria.“Yes, I know,” replies Nathan. “It happens that your grandmother lives in the same building as my parents and when she heard I was going to Paris, she asked me to give you the three thousand dollars you asked for.”

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why am I scared to accept myself the way I am?Everybody is in the same situation. Everybody is scared to accept himself the way he is. This is how all the past centuries of mankind have cultivated, conditioned every child, every human being.The strategy is simple but very dangerous. The strategy is to condemn you and to give you ideals so that you are always trying to become someone else. The Christian is trying to become a Jesus, the Buddhist is trying to become a Buddha. To distract you from yourself seems so clever a device that perhaps the people who have been doing it are themselves unaware of it.What Jesus said on the cross – his last words to humanity – is immensely significant in many ways, particularly in this context. He prayed to God, “Father, forgive these people because they know not what they are doing.”This is applicable to every father and to every mother, to every teacher and every priest and every moralist; to the people who manage culture, society, civilization, and who try to mold every individual in a certain way. Perhaps they also don’t know what they are doing. Perhaps they think they are doing everything for your good. I don’t suspect their intentions, but I certainly want you to be aware that they are ignorant, they are unconscious people.A small child is born into the hands of an unconscious society. And the unconscious society starts molding the child according to its own ideals, forgetting the one thing which is the most fundamental: that the child has a potential of his own. He has to grow, not into a Jesus or into a Krishna or into a Buddha. He has to grow to be himself.If he misses growing into being himself he will remain utterly miserable his whole life. His life will become just a hell and a curse, and he will not know what has gone wrong. He has been put in the wrong direction from the very beginning.And he thinks the people who have put him in the wrong direction love him, are his benefactors. Actually they are his greatest enemies. The parents, the teachers, the priests and the leaders of the society are the greatest enemies of every individual who has been born on the earth up to now. Without being aware, they are distracting you from yourself.And to distract you, you have to be absolutely conditioned about one thing: that you are unworthy, undeserving, of no use at all as you are. Of course you can become worthy of respect, dignity, if you follow the rules and regulations given to you by others. If you are able to manage to be a hypocrite you will be a prestigious citizen of the society.But if you insist on being sincere, honest, authentic, yourself, you will be condemned by everybody. And it needs tremendous courage to be condemned by everybody. It needs a man with a steel spine to stand on his own and declare: “I am not going to be anybody else but myself. Good or bad, acceptable or not acceptable, prestigious or not prestigious, one thing is certain – that I can be only myself and nobody else.”This needs a tremendously revolutionary approach toward life. This is the basic revolt that each individual needs if he wants ever to be out of the vicious circle of misery.You are asking me: “Why am I scared to accept myself the way I am?” Because you have not been accepted by anyone the way you are. They have created the fear and the apprehension that if you accept yourself you will be rejected by everybody.This is an absolute condition of every society and every culture that has existed up to now: that either you accept yourself and be rejected by all, or you reject yourself and gain the respect and honor of your whole society and culture. The choice is really very difficult.Obviously the majority is going to choose respectability. But with respectability come all kinds of anxieties, anguishes; a meaninglessness, a desert-like life where nothing grows, where nothing is green, where no flower ever blossoms, where you will walk and walk and walk and you will never even find an oasis.I am reminded of Leo Tolstoy. Just a few days ago in Moscow there was an international exhibition of books, and one of my sannyasins, Lani, was there. She was surprised – and my Russian sannyasins were there, and they were also surprised: world-famous publishing houses were exhibiting their books, but our stall was the most crowded. At any one time there were not less than one hundred people there the whole day that the exhibition was open.One old man, looking at my picture, asked Lani, “Is this man something like Leo Tolstoy?” – just because of my beard. Tolstoy had a beautiful beard.Tolstoy used to have a dream that psychoanalysts of different schools have been interpreting for almost the whole century. The dream was very strange, but not to me. To me it needs no psychoanalysis, but simple common sense. The dream was repeated every night continuously for years. It was strangely nightmarish, and Tolstoy awoke in the middle of every night, perspiring, although there was no danger in the dream.But if you can understand the meaninglessness of the dream… That was the problem that became the nightmare. This dream represents almost everybody’s life. No psychoanalytic school has been able to figure out what kind of dream it is because there is no parallel, it is unprecedented.The dream used to be the same every night. A vast desert, as far as you can see just desert and desert and two boots, which Tolstoy recognized as his, go on walking. But he is missing, just the boots go on making noise in the sand. And it continues because the desert is endless. They never reach anywhere. Behind he can see the prints of the boots for miles, and ahead he can see the boots going on walking.Ordinarily you will not think it is a nightmare. But if you think a little more closely: every day, every night the same dream of utter futility, reaching nowhere. There seems to be no destiny, and nobody is in the boots, they are empty.He told all the well-known psychoanalysts of his day in Russia. Nobody could figure out what it meant because there is no book that describes any dream which can even be called a little bit similar to this. It is absolutely unique.But to me there is no question of any psychoanalysis. It is a simple dream, representing every human being’s life. You are walking in a desert because you are not walking toward the goal that is intrinsic in your being. You are not going to reach anywhere. The more you go away, the more you will be going away from yourself. And the more you look for any meaning the more you will find utter emptiness and nothing else. That is the meaning. The man is missing; only the boots are walking.You are not in what you are doing. You are not in what you are being. You are not in what you are pretending. It is utter hollowness, pure hypocrisy.But the way it has been created is a simple method: Tell everybody, “As you are, you are absolutely undeserving – even to exist. As you are, you are just ugly, an accident. As you are, you should be ashamed of yourself because you don’t have anything worthy of honor and respect.” Naturally, every child starts doing things that are supposed to be honorable. He goes on becoming more and more false, more and more phony, more and more distant from his authentic reality, his very being – and then the fear arises.Whenever a longing is felt to know yourself, it is immediately followed by great fear. The fear is that if you find yourself you are going to lose respect for yourself – even in your own eyes.The society is too heavy on every individual. It makes every effort to condition you so heavily that you start thinking that you are the conditioning – and you become part of the society, against your own being. You become a Christian, you become a Hindu, you become a Mohammedan, and you forget completely that you were born just as a human being, with no religion, with no politics, with no nation, with no race. You were born just a pure possibility of growth.According to me, sannyas is to bring you back to yourself, whatsoever the consequences, whatsoever the risk. You have to come back to yourself. You may not find a Jesus there. There is no need: one Jesus is enough. You may not find a Gautam Buddha. It is perfectly okay because too many Gautam Buddhas in existence will be simply boring.Existence does not want to repeat people. It is so creative that it always brings something new in each individual, a new potential, a new possibility, a new height, a new dimension, a new peak.Sannyas is a revolt against all societies and all cultures and all civilizations, for the simple reason that they are against the individual. I am absolutely for the individual. I can sacrifice every society and every religion and every civilization – the whole history of mankind – just for a single individual. The individual is the most valuable phenomenon because the individual is part of existence.You will have to drop your fear. It has been imposed on you; it is not natural. Watch every small child: he accepts himself perfectly; there is no condemnation, there is no desire to be anybody else. But everybody, as he grows, is distracted. You will have to gather courage to come back to yourself. The whole society will prevent you; you will be condemned. But it is far better to be condemned by the whole world than to remain miserable and phony and false and live a life of somebody else.You can have a blissful life and there are not two ways, only one single way. This is: you have just to be yourself, whatever you are. From there, from that deep acceptance and respect for yourself, you will start growing. You will bring flowers of your own – not Christian, not Buddhist, not Hindu – just absolutely your own, a new contribution to existence.But it needs immense courage to go alone on a path leaving the whole crowd on the highway. To be in the crowd one feels cozy, warm; to go alone, naturally one feels afraid. The mind goes on arguing within that, “the whole of humanity cannot be wrong, and I am going alone.” It is better just to be part of the crowd because then you are not responsible if things go wrong.Everybody is responsible. But the moment you depart from the crowd you are taking your responsibility in your own hands. If something goes wrong, you are responsible.But remember one very fundamental thing: responsibility is one side of the coin and the other side is freedom. You can have both together or you can drop both together. If you don’t want to have responsibility, you cannot have freedom, and without freedom there is no growth.So you have to accept responsibility for yourself and you have to live in absolute freedom so that you can grow, whatever you are. You may turn out to be a rosebush, you may turn out to be just a marigold flower, you may turn out just to be a wild flower that has no name. But one thing is certain: whatever you turn out to be, you will be immensely happy. You will be utterly blissful.You may not have respectability – on the contrary, you may be condemned by everybody – but deep inside, you will feel such an ecstatic joy that only a free individual can feel. And only a free individual can grow in higher layers of consciousness, can reach to the heights of the Himalayan peaks.Society has kept everybody retarded, it has made everybody stupid. It needs idiots; it does not want intelligent people around. It is afraid of intelligence because intelligence is always in revolt against slavery, against superstition, against all kinds of exploitation, against all kinds of stupidities, against all discriminations between races, nations, classes, colors. Intelligence is continuously in revolt.Only the idiot is always obedient. Even God wanted Adam to be an idiot because it was his vested interest that Adam and Eve remain idiots so they could go on worshipping him.In my vision the Devil is the world’s first revolutionary, and the Devil is the most significant person in the whole of history. The whole civilization and progress owe much to the Devil – not to God at all. God wanted only a stupid Adam, a stupid Eve; and if Adam had followed God you would still be chewing grass in the Garden of Eden!Man has moved because he revolted against God. God was the establishment. God represents the establishment, authority, the power and the domination. Anybody who is intelligent cannot be converted into a slave; he would rather die than become a slave. He cannot be exploited and he cannot be dragged away from his own center.My people have to learn the fact that I believe only in the religion of revolt. Except that, there is no religiousness. Except that, there is no possibility of your consciousness rising to the highest potential that you are carrying as dormant energy.Paddy had recently joined his local skydiving club and had gone up for his first jump. Everything was going perfectly until it was Paddy’s turn to jump.“Hold it,” shouted his instructor, “you are not wearing your parachute!”“Oh, that’s okay,” replied Paddy, “we are just practicing, aren’t we?”Society needs these idiots. They are perfectly obedient, docile, ready to be exploited, ready to be reduced almost into animals.Don’t be afraid of accepting yourself. That’s where your real treasure is, that’s where your home is. Don’t listen to the so-called wise – they are the poisoners who have killed millions of people, destroyed their lives, taken away all meaning and significance.It does not matter who you are. What matters is that you should remain exactly what you are because from there starts growth.A few sutras for you to meditate upon, perhaps they may give you some courage, some intelligence.“Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.” So don’t be worried about being ignorant; everybody is.“All men are born free, but some get married.” So just be alert, and freedom is yours!“Illusion is the first of all pleasures.” Remember, the life of growth goes beyond the mundane life of pleasures. Pleasure is not something very significant; it is just like scratching your skin: it feels pleasant, but just for a little while. If you go on scratching you will bring blood to your skin, and then pleasure turns into pain. And you all know that you have turned all your pleasures into pain.A man of intelligence searches for something that can never be turned into pain and anguish and anxiety and suffering. What I call bliss is not pleasure because bliss cannot be turned into its opposite. There is no opposite of it.The search should be for the eternal, and everybody has the capacity to experience the eternal. But the pleasures of the physical body or biological infatuation or the pleasures of eating food keep people engaged and take away the small time they have here on this earth to grow.I have heard…A man went to a psychiatrist and said, “I am very much concerned. My wife goes on eating and eating and she spends the whole day sitting on the sofa looking at the television. And even while she is looking at the television she is eating something – ice cream – or if she is not eating something, at least she is chewing gum. But her mouth continues.“Now she has lost all beauty; she has become just a bag of skin with no curves anywhere. What am I supposed to do?”The psychiatrist said, “Try one thing. It is a sure success; I have tried it on many patients.” He gave the man a photograph of a beautiful nude girl.The man said, “My God! How is this picture going to help?”The psychiatrist replied, “You have to understand the whole strategy. Put it inside your refrigerator. Stick it with real German glue, so your wife cannot take it away. Whenever she opens the refrigerator she will see herself, and this beautiful girl. Perhaps she will start reducing her weight. Just give her a comparison.”For three or four months the psychiatrist waited and waited, and finally he went to the man’s home to find out what had happened. He could not believe it: the man was sitting on the sofa; he had become so fat and he was watching television, chewing gum. The psychiatrist said, “What is the matter? What happened to you?”The man said, “It is that damned picture! Because of the picture I started going to the refrigerator, just to have a look. But when you open the refrigerator then naturally you want something, the very flavor of so many nice things. So each time I open the refrigerator I start eating. Your device worked, but it backfired.”People are behaving so stupidly in their lives. People who go on eating. The doctors are prohibiting it; everybody is telling them that it is dangerous. What pleasure do they have? Just a small patch on the tongue experiences taste; once the food has passed that small patch you don’t know any taste, any pleasure. It must be utter stupidity.But people are after all kinds of pleasures. They are not even aware that they are wasting immensely valuable time: this is the time when somebody becomes a Gautam Buddha, this is the time when somebody becomes a Socrates – the same time, the same energy, the same potential. But you are wasting it in running after things that are meaningless.“Chivalry is a man’s attempt to defend a woman against every man except himself.”“Even when you are on the right track you will get run over if you just sit there.”“To do nothing is the most difficult thing in the world.”Everybody is doing something. Only very few people know the art of sometimes not doing anything. When you are not doing anything you are simply and purely your being.Doing and being are two ways of living your life, two styles of living your life. The life of doing is mundane; the life of being is sublime, is divine. I am not saying drop all doing, I am saying doing should be secondary in your life and being should be primary. Doing should be only for the necessities of life, and being should be your real luxury, your real joy, your real ecstasy.“To be perfectly happy one must be perfectly stupid.”Whenever you see a happy person, remember it. Stupid people are very happy because they don’t know what they are here for. They don’t know that there is some task to be fulfilled. They are almost like retarded children who go on playing with teddy bears. Your teddy bears can change their shape: somebody’s teddy bear is money and somebody’s teddy bear is women, and somebody’s teddy bear is men – but whatever you are doing you are feeling very happy that money is accumulating, that you have found a new girlfriend, that you are promoted to a higher position. You are utterly happy. Unless you are stupid this is not possible.A man of intelligence will be able to see without fail that all these small things of life are preventing you from the beyond. They keep you engaged here, and this is not your home. They keep you engaged in a life that is going to end up in a graveyard.The intelligent man starts asking – and this becomes his fundamental search and quest – “Is there something beyond the graveyard or not? If there is nothing beyond the graveyard, then this whole life is just a dream and meaningless. Unless there is something beyond, life cannot be significant and life cannot be meaningful.” But the stupid person is immensely happy with any toys that the society provides him. Don’t be stupid!“To err is human, to admit it is divine.”It is absolutely human to commit mistakes. To admit it, without any guilt, brings a transformation in your being. You are simply admitting your humanity by admitting your mistake. Something of the divine, something of the beyond starts opening up.“Every cloud has a silver lining and even old clothes have their shiny side.”“If it were not for the optimist, a pessimist would never know how happy he isn’t.”People are continuously comparing themselves with others. They become happy, they become unhappy because of the comparisons.I had a meeting with a very famous Hindu saint. He told a few other people who had gathered to listen to what transpired between us, “The secret of happiness is always to look to those who are unhappy. Look at the crippled and you will feel happy that you are not crippled. Look at the blind and you will feel happy that you are not blind. Look at the poor and you will feel happy that you are not poor.”I had to stop this idiot! I said, “You don’t understand a simple fact. Once a person starts comparing he cannot stop at only comparing with those who are unfortunate. He will also look at those who are richer than him, who are more beautiful than him, who are stronger than him, who are more respectable than him. Then he will be miserable. You are not giving him the secret of happiness; you are giving him the secret of being in absolute misery.”It has been taught down the ages in almost all the religious scriptures, in different words, but the essential secret is the same: Feel contented because there are people who are so miserable. Thank God that you are not so miserable.But this cannot remain one-sided. Once you learn the way of comparison, you cannot compare yourself only with those who are inferior to you. Inevitably you will also have to compare yourself with those who are superior to you – and then there will be immense misery.In fact, comparison is not the right thing to do. You are yourself, and there is nobody else with whom you can be compared.You are incomparable. So is the other person. Never compare.Comparison is one of the causes that is keeping you tethered to the mundane – because comparison creates competition, comparison creates ambition. It does not come alone; it brings all its companions with it. And once you become competitive there is no end to it; you will end before it does. Once you become ambitious you have chosen the most stupid path for your life.Henry Ford was once asked… And he seems to be one of the wisest men of this century because his small statements make so much sense. He was the first man to say that “history is bunk,” and that is absolutely true.He was asked, “What have you learned through your successful life?” He was one of the most successful men you can conceive of; from poverty he rose to be the richest man in the world. What he said has to be remembered.Henry Ford said, “Through all my successful life I have learned only one thing: I have learned to climb staircases, to climb ladders. And then when I reach the last rung of the ladder I feel so stupid and so embarrassed because there is no longer anywhere to go.“And I cannot say to the people who are behind me, struggling hard to reach the same ladder where I am feeling stupid, what I have been struggling for. And nobody will listen to me if I say to them, ‘Stop wherever you are. Don’t waste time because there is nothing. Once you reach the top you are stuck. You cannot get down because that looks like falling back. You cannot go ahead because there is nowhere to go ahead.’”The presidents and prime ministers of countries just feel stuck. Now they know there is only one thing that can happen, and that is the fall. There is nothing to rise to; there is nowhere to go except to fall from the place that they have reached. So they cling to their seats.But this is not the right kind of life. First you go on climbing ladders, struggling with people; then ultimately you are stuck and you cling to the last rung so that nobody can take you away from it. Is this a madhouse?Man has turned this planet into a madhouse. If you want to be sane, first be yourself – without any guilt, without any condemnation. Accept yourself with humbleness and simplicity.This is a gift of existence to you. Feel grateful, and start searching for what can help you to grow as you are not to become a carbon copy of somebody else, but just to remain your original self.There is no ecstasy greater than to be your original face.Osho,Is there any possibility that I will ever grow up?I love the way you have asked the question. It is out of a sincere humbleness. And just because it is arising out of a simple humbleness it opens the doors for your growth.You are asking, “Is there any possibility that I will ever grow up?” There are all the possibilities. For the humble heart everything is possible, for the egoist nothing is possible. For a person who can accept that “I am nobody,” all doors suddenly open, all the mysteries of existence become available. For the man who can say, “I do not know,” a miracle becomes possible. In his acceptance of not knowing he starts becoming wise because he starts becoming like a child, utterly innocent.There is every possibility of your growing up. And particularly in this buddhafield, if you are not functioning out of your ego, if you have left your ego outside the Gateless Gate, then everything is possible for you, then the whole existence is available for you. The only thing that blocks is the small ego.One sometimes wonders why this small ego, phony, false, prevents people from growing. Logically it seems very ridiculous, but existentially it is something like a small speck of dust falling into your eyes and the whole existence disappearing. Your eyes are closed, you cannot open your eyes. Those small pieces of dust have taken the whole of existence away from you. The rainbow in the clouds and the sun and the rain – all have disappeared.Logically it should not be so: that such small dust particles prevent the view of the whole sky. But in reality they do. So it is not a question of logic; it is question of actual, existential reality.The small ego functions just like a small dust particle in your vision, and it prevents you from looking at all the possibilities that are available, which have always been available. Just remove that small particle from your eyes. Nothing is changing, all was always available – your eyes were just not capable of seeing it.With your humbleness great miracles are possible. Just remain humble, innocent, receptive, available, waiting for the guest to knock on your doors.Two nuns were walking through the woods one evening when they were jumped on by two men who dragged them into the bushes and began to rape them. Sister Mary, bruised and battered, looked up at the sky and began to pray softly, “Forgive him Lord, for he knows not what he is doing.”Sister Teresa looked over and said, “That’s a pity, mine does.”A gorgeous blonde walked into the dentist’s office and was obviously very nervous. “Oh doctor,” she cried, “I’m so scared. You know, I think I would rather have a baby than have a tooth filled.”“Okay,” said the dentist warily, “but make up your mind before I adjust the chair.”Just remain innocent and laughing and rejoicing and you need not be worried about your growth. It will be happening on its own accord. You don’t have to do anything for it; you have just to create the right atmosphere.And we have already created that atmosphere here. You can benefit from this atmosphere if you don’t remain an outsider – just a spectator or a curious person.If you are here, then melt and merge in this beautiful communion which is incomparable in the sense that nowhere on the earth is anything similar happening. Where people are laughing, rejoicing, dancing, singing, melting into each other, the growth will come on its own accord.Just learn to laugh, learn to dance, learn to sing, learn to be yourself, utterly fulfilled and grateful to existence.Paddy and Maureen had just had their eighteenth child, so Maureen went to the doctor and asked if he could give her a hearing aid. “A hearing aid?” asked the doctor. “How will that help you plan your family more effectively?”“Well,” said Maureen, “I’m a little bit deaf, so every night when Paddy says, ‘Would you like to go to sleep or what?’ I always say, ‘What?’”

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I feel and know in my heart, I am your disciple. I don't feel I am yet a devotee although I aspire to be one. Is it the nature of being a devotee that one knows one has become one? Or does the innocence of the devotee make the awareness of it not possible?Antar Farid, the question you are asking is certainly significant. Its significance is very subtle. I will have to go step by step to make it clear to you.These are the stages a seeker moves through: the student, the disciple, the devotee. The fourth is also there but it does not belong to the seeker, it belongs to the one who has arrived; that’s why I am not counting it. The seeker is on the path. The student is not aware that he is a student. He may think he is a disciple, he may think he is a devotee; he functions absolutely unconsciously.I am reminded of a case – it happened in the life of a Sufi mystic, Junnaid:A man came; he wanted to be a disciple. Junnaid looked at him for a long time. The man started feeling a little nervous: Why is he looking at him for so long and so silently?Finally Junnaid said, “To be a disciple is very difficult.”The man said, “Then I am ready to be a devotee.”Junnaid said, “That is even more difficult. The only thing that is not difficult here is to be a master.”The man said, “If that is the case, I am ready to be the master.”Junnaid told his disciples and devotees, “This is a case of unconsciousness. He is not even a student, but the longing is to be a master if it is easier.”The student comes almost accidentally. Perhaps he reads a book, perhaps a friend talks to him and he becomes curious. But curiosity is so superficial; it cannot make you committed and devoted for a long journey. It is very momentary; hence the student is not accepted in the mystery schools. He is too unripe; he has to wander a few days more or perhaps a few lives more before he can be accepted by a master as a disciple. Another Sufi story will explain it to you clearly…A man left his home and his village in search of a master. Just outside the village he met an old man sitting under a tree, so silently and so peacefully that he thought, “Perhaps he may know somebody who is a master; otherwise, how am I going to find…?”Each master is so unique that there are no symptoms that can be recognizable. The young man went to the old man sitting under the tree and asked him, “Do you know a master?”The old man said, “Certainly. Do you also want to know him?”He said, “That’s why I have asked you. Show me how I can reach the master and how I will recognize him.”The old man said, “It is easy. He will be very old – at least thirty years older than me – and he will be sitting under a tree.” And he described the tree, what kind of tree it would be, and he described the moment of meeting. He described it in such detail that the young man was puzzled, how he could manage to describe even the moment of meeting?But the old man said, “It will take at least thirty years for you to find him.”The young man thanked the old man and went on in search. Now he has some signs, some indications: a certain tree that he can recognize in the evening when the sun is setting, an old man who will be thirty years older than the man he has just left. Of course it is going to be a long journey, wandering here and there, but the old man said things with such authority, with such certainty, that it was almost indubitable.He wandered in the desert, and he never came across the tree that was described, he never met a man who was thirty years older than the old man. Every evening when the sun was setting he looked all around. No master appeared.Utterly frustrated and disappointed, now himself becoming old, tired and tattered with the journey in the desert, he came back home. Strangely enough, the old man was still sitting under the tree.The last time when he was there and the old man was describing the tree – its leaves, its flowers, its fruit, its height, its foliage, its deep shade even in the middle of a sunny day – he had never looked at the tree under which the old man was sitting. He was describing the same tree, but now the man recognized it. After wandering for thirty years looking at every tree, he had become almost accustomed to looking at the tree first.“My God,” he said, “this is the tree! I never came across the same tree anywhere.” And the old man was certainly thirty years older, and all the descriptions that he had given about the master were absolutely apparent in the old man – and the sun was setting.The old man said, “So you have come! I had to wait so long. I was already old enough and ready to die, but just for you I had to wait thirty years.”The young man said, “This is so stupid! Why didn’t you tell me at the first moment of meeting that this is the tree and you are the master?”The old man laughed. He said, “I had told it in every possible way, but you were not ripe. Your understanding was almost absent. These thirty years have ripened you and now you can recognize that which you failed to recognize when you met me. I am your master.”The student is very accidental. There is every possibility that he will never become a disciple. He may go from one place to another, he may gather much knowledge, but he will never become aware of his own being – which is the only true knowledge in existence; the only knowledge that takes you away from darkness to light, away from death to immortality and away from ignorance to innocence. It is the only knowledge that is not information but transformation.The student is not aware that he is accidental, that he is only curious, that the search has not begun yet because deep in his heart he is not ready to go on a long pilgrimage.The disciple knows perfectly well that he is a disciple. The first rays of understanding, awareness, have penetrated his being. He knows for sure that he is no longer a student. He feels it deep in his heart, without any doubt, that the miracle has happened: he has become a disciple. He feels the dedication, he feels the love, he feels the commitment. Even if it takes lives to reach, he knows he is on the right path and he will certainly reach. He knows perfectly well that he has found the master.It is not an intellectual understanding; it is something intuitive, just like love. In fact, the Zen masters have called it “the great affair.” Love is a small affair, but to find a master is a great affair because there is no other love that will be deeper and more fragrant and more profound than that which exists between the disciple and the master. And the disciple is perfectly aware of it.But the devotee is again a totally different phenomenon. The devotee never knows – not because he is unconscious like the student. Devotion comes so slowly, not making any noise. You don’t hear the footsteps.The disciple simply grows just as the child grows and becomes a young man and the young man grows and one day becomes old, but you cannot find when it happened. The disciple grows slowly, slowly into a devotee. And to be a devotee is such a total transformation that only the master becomes aware that you have changed from the disciple to the devotee. You yourself cannot be aware of it.But the difference between the unawareness of the student and the absence of awareness of the devotee is tremendous. The devotee is so full that there is no place left from where he can stand aloof and be aware of what is happening. He is completely enveloped with the experience, and it is so absorbing that he cannot be watchful of it.To be watchful, to be alert, you need a certain distance. The devotee has lost all distance. It is the master who recognizes for the first time the change, that the climate has changed: the disciple is no longer a disciple.Another Sufi story may help you. Sufis have such beautiful stories, such unparalleled stories, that each story opens a new vision.This Junnaid I mentioned was himself once a seeker. He used to tell his disciples, “When I met my master, the master never looked at me for three years. I was sitting from morning till evening. So many people were coming and going and he was talking to people and he did not look at me – as if I did not exist for him yet. But I was persistent because I had felt the presence of the master and I had tasted the sweetness of his surroundings. I remained. In fact the more he ignored me, the more I became certain that there is some secret in his ignoring me.”After three years the master looked at him for the first time. That was the recognition that he was not a student but a disciple. A student would have got lost in three years. No student can stay that long, waiting just for a look. And then another three years passed and he never looked again.After three years the master looked again and smiled too. And his smile almost went just like a sharp sword into the heart of Junnaid. Why had he smiled? But the master did not give him a chance to ask. He started talking to other disciples.Three years passed again, and one day he called him close and kissed his forehead and said, “My son, now you are ready. Now you can go and spread the message.”But no message had been given to him. For nine years he had been there and the only message was that once he was looked at, once he was smiled at, and once he had been kissed on his forehead.But if the master is saying “You are ready,” it must be so. Touching the feet of the master in gratitude, he left.He used to tell his disciples: “I met a very strange man. In nine years he prepared me without even looking at me – but at each change he made the indication. When he became certain that I was a disciple and whatever happened I was going to stay there, he looked at me. But his look was such a shower of love – I could have waited for it for three lives. Three years were nothing. I was immensely glad: the way he looked at me, with such deep love and compassion, I was almost bathed in a new experience.“Without telling me anything… In those three years my mind had stopped functioning. I just went on looking at the master, his every gesture, and slowly, slowly there was nothing to think about. I even forgot for what purpose I was sitting there – and that was the day he looked at me and I knew the purpose, and I was immensely fulfilled.“But then three years again passed, and when he smiled the whole of existence smiled. Every fiber of my being felt his smile, such a soft touch, but it went deep into my heart. I knew something had happened, but I was not aware at that time what had happened. I had passed from disciplehood into devoteehood.“And the day he kissed my forehead, he sealed my certificate as a master. His kiss on my forehead was his only final message. It took me years to figure out slowly what he had meant.”The kiss of the master to the disciple, to the devotee, is a declaration that the merger has happened, the melting has happened, and now you are ready to spread the fragrance that you are filled with all around.The student is unconscious. The disciple starts becoming conscious. The devotee is so conscious that he cannot be conscious of his consciousness. It has to be a recognition from the master because from the devotee the distance between himself and the master is absolutely nil. From the devotee one grows into a master, but it is a spontaneous and natural growth.Farid, I remember these Sufi stories because of your name. Farid is the name of a great Sufi master. You are right: “I feel and know in my heart, I am your disciple.” I agree with you.You say “I don’t feel I am yet a devotee although I aspire to be one.” Just drop the aspiration and you are one. Only the aspiration is blocking the way. Aspiration is simply a beautiful name for desire, for greed.Just drop the aspiration and there is no hindrance to your being transformed, transmuted from disciplehood into the wider world of a devotee. And you have certainly stumbled upon a beautiful fact, which cannot be possible just through intellect. You say, “Is it in the nature of being a devotee that one knows one has become one, or does the innocence of the devotee make the awareness of it not possible?”The second part of your statement is correct; the very nature of the devotee makes it impossible for you to recognize it. There is no space left to stand aside and see. Every knowledge, every awareness needs a distance. You have to stand aside: then you can see and watch, and you can know and you can be aware.But the devotee has lost all distance between himself and his knowing. He himself has become awareness. Now who is there to be aware of awareness?This has to be understood: you cannot be aware of your awareness because if you can be aware of your awareness you will be falling into a very logical regress. Then you will have to be aware of your awareness of your awareness, and there is no end to it.Finally you will always have to decide “Now, this is enough!” In fact you cannot be aware of your awareness because you are awareness. It comes from the recognition of the master. He can see the transformation, the change of the climate in your being. And every master has many things to do. One of the most important things, the final thing, is to give you the indication, the kiss on your forehead recognizing that you have entered into the most mysterious experience of life.Farid, you will never become aware of your being a devotee, but your longing to be a devotee is a hindrance. Drop it immediately! Don’t take time dropping it, don’t postpone.There are things that should never be postponed because the tomorrow is never certain. There are things that have to be done just here, immediately, and you will see many doors opening which your aspiration was blocking.But once you enter into those mysteries you will not be aware because you will become the mystery itself.Osho,What does it mean to be in the middle?To be in the middle means many things. I will have to start my answer from Gautam Buddha because he was the first man to use the words “to be in the middle,” and of course nobody has been able to improve upon the meanings that he gave to the word middle.He called his path “the middle path.” The first meaning is that if you can avoid both the extremes – the rightist and the leftist – if you can be exactly in the middle of both the extremes, you will not be in the middle. You will have transcended the whole trinity of the extremes and the middle. If you drop both the extremes, the middle disappears on its own accord. Middle of what?Gautam Buddha’s insistence on the middle is not on the middle; it is in fact a subtle way to persuade you for transformation. To tell you directly to be transformed may make you apprehensive, afraid, but to be in the middle seems to be very simple.Gautam Buddha played with the word out of sheer compassion. His own word for the middle is majjhim nikai, the middle path. Every extreme has to exclude the other extreme; every extreme has to be in opposition to the other polarity. The negative is against the positive, the minus is against the plus, death is against life. If you take them as extremes, they naturally appear as opposites.But the man who can stop exactly in the middle immediately transcends all the extremes and the middle as well. And from the higher standpoint of the transformed being, you can see there is no opposition at all. The extremes are not opposites, not contradictory, but only complementary.Life and death are not enemies, they are part of one single process. Death does not end life, it simply renews it. It gives it a new form, a new body, a new plane of consciousness. It is not against life; looked at rightly, it is a process of refreshing life, of rejuvenating life. The day is not against the night.In existence there is no opposition in anything; all opposites contribute to the whole. Existence is an organic unity. It does not exclude anything from it. It is all-inclusive.The man who can stop in the middle comes to know this tremendous experience: that there are no opposites, no contradictories. The whole existence is one, and in that oneness all contradictions, all oppositions, all contraries disappear into a single unity. Then life includes death, then day includes night.A man who can experience this organic unity becomes fearless, without any anguish and angst. For the first time he realizes his vastness because he is as vast as the whole existence.One of the great disciples of George Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, has written a book. I must have seen thousands of books, and perhaps no other man in the whole world can claim to know more about books than I know. But in this whole experience of thousands of books I have never come across another book that can be compared in any way with P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum.Tertium Organum means the third canon of thought. He gave this name to this great and incomparably unique book because there have been two other books in the past. The first was written by Aristotle, and he called it The First Organum, the first principle of thought; and the second was written by Bacon, and he called it Novum Organum, a new canon of thought.Then Ouspensky wrote Tertium Organum, the third canon of thought, and he declared just in the beginning of the book that “although I am calling it the third canon of thought, it existed before the first canon of thought ever existed.” This book contains so many mysteries that each page, almost each paragraph, each sentence seems to be so pregnant with meaning.I used to love underlining my books. That’s why I have never been interested in reading books from any library. I cannot underline a book that has been borrowed from a library; I cannot put my stamp on it. And I hate to read a book which has been underlined by somebody else because those lines which have been underlined stand out and they unnecessarily interfere in my own conception, my own flow.This is the only book that I started underlining and I recognized after a few pages that every line has to be underlined. But I could not be unjust to the book. All my books in the library are underlined. Knowing perfectly well after a few pages that this book could be left not underlined but that that would be unjustified, I had to underline the whole book. In that book there are so many things. One that is significant is the reference I am talking about.P. D. Ouspensky was one of the greatest mathematicians of his time. He knows perfectly well what he is writing, and he says that in mathematics the part can never be bigger than the whole. It is obvious: how can the part be bigger than the whole? But he goes on to say that mathematics is not all: “I have come to know the mystical experience with my master, George Gurdjieff, and now I can say there is a higher mathematics, the mystical mathematics, where the part can not only be equal to the whole, but sometimes it happens that it is bigger than the whole.”Now you are entering into a strange world, where the part cannot only be equal to the whole, sometimes it can be bigger than the whole. It is simply absurd as far as logic is concerned, and from the mouth of a man who is one of the greatest mathematicians, and he knows it. He makes it clear that “I am embarrassed making this statement. As a mathematician I should condemn it. But what can I do against the existential experience? When it comes to experience, then mathematics or no mathematics, I have to state it exactly as it is.”The moment somebody transcends the opposites and comes to know them as complementaries, he is not only part of the whole, he becomes the whole.And let me tell you the final absurdity. Once in a while – in a man like Gautam Buddha, or in a man like Mahavira, or Chuang Tzu, or Lao Tzu – it happens that the part becomes bigger than the whole: absolutely illogical, absolutely unmathematical, but still absolutely right.A Gautam Buddha not only contains the whole but because of his transformation he is a little bit more than the whole. The whole is not aware of its complementariness. Gautam Buddha is aware of its complementariness, and that’s where he transcends and becomes bigger than the whole although he is just a part of it.To be in the middle is one of the great methods of transforming yourself into the ultimate. To prepare yourself for being in the middle you will have to drop all extremist ideas. And all your ideas are extremist – either leftist or rightist, either Christian or Mohammedan, either Hindu or Buddhist. You have chosen. You have not allowed a choiceless consciousness, accepting everything that is.All your prejudices are your choices. I am against all your prejudices for a simple reason: to bring you into the middle.The pope heard that a certain lady in Ireland had produced ten children, so he sent one of his cardinals to grant her his blessings.When he met the lady the cardinal was disgusted to learn that she was not a Catholic. “Do you mean to say,” he thundered, “that I have come all this way to meet a sex-mad Protestant?”If she had been a Catholic, she would have received the blessings of the pope. But unfortunately she is a Protestant. Immediately the prejudiced mind changes its position: from blessings; he starts cursing. He calls that poor woman “a sex-mad Protestant!” This is the way of all prejudices.A sannyasin is one who has no prejudices, who has not chosen any ideology to be his own, who is choicelessly aware of all that is. In this choicelessness you will be in the middle. The moment you choose, you choose some extreme. The moment you choose, you choose against something; otherwise there is no question of choice. Being in a choiceless awareness is another meaning of being in the middle.It happened that a very beautiful young prince, whose name was Shron, listened to Gautam Buddha for the first time. Buddha was visiting the capital of the young man’s kingdom, but listening to Gautam Buddha, the prince immediately asked to be initiated. He was well-known as a sitar player and he was also well-known for luxurious living, utterly luxurious.It was said that even when he was going upstairs, rather than having a railing on the staircase, naked, beautiful women used to stand all along the staircase so that he could move from one woman’s shoulder to another woman’s shoulder. That was his way to go upstairs. He used to sleep the whole day because the hangover of the night before was too much; the whole night was a night of celebrations, drinking, eating, music, dance. There was no time for him to sleep in the night.All these things were known, well known to the people. Gautam Buddha had never hesitated to give initiation to any man before. Now he hesitated. He said, “Shron, I know everything about you; I would like you to reconsider. Think it over. I am still going to stay in this capital for the four months of the rainy season.”In the rainy season, Gautam Buddha never used to move around, nor did his sannyasins. Eight months of the year they were continuously wandering and sharing their experiences of meditation and higher states of consciousness. But because twenty-five centuries ago there were only mud roads, and Buddha had not allowed his disciples to have any possessions – not even an umbrella, no shoes, and just three pieces of cloth. One was for any emergency, and two so that you could change every day after the bath; more than three was not allowed. In the rainy season when it was pouring it would have been difficult to keep those three cloths dry, and to walk in the mud, in the pouring rain might make many poor sannyasins sick.For that reason he had made it a point that for four months you remain in one place, and those who want to see you can come. For eight months you should go to every thirsty person; for four months let others come to you.So he said, “There is no hurry, Shron.”But Shron said, “Once I have taken a decision I never reconsider. You have to give me initiation right now.”Buddha still tried to persuade him that “there is no harm in reconsidering it because you have lived a life of utter luxury. You have never walked on the road, you have been always in a golden chariot. You have never come out of your luxurious palace and gardens. You have lived continuously with beautiful women, with great musicians, with dancers. All that will not be possible when you become a sannyasin – not even two meals a day.” A Buddhist sannyasin is expected only to have one meal.Gautam Buddha’s insight has been proved correct by science after twenty-five centuries of criticism. Now science has come to the same conclusion: if you can reduce your food to half, your diseases, sicknesses, illnesses will also be reduced to half, and your life will be doubled. Now it can be said scientifically that Buddha was right. It was not a deprivation; it was really a very healthy measure.He told Shron, “You will not be able. And I don’t like anybody to return to the world because that makes him lose his self-respect. That’s why I say, ‘Consider.’”Shron said, “I have considered again and again and I still want to be initiated right now. The more you tell me to consider the more I become adamant and stubborn.”Gautam Buddha had to relent and give him initiation, and from the very second day there was trouble – but a trouble that no sannyasin of Gautam Buddha had expected. A trouble that perhaps Gautam Buddha had expected started happening.When all the sannyasins had three pieces of cloth, Shron started living naked – from one extreme to the other extreme. When all the Buddhist sannyasins were walking on the road, Shron would always walk by the side of the road in the thorns. When the other sannyasins were resting under the shade of the trees, Shron would always stand in the hot sun in the middle of the day.Within just six months a beautiful young prince became almost old, a skeleton, black; one could not recognize that this was the man who used to be a great prince and was famous for his utterly luxurious life. His feet were bleeding, his whole body had shrunk, and one night after six months Gautam Buddha went to the tree under which he was sleeping. It is one of the rare occasions when Buddha went in the night to any sannyasin for any reason. There is no other incident, at least in the Buddhist scriptures, this is the only incident.He woke Shron up and asked him a very strange question: “I have heard that when you were a prince you were also the greatest sitarist in the country. Is that right?”Shron said, “You could have asked at any time. I don’t see the point in the middle of the night.”Gautam Buddha said, “Just wait a little, you will see the point.”Shron said, “Yes, it is true.”Buddha said, “Now the second question is, if the strings of the sitar are too tight, will there be any music born out of those strings?”Shron said, “Of course not. If they are too tight they will be broken.”Buddha said, “If they are too loose, will there be any music?”Shron said, “You are asking strange questions in the middle of the night. When the strings are too loose they cannot create any music. A certain tension is needed. In fact, to play on a sitar is simple. The real mastery is to keep the strings exactly in the middle, neither too tight nor too loose.”Buddha said, “This is the point I came to make to you. Life is also a musical instrument: too tight and there is no music, too loose and there is no music. The strings of life have to be exactly in the middle; neither too tight, nor too loose. Only then is there music. And only a master knows how to keep them in the middle. Because you have been a master sitarist I would like you also to become a master of life. Just don’t move from one extreme to another, from luxury to austerity, from pleasures to self-torture. Try to be exactly in the middle.”In a sense Gautam Buddha is one of the most profound psychologists that the world has produced: to be in the middle in every action of your life. Always find the middle and you have found the path of meditation and the path of liberation.Osho,When I enter the “Gateless Gate” my body is filled with some type of uncontrollable vibration. Sitting in your presence in Buddha Hall with closed eyes my whole body vibrates and tears flow from my eyes. I feel the vibration deepening as if someone has touched me. However, I get lost in the darkness with closed eyes and I am very much frightened of what's happening. Then I try to stop all this by keeping my eyes wide open. Osho, would you please comment?It is natural that when something from the unknown starts happening one feels afraid. Although you are seekers and you want the whole sky to open for you – you want the unknown to touch your heart, you want the stars to enter in your being – you are not aware that when things start happening you will be afraid and trembling.Now whatever is happening to you is absolutely good. But the fear is natural, and you will have to overcome your fear. It is perfectly good to sit with closed eyes when so much is happening around you and you are feeling strange vibrations and a soft touch to your heart.Don’t close your eyes out of fear; close your eyes for deeper exploration. There is nothing to be afraid of. This is our existence, this is our world, and there are many, many things of which we are unaware.As you become more receptive, you will become aware of subtle vibrations and naturally you will start thinking, “Am I going mad or what?” You will start feeling things which, if you are not aware and clear, can drive you nuts.Close your eyes with love for a deeper contact with those vibrations. Those are the vibrations of a buddhafield. You are fortunate that they are touching you, but your fear can stop the whole process. If you want to be afraid, be afraid only of your fear. Except that, there is nothing to be afraid of.Close your eyes. But when you close your eyes, another fear comes – of darkness. There is nothing in darkness to be afraid of. It is so silent, so beautiful, so vast. In the light you are always surrounded by a crowd of people or trees – but you are always crowded. Only in darkness are you absolutely alone. That aloneness creates fear.But our whole effort is to teach you aloneness, to teach you to love without any choice. Light or darkness, both should be explored. Light has its own beauties, its own colors, its own rainbows, its own flowers. Darkness also has its own silences. Light comes and goes, darkness remains.Darkness is far more eternal than light. It is always there; it does not need any fuel, it is not dependent on anything, on any cause. You cannot destroy darkness; you can destroy light without much difficulty. You cannot do anything directly with darkness; it is there and it will remain forever. Search for its beauties, search for its depth. Out of fear, first you close your eyes. Then another fear grips you – of darkness – so you open your eyes, but then the whole experience starts disappearing. Get out of this misunderstanding.If you can, just trust me a little bit. I give you the guarantee that what is happening to you is for your good, for your well-being. You are not only entering the Gateless Gate, you are really entering into the gateless gate within you.Allow it to happen. Rejoice in it so that it can happen more. Dance. In welcoming it, allow your whole heart to be receptive to all these vibrations. You have entered a mystery school. You have to prepare yourself for many more mysteries ahead, but if you misunderstand you will lose something great that was beginning to grow within you.Be absolutely assured that what is happening to you is going to happen to all. These experiences happen like a chain. If one person becomes absolutely immersed in these unknown vibrations, he will become infectious, contagious to others. Spread your vibrations to others.Sitting by the side of someone, focus with your eyes closed on the person; particularly, if you can, focus with closed eyes on the neck of the person. Sit behind him. The neck is the most receptive center – and those vibrations will start moving into the other person too. You will see that he is becoming fidgety, looking all around – what is happening?Every day sit behind somebody else. You have a great and a very enjoyable task. Just sit behind Avirbhava, and you will see the explosion. But don’t misunderstand what is happening to you. Welcome it.A young lady living in Canada received a present from a friend in Mexico. It was a tiny Chihuahua dog, the so-called Mexican hairless breed.During the Canadian winter the tiny dog, which was used to tropical heat, began to shiver uncontrollably. No matter how many blankets she put on it, the poor dog could not get warm.In desperation the girl jumped on her bicycle and pedaled down to the village drugstore. She asked the druggist if he could give her something to keep her Chihuahua warm and maybe grow some hair on it.The druggist blushed and said, “Miss, I think that is something you should see your doctor about.”The girl was about to leave when the man added, “But I will tell you one thing, miss. Riding that bicycle is only going to make things worse!”

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Rig Veda says, “Let noble thoughts come to us from every side.” Do you agree with this statement?I do not agree with Rig Veda and its statement. It appears only to the intellectuals as true.But those who know, know perfectly well that thoughts are simply thoughts. They are neither noble nor ignoble. They are all chains, prisons; how can they be noble? Mind itself is your slavery, how can it be noble? And the ugliest thing in the statement of Rig Veda is that it is asking, “Let noble thoughts come to us from every side.” You are already too full of all kinds of crap – and you are inviting more crap to come to you from every side?How can I agree with this statement? It may have been made by a great Hindu seer and saint, but because of this statement, this very statement, whoever has made it has shown his ignorance about human consciousness. He does not know the state beyond the mind.Unless you know the state beyond the mind you are as blind as anyone else, as ignorant as anyone else, with only one difference: you are a hypocrite, you are a pretender, you are showing the world a false face and hiding your reality. Any man who has made this statement is utterly ignorant about spiritual reality. It does not matter that the statement is contained in the ancientmost holy book of the Hindus. To me, each statement has to stand on its own authority. It doesn’t matter from where it comes, who utters it. The statement itself intrinsically is wrong. It shows only one thing: that whoever uttered it was also wrong.The whole process of religious consciousness is getting rid of thoughts. Yes, noble thoughts are included in this. It doesn’t matter whether your chains are made of gold or just steel. In fact, the chains that are made of gold are more dangerous than the chains made of steel because the chains made of gold can be misunderstood as ornaments; you can start being attached to them and then there is no possibility of freedom at all.To call any thoughts “noble” is one of the most dangerous statements to make. It goes against all mystical experience. No thought is noble, and therefore no thought is ignoble either. Thoughts are just thoughts. Their function is to keep you clouded so that you cannot see the sun. Their function is to keep you in darkness so you cannot see the light of the day. They surround you in thick layers and keep you disconnected from existence. This separation is our misery. This is our anguish, this is our hell.All thoughts have to be removed, irrespective of whether they are made of gold or of steel. Whether they appear to be good or bad, whether they come in moral packages or immoral packages does not matter. In fact, again I would like to repeat: thoughts that appear to be noble are more dangerous than those that are apparently ignoble because there is a tendency within you to get attached to anything that is noble, moral, puritan.Once you get attached to your chains, how are you going to be free? Once you become attached to your cage, how are you going to open your wings in the sky?The Rig Veda is certainly the ancientmost scripture in the world. That does not make it in any way significant; it simply makes it more primitive than any other scripture. It was written by more barbarous and more primitive people, less civilized, less cultured – and you can see it in the lifestyles of the Vedic seers.You can see the difference between a Gautam Buddha and any seer, any sage of the Vedas. They had many wives – and not only that, they had many other women, purchased in the slave markets. Can you conceive of Gautam Buddha purchasing a woman auctioned in the marketplace? It is simply inconceivable to reduce a woman to a commodity; just a sexual object to be used. And all the vedic seers, without any exception, had many wives and many women purchased from the auctions in the marketplace.You will be surprised to know… Sometimes words go through such a transformation that one becomes absolutely unaware of their meaning. The word vadhu has lost all its original meaning. Now it means the newly-wed wife, but in the times of the Vedas, vadhu meant a woman who had been purchased from the marketplace. You can treat her as a wife, you can use her as a sexual object, but her children will not be legitimate. They will be orphans, illegitimate and condemned by the society.Strange, the people who are producing them are praised as seers and sages. Their very act of purchasing women is so ugly that to call them sages is simply stupid; they are not even worthy to be called human. And then to produce from those women children who will be condemned for their whole lives as illegitimate…I say unto you, there is not a single child in the whole world who is illegitimate. Parents may be illegitimate, but not children. How can a child be illegitimate? Every child comes from the same source of life and existence, with the same purity and dignity. No child brings a certificate that “I am legitimate;” and no child comes with a seal on his forehead that he is illegitimate.But these so-called seers were accumulating immense money. They were in favor of the ugly caste system of India – in fact they created it. One fourth of the country is condemned to live like cattle, and the responsibility goes to the Vedas. They were very ordinary people. If you look at the prayers that they have written in the Vedas, you can see their utter ordinariness.And that has continued to be the inner unconscious of the Indian mind. They were greedy people: they possessed lands, slaves, and they were very jealous, jealous of each other. They were not humble people, and they were jealous even of their own wives. They had many wives, and they had many purchased women who were almost like prostitutes, but they wanted their wives to be absolutely dedicated only to them. They were very angry people, ready to curse anybody – not only for this life but even for future lives – on any slight provocation. And they still have a certain existence in the Indian mind.Just a few days ago Jayesh was telling me – because he is looking after all the problems that the Indian government and the Indian bureaucracy have created for this place – one ex-attorney general of Maharashtra appeared to be very much interested in me.Jayesh asked him, “Have you ever heard Osho, have you ever read anything?” He said, “I have not read anything, I have never heard him.” Jayesh said, “Then in what ways are you interested in him? And why do you want to help me in solving the legal problems against the ashram, which are absolutely invalid?”He said, “I simply want to help because it is a blessing to work for Osho.” Jayesh was very much influenced, but in the next sentence the man said, “I will work just for the sheer joy and the blessings that will come to me from working for Osho. But money is also needed…”Jayesh asked me what to do with such people. “He does not know you, he has never read you, he has never heard you. He talks about blessings, looks very spiritual – and ends up with the sentence that money is also needed.”I said to him, “Ask him to choose between the two: either the blessings or the money.” He said, “Osho, you will destroy my whole work! He is the man I am depending on.” I said, “But make it clear because he cannot have both.” He said, “It was better not to have told you. Now I am in a fix. I know he needs money, I know he is working for money. And if I ask this question, he will certainly be very much annoyed.”This greed, this money infatuation, this materialism comes exactly down from the seers of the Rig Veda. It still constitutes the unconscious of the Hindu mind. On the surface, everything is spiritual. Underneath, everything is so ugly, so obscene, and the beauty of it is that the Indians go on condemning the whole world as materialist; they are the only spiritual people.But my own experience is that I have not come across a more materialist people in the whole world than the Indians. Yes, they have a spiritual mask that the others don’t have, so the others appear to be materialistic. And Indians are very much conditioned to talk about spirituality, the ultimate reality. It is just common heritage to talk about great things. But when you scratch a little bit, you will find the most ugly human beings in the world – and the responsibility goes to such people.The man who said: “Let noble thoughts come to us from every side,” has been praised by Hindu scholars down the ages. I am the first in the whole history of mankind who is condemning this man and his statement. His statement shows absolutely clearly that he knows nothing of meditation.Noble thoughts are simply noble chains, noble prisons, noble poisons. Every thought has to be dropped. Whether it is good or bad – that is immaterial. You have to rise into a state of thoughtlessness. That state is the only nobility in the world. That is the only authentic spirituality.But the moment you go beyond thought, you are no longer a Christian, no longer a Hindu, no longer a Jew, no longer a Buddhist – because all these are thoughts. To be a Hindu means you have certain kinds of thoughts; to be a Mohammedan means you have chosen a different collection of thoughts. What is the difference between a Hindu and a Christian? – just the thoughts. Once they both go beyond thoughts, what will be the difference? In the silences of the heart, everybody is exactly the same open sky, without any clouds.A few sutras for your meditation. You need them urgently because you are reading the wrong kind of literature.The first sutra: “Not all saints are playing a practical joke on the public. Some are genuinely mad.”Second: “If everyone does what they believe to be right, there will be assuredly utter chaos in the world.”Third: “If you see the good in everybody, you are an optimist or you may be simply nuts.”Fourth: “Just when I nearly had the answer, I forgot the question.”Osho,What is real authentic friendliness?The question you have asked is very complex. You will have to understand a few other things before you can understand what real authentic friendliness is.The first is friendship. Friendship is love without any biological tones to it. It is not the friendship that you understand ordinarily – the boyfriend, the girlfriend. To use the word friend in any way associated with biology is sheer stupidity. It is infatuation and madness. You are being used by biology for reproduction purposes. If you think you are in love, you are wrong; it is just hormonal attraction. Your chemistry can be changed and your love will disappear. Just an injection of hormones and a man can become a woman and a woman can become a man.Friendship is love without any biological tones. It has become a rare phenomenon. It used to be a great thing in the past, but a few great things in the past have completely disappeared. It is a very strange thing that ugly things are stubborn, they don’t die easily; and beautiful things are very fragile, they die and disappear very easily.Today friendship is understood either in biological terms or in economic terms, or in sociological terms – an acquaintance, a kind of acquaintance. But friendship means that if the need arises you will be ready even to sacrifice yourself. Friendship means that you have made somebody else more important than you; somebody else has become more precious than you yourself. It is not a business, it is love in its purity.This friendship is possible even the way you are now. Even unconscious people can have such a friendship. But if you start becoming more conscious of your being, then friendship starts turning into friendliness. Friendliness has a wider connotation, a far bigger sky.Friendship is a small thing compared to friendliness. Friendship can be broken, the friend can turn into an enemy. That possibility remains intrinsic in the very fact of friendship.I am reminded of Machiavelli giving guidance to the princes of the world in his great work, The Prince. One of his guidelines is: Never tell anything to your friend which you would not be able to say to your enemy because the person who is a friend today may turn into an enemy tomorrow.And the suggestion following that is: Never say anything against the enemy because the enemy can turn into a friend tomorrow. Then you will be very embarrassed. Machiavelli is giving a very clear insight: that our ordinary love can change into hate, our friendship can become enmity any moment. This is the unconscious state of man: where love is hiding hate just behind it, where you hate the same person you love but you are not aware of it.Friendliness becomes possible only when you are real, you are authentic and you are absolutely alert of your being. And if love arises out of this awareness, it will be friendliness. Friendliness can never change into its opposite. Remember this as a criterion: that the greatest values of life are only those which cannot change into their opposite – in fact there is no opposite.You are asking, “What is real authentic friendliness?”It will need a great transformation in you to have a taste of friendliness. As you are, friendliness is a faraway star. You can have a look at the faraway star, you can have a certain intellectual understanding, but it will remain only an intellectual understanding, not an existential taste.Unless you have an existential taste of friendliness, it will be very difficult, almost impossible to make a distinction between friendship and friendliness.Friendliness is the purest thing you can conceive about love. It is so pure that you cannot even call it a flower, you can only call it a fragrance which you can feel and experience, but you cannot catch hold of. It is there, your nostrils are full of it, your whole being is surrounded by it. You feel the vibe, but there is no way to catch hold of it. The experience is so big and so vast and our hands are too small.I said to you that your question is very complex – not because of the question, but because of you. You are not yet at the point from where friendliness can become an experience. Be real, be authentic and you will know the purest quality of love – just a fragrance of love surrounding you always. And that quality of the purest love is friendliness. Friendship is addressed to someone, somebody is your friend.Once Gautam Buddha was asked, “Does the enlightened man have friends?” and he said, “No.” The questioner was shocked because he was thinking the man who is enlightened must have the whole world as his friend.But Gautam Buddha is right, whether you are shocked or not. When he says, “The enlightened man has no friends,” he is saying he cannot have friends because he cannot have enemies. They both come together. Friendliness he can have, but not friendship.Friendliness is unfocused, unaddressed love. It is not any contract, spoken or unspoken. It is not from one individual to another individual; it is from one individual to the whole existence, of which man is only a small part because trees are included, animals are included, rivers are included, mountains are included, stars are included. Everything is included in friendliness.Friendliness is just the way of your being real and authentic; you start radiating it. It comes on its own accord, you don’t have to bring it. Whoever comes close to you will feel the friendliness.That does not mean that nobody will be your enemy. As far as you are concerned, you will not be an enemy of anyone because you are no longer a friend to anyone. But your height, your consciousness, your blissfulness, your silence, your peace will annoy many, will irritate many, will make many – without understanding you – your enemies.In fact the enlightened men have more enemies than the unenlightened. The unenlightened may have a few enemies, a few friends. The enlightened men have almost the whole world antagonistic toward them, because blind people cannot forgive the man who has eyes, and the ignorant cannot forgive one who knows. They cannot feel love toward a man who has attained his fulfillment because their egos are hurt.Just the other day, I received four letters from four different American prisons. All the four prisoners are asking for sannyas. One American prisoner has been reading my books. Since I was in that prison for one day, the authorities became interested, the prisoners became interested, so they must have ordered my books. The prisoner has been reading those books.Although he is an American, he writes, “Osho, reading your books, listening to you on the television… And when you were in this prison for one day, I was also here.” He has been there for almost five years. “It was a blissful experience for me and I will never forget the day we were together in the same cell. It was been the most important day of my life.“And I have been carrying something in me which I want to express to you. You have not committed any sin. Of that I was absolutely certain the moment I saw you. But to be innocent seems to be a greater crime than any other, and because you were talked about on the radio, on the television, your books were read all over the country, there came a moment when you were a more important figure than the president of America. That’s what triggered the whole process of destroying your commune, imprisoning you – just to humiliate you.”I was surprised that a prisoner would have such a deep insight. He is saying “People like you are bound to be condemned because even the greatest, most powerful people look like pygmies before your consciousness and your height. It is your fault,” he is saying to me. “If you had not been so successful, you would have been ignored. If your commune had not been so successful, nobody would have bothered about you.”The enlightened man has no friends, no enemies, but only a pure love, unaddressed. He is ready to pour into anybody’s heart who is available. That is real, authentic friendliness.But such a man will provoke many egos, will hurt those who think they are very important and powerful people. The presidents and the queens and the prime ministers and the kings will become immediately worried, concerned. A man who has no power has suddenly become the focus of attention of the people, attracts more people than the people who have power and money and prestige. Such a man cannot be forgiven. He has to be punished whether he has committed any crime or not. And a man of enlightenment cannot commit a crime; that is just a sheer impossibility.But to be innocent, to be friendly, to be loving for no reason at all, just to be yourself is enough to trigger many egos against you. So when I say, “The enlightened man has no enemies,” I mean that from his side he has no enemies. But from others’ side, the greater his height, the more will be their antagonism against him, the more will be the enmity, hatred, condemnation. This is how it has been happening for centuries.Nirvano was just telling me the other day that the day I was fined four hundred thousand dollars – more than half a crore rupees – knowing perfectly well that I don’t possess a single paisa, a single cent, the attorney who was working for Nirvano told her, “They have done it again.”She asked him, “What are you saying?” and he said, “Yes, they have done it again. They have again crucified Jesus, they have again punished a man who is utterly innocent – but his innocence hurts their egos.”Just an intellectual understanding will not be enough – although it is good to have some intellectual understanding because that may help you move toward existential experience. But only the experience will give you the full taste of the tremendous sweetness, the beauty, the godliness and the truth of love.Osho,Can it be true that sex is already over? I have been your sannyasin for four and a half years and my body is thirty-one years of age. I never planned to drop sex, but now it feels like it has dropped me. Am I a “quicky” or what?Dhyan Satyama, the place you are in and the space you are in – four and a half years is really too long. You can understand by the laughter of the people. They are in the same boat.If you meditate, sex is going to drop by itself. Sex is part of your unconsciousness, and it is a blissful experience if it drops by itself. If you force it to drop, it never drops. On the contrary, it becomes perverted; it starts finding ways from the back door. Unless it drops by itself, it never drops.Meditation is the secretmost method of going beyond the body and all that the body contains. Sex is part of your body, your biology. It is not part of your consciousness. The moment you start rising up in your consciousness, sex is left far behind. Naturally, at the age of thirty-one one starts wondering, “Something seems to have gone wrong.” Nothing has gone wrong, everything has gone right. You should feel blessed that you are free from the greatest imprisonment of your being.Adam and Eve were standing underneath the Tree of Knowledge, looking at the apple in Eve’s hand. Eve turned to Adam and said, “After we have eaten the apple, we are going to do what?”Naturally the poor woman was not yet aware about “what” – and they had eaten only one apple! It seems you have been eating too many apples; then one becomes a quicky.Little Ernie’s mother was worried about his progress at school, so she took him to see the psychiatrist. The shrink decided to give him an aptitude test and asked the nurse to put a hammer, a wrench and a screwdriver on the table. “If he grabs the hammer,” said the shrink, “he will be a carpenter. If he grabs the wrench, he will be a mechanic. If he grabs the screwdriver, he will be an electrician.”Ernie fooled them all. He grabbed the nurse.It does not matter what your age is; sex has nothing to do with age. It can disappear at any moment or it may not disappear even when one leg is in the grave. It all depends whether your life is just a horizontal phenomenon or something vertical also.That verticalness can happen any moment – particularly for those who are in meditation. You can start moving differently than any other animal is capable of – except a few men. It is unfortunate that I have to say “except a few men.” Intrinsically, every man is capable of going beyond sex.But people think sex is life. They think the moment sex disappears, there is no point in going on living. Sex was their meaning, their very salt. These are the poorest people in the world, who have not known anything beyond the lowest. They have never raised their eyes toward the stars.“A man has reached old age when he can’t take yes for an answer.”So it doesn’t matter, at the age of thirty-one you have become a wise old man. And the beauty of a wise old man is tremendously valuable in comparison to the foolishness of all those who are just young. The young people are bound to fool around; it is rare at this age, to be capable of getting out of this stupidity that we call youth.Dhyan Satyama, you are exactly what I would like every sannyasin to be. This place is a place for transformation, and the only energy you have got to be transformed is sex.Sex is your basic life force. If you transform it into higher forms, it is going to disappear from its lower manifestations. But you are not going to miss anything. At each higher state the energy will give you more and more blissfulness. The higher it rises, it becomes a tidal wave of blissfulness. You start feeling orgasmic in every fiber of your being. Sexual orgasm seems to be a faraway echo, almost as if you have seen it in a dream, just a faint memory.Because what you are now experiencing is so authentic and so real, so solid, you will not need a companion. That too is one of the basic dependencies, and that’s why all couples are in a constant fight. The reason is that nobody wants to be dependent on anyone. It takes away your dignity, your individuality, your freedom. In a subtle sense it makes you a slave.The man who loves a woman will hate the woman because that woman has become a necessity and one hates to be dependent on anyone. And the same is the case for the woman. Every woman hates the husband, has to hate him because she has become dependent on him for momentary pleasures that don’t last long.A meditator finally comes into a space where he does not need anyone to give him pleasure. He is full of blissfulness, overflowing. He can share, he can fill the whole world with his blissfulness, his very being has become orgasmic.Now that is something tremendously significant to be remembered. You are both: man and woman together. Because you are born of a father and a mother – half of your being has been contributed by your father and the other half by your mother – naturally you cannot be just man or just woman. It is a fallacy perpetuated for centuries that man is man and woman is woman. It is absolutely wrong.Every man has his woman within him and every woman has her man within her. Only the meditator comes to know his whole being. Suddenly his inner woman and the inner man melt and merge into each other. That creates an orgasmic state in him. Now it is no longer a momentary experience that comes and goes; it is something that continues, day in, day out, like heartbeat or breathing. Every moment he is in an orgasmic state.Naturally, sex disappears. A greater experience has come in. The sun has risen; what is the use of having a candle unnecessarily burning? You are bound to blow it out. If somebody keeps his candle burning in the sun, it only shows one thing: that man is blind.A meditator comes to know such a vast experience of joy that all other pleasures simply fade away.You are asking, “Can it be true that sex is already over?”Yes, it is true, and you need not repent for it. Don’t look back. Look ahead. Something greater is going to open in your being, something like a lotus, which will give you absolute fulfillment and contentment, and freedom, independence, individuality. For the first time, you will feel you are able to fly alone into the vast sky of existence. Your need for the other has disappeared – that is what sex is, the need for the other – and in this state of orgasmic experience within yourself, without the help of anyone else you become capable of sharing your love, not bargaining, not even hoping for something in return.In other words, this is what I was just talking about – friendliness, friendliness toward the whole existence. Nothing is greater, more glorious. Nothing is more of a splendor and a miracle.You are saying, Satyama, “I have been your sannyasin for four and a half years and my body is thirty-one years of age.” The body can be of any age…There are two things which are not necessarily of the same age as the body. The lowest of these two is well understood by the psychoanalyst; the higher is still beyond them. Psychology is still struggling to stand up. It is crawling on the ground at the lowest level of human energies; hence, about the lower it has found a few fundamental truths.One is the mental age: a man may be seventy years old, yet his mental age may be only fourteen – or vice versa. In cases like Mozart, when he was only four years of age he was able to play on musical instruments like a great master; at the age of five he was already becoming famous. Even great masters of music could not believe the phenomenal energy of Mozart. At the age of five, he was almost as mature mentally as very few people become at the age of seventy.Psychology has accepted that body and mind don’t grow together. Sometimes, most of the time, the mind is lagging behind and the body goes on growing. A few times, in rare cases, the mind grows ahead and the body lags behind.When Emerson, a great creative and sensitive man, was asked about his age, he said, “Three hundred and sixty years.” The people who were present could not believe it. They could not believe that Emerson, a man of truth, a very innocent man, a man loved and respected by all those who could understand the heights of consciousness; why should he lie about such a thing? Three hundred and sixty years old? He does not look more than sixty. What to make of it?Finally, one man asked, “Perhaps I could not rightly hear what you said. Will you please repeat it?”Emerson laughed and said, “Why are you going in a roundabout way? Why don’t you say directly that you cannot believe that my age is three hundred and sixty years?”Then another man said, “Now we have to ask you. You look only sixty at the most; you will have to give us evidence that you are three hundred and sixty years of age. And a man of your integrity is expected not to lie.”Emerson said, “I am not lying. I have lived as much in sixty years as you will be able to live only in three hundred and sixty years. According to my intensity and totality of life, I have lived in sixty years as much as an ordinary man will live in three hundred and sixty years. I am not lying. It all depends how you live.”Meditation changes your life pattern completely.This has still to be recognized by psychology. But the psychology of the enlightened ones knows perfectly well that consciousness can go on growing. It need not grow simultaneously with the body.Adi Shankara, the founder of a systematic, philosophical system for the Hindus, died at the age of thirty-three. He became enlightened somewhere about the age of seven. His father had died when he was seven. He was the son of a poor father, a poor Brahmin. His mother was only living for him, the only son. At the age of seven, Adi Shankara asked his mother – he wanted to renounce the world. Can you conceive of a child of seven years old thinking of renouncing the world? He must be another Mozart, a Mozart of spirituality.The mother said, “Your father has died and you want to renounce the world. Don’t you think of me?”Adi Shankara said, “I can only promise you one thing: before you die I will be present so in your last moments you can die peacefully. But right now, allow me to renounce the world. I want to become a sannyasin and to go in search.” The mother refused. Not to hurt her, Shankara remained for a few days more.One day he went to the river. He used to go for his bath every day, but that day he insisted that his mother should also come with him. The mother was a little concerned. Why was he so insistent? But then he became absolutely adamant: “If you don’t come, I will not go for the bath. Then I cannot worship and then I cannot eat either,” the mother had to go.The mother was standing on the riverbank and the little child, seven years old, was caught by a crocodile. A crowd gathered, but there was nothing that could be done. Both the feet of the boy were inside the mouth of the crocodile, and Shankara shouted to the mother, “Now there are only two possibilities: either you give me permission to renounce the world and become a sannyasin or the crocodile is going to eat me. It is up to you to decide. Be quick!”It is a strange story. How did the crocodile conspire in this? And the mother of course immediately shouted, “I allow you! You can become a sannyasin. Even this much will be a solace to me, that you are still alive.”And the story goes that the crocodile immediately left him and disappeared. It must have been a very saintly crocodile! Whatever the case – perhaps it is only a parable – one thing is certain: at the age of seven Adi Shankara must have convinced his mother that either she had to allow him to be a sannyasin or she had to be ready for his death. How he managed this is a different matter. But one thing is certain: he gave her the clear-cut choice, either death or sannyas. Obviously the poor mother had no choice; she allowed him.At the age of seven, Adi Shankara became a sannyasin. In the whole history of the world there is no other case parallel to Shankara. Somewhere between the age of seven and eleven – there is no historical record of it, but it seems just between seven and eleven – he must have become enlightened. At the age of eleven he started writing his great commentaries on the Upanishads, and on one of the greatest and most complicated scriptures that exists in India, Badarayana’s Brahma Sutras.At the age of eleven it is almost impossible even to understand it – and Shankara wrote the greatest commentary. It has defeated all the great commentators of the past and all the great commentators that came after him. Nobody has been able to go beyond these flights of consciousness and bring such tremendous meaning to the almost dead scripture of Badarayana’s Brahma Sutras. The way he interprets is possible only after enlightenment. Each small word, the way he gives a turn to its meaning… Something that was looking very ordinary immediately becomes extraordinary. He has the touch that transforms everything into gold.By the time he was thirty-three, he had written all the great commentaries on all the great scriptures, and he had traveled all over the country and defeated all the so-called great philosophers, theologians, and priests. At the age of thirty-three he died.Consciousness is not limited to your physical age. Consciousness can go far ahead of you, your body.So don’t be worried, Satyama. You are saying, “I never planned to drop sex, but now it feels like it has dropped me.” That’s the right way. You should never drop sex with conscious effort because that is only repression. You should not pay any attention to sex. Your whole focus should be toward meditation, and one day sex is going to drop just like an old leaf dropping from the tree; not making even any noise, silently falling into the earth and disappearing.I have given you the name Satyama. I would like to explain to you that that name belonged to an ancient seeker. He was also in the same category as Adi Shankara.When he was just nine years old, he asked his mother, “I would like to go to a forest monastery and learn all about myself, before it is too late.”The mother said, “My son, you are creating a difficulty for me. But if you have decided, then I will not stand in your way. Just one thing you have to remember: in that forest monastery the first question that will be asked will be, ‘What is the name of your father?’ – and I don’t know the name of your father. When I was young, being poor I used to serve in many houses, and I have been sexually abused by so many rich people. I was so poor I could not fight back, neither was anybody ready to believe me. Those people were powerful, and my whole concern was you. I don’t know who your father was out of so many people who have made forced love to me against my will.“So when you are asked in the university, you have to say the simple truth. Your name is Satyakama, and your mother’s name is Jawali. As far as your father is concerned, your mother has said that while young she has been abused, exploited by so many rich people, that she does not know who exactly your father is: ‘So please call me not by my father’s name, call me by my mother’s name. My name is Satyakama, my mother’s name is Jabali. You can call me Satyakama Jabali.’”He went to the forest university. And the first thing the kalpati of the university, the head of the university asked him was, “What is your caste?”He said, “I don’t know.”“Who is your father?”He said, “I don’t know. I asked my mother, and this is the story she has told me. You can call me Satyakama Jabali.”The old man could not believe that a mother could be so truthful as to say this to her own son, and that the son also could be so truthful as to repeat it to a stranger without feeling any guilt or any humiliation – with utter dignity, with absolute acceptance: whatever is the case is the case. The old man must have been a man of immense understanding. He said, “You are accepted, Satyakama Jabali, because at the age of nine you are so truthful. And your mother is also great. Her respect for truth is immense. You don’t know your caste. I know your caste. You are a born brahmin” – the highest caste in India. “Because of your truth, I can deduce logically that you must belong to the highest caste. You are accepted.” One day this Satyakama became enlightened.I have given you the name Dhyan Satyama – just another form of Satyakama. Remain truthful to yourself and to the world and the day of your illumination is not far away.

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is the difference between being humble, being shy, and just hiding out of fear?Anand Shantideva, the difference between being humble, being shy, and just hiding out of fear is immensely great. But man’s unawareness is such that he is not even capable of making distinctions between his own actions and responses to reality; otherwise, the difference is so clear that even to ask the question is useless.First you have to go deeper into the word humble. All the religions have given it a wrong connotation. By humble they mean just the opposite of the egoist. It is not so, because even the exact opposite of the ego will still be ego, hiding behind facades. It is shown once in a while in the so-called humble man. He thinks he is more humble than anybody else. That is the ego. Humility knows no such language.I have told you the story of three Christian monks. Their monasteries were close by in the mountains and they had to pass each other at the crossroads every day. One day it was too hot and they decided to rest a little and to talk to each other a little. After all they are all Christians; they may belong to different sects, but their fundamentals are Christian.As they sat down under the shade of a tree, the first one said, “It is absolutely clear that your monasteries may have something, but you cannot find such wisdom, such scholarship as you will find in our monastery.”The second one said, “You have raised the question, hence I have to say this: your monastery may have scholarship, but that is not the question. Nobody is more austere, disciplined than the people of our monastery. Their austerity is incomparable, and in the ultimate moment of judgment, remember, scholarship will not be counted. What will be counted will be austerity.”The third man laughed and he said, “You both are right about your monasteries, but you don’t know the real essence of Christianity, and that is humbleness. We are the tops in humbleness.”Humbleness and “the tops”? Then it is simply a repressed ego. Out of greed, out of tremendous greed to enter into paradise and to enjoy all its pleasures, a man is capable of repressing his ego and becoming humble. Before I can tell you what true humbleness is you have to understand false humbleness. Unless you understand the false it is impossible to define the true. In fact, in understanding the false, the true arises on its own in your vision.False humbleness is just repressed ego, pretending to be humble but desiring to be at the top. Authentic humbleness has nothing to do with ego. It is absence of the ego. It has no claim of being superior to anybody. It is a simple and pure understanding that there is no one who is superior and there is no one who is inferior. People are just themselves; incomparably unique. You cannot compare them as superior or inferior.Hence, the authentic humble man is very difficult to understand because he will not be humble in the way you understand it. You have known hundreds of humble people, but they were all egoists and you are not insightful enough to see their repressed ego.Once a Christian missionary woman, a young, beautiful woman came to my house. She presented me with the Holy Bible and a few other pamphlets, and she was looking very humble. I told her, “Take all this rubbish away from here. This Holy Bible of yours is one of the most unholy scriptures in the world,” – and immediately she exploded; she forgot all humbleness. I told her, “You can leave the Bible. It was just a device to show you who you are. You are not humble; otherwise you would not have been hurt.”Only the ego is ever hurt. You cannot hurt a humble man.True humbleness is simply egolessness. It is dropping all personality and the decorations that you have accumulated around you, and just being like a small child who does not know who he is, who does not know anything about the world. His eyes are clear; he can see the greens of the trees more sensitively than you can see.Your eyes are full of the dust that you call knowledge. And why have you collected this dust that is making you blind? – because knowledge in the world gives a tremendous energy to your ego. You know and others don’t. The humble man knows nothing. He has come back full circle to his childhood innocence. He is full of wonder. He sees mysteries everywhere. He collects stones and seashells on the sea beach, and rejoices as if he has found diamonds and emeralds and rubies.In my childhood, my mother was very much troubled by me – and so was my tailor because I used to tell him, “Make as many pockets as possible.”He said, “On only one condition: that you don’t tell anybody who has made this dress. Because of you I am losing customers. They say, ‘This tailor has gone a little cuckoo,’” because I had pockets in front, at the back, on the side, on the pants, as many…I told him, “Wherever you can find a little space, make a pocket.” He said, “Are you mad or something?” I said, “You can think anything, but I need that many pockets,” because by the river of my village there were so many beautiful colored stones, and I had to collect them, and I needed different pockets for different colors.My mother was very angry because I would go to sleep with all my stones in my pockets. And then when I was asleep, she would start pulling my stones out of my pockets: “How can you sleep with so many stones?” I told her that this is cheating; nothing should be done to me while I am asleep.Childhood has an immense clarity. In that clarity, in that transparency, in that perspective, the whole world looks a miracle.The humble man comes back to this miraculous existence. We take it for granted, but you don’t see how from the same soil a lotus flower blossoms, and a rosebush, and millions of other flowers. The earth has no colors; from where do those beautiful colors come? The earth is very rough; from where do the velvety roses come? The earth has no greenery; from where do the green trees come?The humble man is a child again. He has no claim, but only gratitude: gratitude for everything, even gratitude for things for which you cannot conceive how one can be grateful.A Sufi mystic, Junnaid, was on a religious pilgrimage with his disciples. In his mystery school it was almost a routine for the disciples to pray with the master. And his prayer was always the same, ending with thankfulness to God: “How am I going to pay? You are giving me so much, you are pouring so much bliss over me, and you never think how I am going to pay for it. I don’t have anything other than gratefulness. Forgive me for my poverty, but I thank you for all the great things that you have given to me.”Nobody had objected to it. The mystery school of Junnaid was flourishing, people were coming from faraway places; it had become one of the richest schools of the Sufis. But on the pilgrimage the disciples started wavering about the last part of the prayer.One day they passed through a fanatic village. Mohammedans don’t believe that Sufis are real Mohammedans, and Sufis are the only real Mohammedans in the whole world. Mohammedans – the orthodox Mohammedans, the priests – condemn Sufis: they have gone astray because they have left the crowd and they have started moving on their own lonely paths. They don’t bother about tradition, and they declare clearly: “If something is wrong in the tradition we are going to correct it.”For example, Mohammedans pray to God, praise him, and end the prayer saying that the God of the Mohammedans is the only God; there is only one God, and there is only one holy book, the Koran, and there is only one prophet, Hazrat Mohammed.Sufis never complete the whole thing; they simply say there is only God – and nothing else. They drop the two points that there is only one holy book, the Koran, and there is only one prophet, Hazrat Mohammed. This hurts the orthodox Mohammedans.Sufis are very humble people and open to receive from all the sources. They don’t bother whether it comes from Christian sources, or Jewish sources, or Hindu sources. Truth is truth; from what door it enters into your being is immaterial.That fanatic village did not give them shelter, did not give them food, did not even allow them to drink from their well. It was a desert country and it continued to happen for three days. They were sleeping in the cold night in the desert – shivering the whole night – hungry, thirsty, rejected, condemned. And in one last village they were even stoned. Somehow they survived by escaping.But the master continued his prayer, just the same as he had been doing it in his mystery school: “How much you have given to us! Your compassion is infinite – and you know our poverty. We cannot give you anything except our heartfelt gratitude.”Now this was too much. Three days: no food, no shelter, cold nights in the desert. The disciples could not tolerate it – Junnaid is going a little too far. One of the disciples said to him, “At least for such days, drop this last part.”Junnaid said, “You don’t understand. God has given us these three days as a fire test. His compassion is infinite: he was just trying to see whether our trust is also infinite or not, whether our trust has some conditions. If you had been received by these three villages, welcomed, given good food, shelter to rest…” because Mohammedans very much respect people who are going for a holy pilgrimage “…then you would have agreed with my prayer – because until now you have never disagreed. For the first time God is giving me the opportunity to show that it is not only on good days that I am grateful; whatever happens, my gratefulness will remain unwavering. Even in my death I will be dying with the same words on my lips.”A humble man lives an unconditional life of gratitude – not only gratitude to God, but gratitude to human beings, to trees, to stars, to everything.Being shy is another way of the ego. It has been converted into something almost ornamental. A person who feels shy, particularly women in the East, are thought to be very graceful because they are so shy – but they are shy because it is thought to be great.In the West, this shyness is slowly, slowly disappearing from the women because it is no longer thought to be of any value. It simply shows a long tradition of slavery. The modern woman in the West has thrown it away because it was also a binding chain, and for liberation it needs to be broken.What are the moments when you start feeling shy? Those are the moments when somebody praises you. Those are the moments when somebody says, “You are so beautiful!” And you know that it is not true; there are not so many beautiful people around. But almost everybody will come across an idiot who will say, “You are so beautiful!” And then a shyness comes because you know it is not true, but it is very ego-fulfilling.You can try. You can tell the ugliest man or the ugliest woman, “My God, the world has not yet discovered the mystery of you! You are so beautiful that even Cleopatra would have been nothing in comparison to you.” And even the ugliest woman will not deny it. In fact, she will say, “You are the only person who has the sensitivity.”It happened that I was expelled from a college. I was expelled from many colleges and many universities. That way it gave me great richness. Nobody has belonged to so many colleges and so many universities. In the city where I was there were twenty colleges; a time came when not a single college was ready to accept me.I asked those principals, “What is the problem?”They said, “You are not the problem. Certainly we cannot say you are the problem, because from every other college you have been expelled – not because you are a problem, but because you create such situations that professors start resigning. Nothing can be said against you because you are only asking relevant questions. But because the professors cannot answer them they feel very humiliated. We don’t want our staff to be disturbed.”Only one college remained, and I thought now it was better not to approach directly but to find some indirect way. So rather than going to the college office, I inquired about the principal – his qualities, what he likes and what he does not like. And from every source I collected knowledge about him. They said, “He is a very religious man. Early in the morning, at four o’clock, he disturbs the whole neighborhood because he is a very big fellow, very fat, and he is a devotee of Mother Kali of Kolkata. He has a big statue in his house, he has made a temple, and when he starts shouting what he calls prayer, he is the only man in the city who can address a meeting of ten thousand people without a microphone. And he becomes so utterly intoxicated by his own words.”I said, “That will do.” I went to the principal’s house early in the morning at exactly four o’clock. He was in his temple. Just a small cloth was wrapped around him – otherwise he was almost naked – and he was shouting continuously, “Jai Kali! Jai Kali! Jai Kali…” The words mean, “Victory to the Mother-Goddess.”I was sitting in the corner of his temple and I also started shouting, “Jai Kali!” He looked around because this was the first time that anybody had joined him. I shouted with all my strength because I cannot speak without a microphone. But it was an absolute necessity.He asked me, “Who are you?” I said, “Just a devotee of the Mother Goddess of Kolkata. But I am a small devotee; you are a big devotee. I have just come to sit at your feet because in this whole city you are the only religious man.”He said, “You are the only man who has ever understood me. Otherwise all the neighbors are reporting me to the police, and my staff in the college think me a little cuckoo.”I said, “All those idiots are of no importance. A man of heart and love declares you to be the greatest devotee of Mother Kali. You are the most spiritual man I have ever come across.”He said, “Can I do something for you?” I said, “Nothing much. I just want to be admitted to your college. Although there are twenty colleges, when I have the opportunity and chance to be under your grace, I would not get entrance into any other college.”He said, “You are admitted. And the day you come, sign the forms. I am giving you a scholarship. And if you want to move into the hostel you will not be charged because you are the only person who has understood me. In my whole life nobody thinks that I am sane, not even my wife, not even my children. ‘Something is wrong.’”I went to his college. He welcomed me at the gate. Even his own staff of professors and students could not believe it. He took me by his side into his office and he told me, “You are not going to pay anything in this college. But as people came to know that you were being admitted… They are as afraid of you as they are afraid of me, so there is only one condition – because I don’t want to disturb the whole staff. They are all against you, and I know they are all against me too. They are all irreligious, materialist people, so you will have to forgive me. Just one condition: you should not attend any classes.”I said, “I don’t care about classes. Can I attend the temple?”He hugged me, with tears in his eyes. He said, “Even at this early age you have such a pure heart. The doors of my temple will always be open for you. I keep it locked because there is fear of the neighbors destroying the statue. But I will give you a copy of the key. Whenever you want you can go there. Lock the door from the inside. Even if a crowd gathers, don’t be worried; these kinds of distractions always come on the path of religious seekers.”I said, “Don’t be worried.”When I graduated from his college I had not attended a single lecture. I was moving to another city for my post-graduation, so I thought it was better to tell him the truth. I went to him, met him in the temple, and I said, “It is very heavy on my heart; I want to tell you the truth. You said that I understand you, and I am the only person who understands you. I beg your pardon, but I don’t understand you either – and I am absolutely certain that some nuts and bolts are either loose or tight.”He said, “What are you saying?”I said, “I have graduated and now there is no problem. It was a simple bribe, a spiritual bribe.”When I had said to him, “You are the greatest religious person I have come across,” even that fat and very big man looked shy. It is the ego again, playing a different game.The egoless person never feels shy because if you say anything untrue about him, he will refute it himself. He wants to expose himself in his absolute authenticity.And the last thing: “…just hiding out of fear.” All are different expressions of the ego: a false humbleness, being shy – knowing perfectly well that what is being said is not true – and the third, hiding out of fear. Except ego, there is no element in you which ever feels fear because ego is the only false thing that has to die. Neither will your body disappear – it will just go back to its basic elements – nor is your consciousness going to die. It will move in its journey to higher levels and forms of expression, or finally it may disappear into the universal consciousness. But that is not death. That is becoming greater, vaster, infinite and eternal. It is not a loss.The only thing that is going to die, and has been dying continuously each time you have died… The body goes to the material elements, the consciousness goes to the universal consciousness or into a new form of consciousness, but one thing dies again and again, and that is the ego.So ego is the root cause of all fear in you. A man who is egoless is also fearless.Shantideva, it is just intellectual discrimination as far as you are concerned. It is not intellectual distinction as far as I am concerned; it is my experience. The day my ego disappeared, I found a totally new kind of humbleness. I have found that there is nothing to be shy about, and I have not been hiding in any way out of fear. This can become your experience too, and unless it becomes your experience, just intellectual understanding will not be enough.Meditation can help you to get rid of the ego and all these three things will disappear. But in an unconscious state it is very difficult to make a distinction between the authentic humbleness and the bogus.A man was saying to me, “Not only do I not know what tomorrow will bring, I’m still not exactly sure what yesterday brought.” We are all living like a somnambulist who walks in his sleep. Our consciousness is so thin, and our unconsciousness is so deep. All our actions come from our unconscious; all our decisions come from our conscious. That’s why our decisions and our actions are never synonymous. You say something but you do something else because within you there is a great split.The doer is the unconscious, and the conscious mind is so small it can only do the talking. So everybody talks beautifully. What even the greatest poets, painters, artists of different dimensions are doing with painting or sculpture or poetry is only from their conscious minds. It is their way of talking; it is their way of expressing, communicating with others. But it is a very unfortunate experience if you come in contact with these people personally. They are more ordinary than the ordinary people – and they have written such golden poetry.I happen to know almost all the great poets of this country because I was traveling all over the country, and every kind of person was meeting me. I was surprised. I had read their poetry, and I had loved their poetry, but I could not believe that these ordinary men could rise to such heights. Slowly, slowly I became aware of a split. The conscious mind talks and it talks beautifully, but the unconscious mind does not know anything about your conscious.As far as action is concerned and your lifestyle is concerned, it is going to come from your unconscious. It is vast: it is your heritage of millions of years of human evolution. It is tremendously powerful. Remember, if you are in the grip of the unconscious, there is no way to see things exactly as they are.Except meditation, there is no other way to bring light into the unconscious darkness of your being. As your meditation grows your consciousness grows, your unconsciousness diminishes. At the ultimate point your consciousness is total, and your unconsciousness has disappeared completely. That is the moment when your words and your life and you are all synonymous. Then there is no split, no division, no antagonism.As far as ordinary humanity is concerned, it may appreciate beautiful paintings, but its appreciation is again an expression of the ego.I have heard about a very rich woman who had purchased a Picasso. She was keeping the Picasso painting in her drawing room. She could not understand what it was; she could not even figure out whether it was hanging upside-down or the right side up. Many times even Picasso was puzzled: what has he painted?He was certainly a great artist, but not a conscious artist. He has poured the colors in the most beautiful combinations, but his paintings don’t have any headings to them. He himself could not figure out what it was all about, and when he was asked he was very angry. He said, “Nobody asks the rose, nobody asks the trees, nobody asks the sun and the moon, what is their meaning. Then why do you harass me, continuously asking, ‘What is the meaning of the painting?’ It is just beautiful, it has no meaning.”The woman was just an exhibitionist. She wanted to show that she has a Picasso painting – one million dollars worth. But it happened many times. A critic would come to look and would say, “It is fake.” Immediately the painting would be removed. Then another critic would come and say, “I want to see the painting” and it had been thrown in the basement. He would say, “Who says it is fake? It is absolutely authentic” and again it would come into the drawing room. This happened many times.Your ego is a very subtle phenomenon. If anything fulfills it, it is good. If it does not fulfill it, it is bad. And everybody pretends to appreciate great music – just to show that he understands great music, great poetry, great literature; just to show that he understands. But the reality is totally different. Ego never wants to accept one thing: ignorance.Little Ernie was getting very tired of the long sermon at the church. In a loud whisper he asked his mother, “If we give him the money now, will he let us go out?”This is pure innocence: If he is after money, give him the money and let us get out. Why get tortured? But only a child can say that, and I would like all my sannyasins to be children again.“Boys,” said Father O’Flanagan to his Bible class, “you should never lose your temper. You should never swear, or get excited or angry. I never do. Now to illustrate – you see that big fly on my nose? A good many wicked men would get angry at that fly, but I don’t. I never lose my temper. I simply say, ‘Go away, fly, go away.’”And then suddenly he jumped and said, “Jesus Christ! It’s a bee, the son-of-a-bitch!”The layer of consciousness is so thin. Our pretensions, our promises are not more than just skin-deep. He forgot all about the great sermon he was giving; he acted exactly how he was trying to tell others not to do, not to act.Shantideva, it will be good not to be only curious about distinctions between things. Become more of a meditator, then the answer will arise within you yourself. And only your answer can make you truly wise. You can accumulate the answers from others but you will still remain “other-wise.”Osho,Every answer you give, not questioned by me, I still take very personally. Is that possible?Again it is Anand Shantideva. In a way whatever I am saying applies to you all, more or less, because I am talking about the very structure of human consciousness and being. People are not much different, so the question may be coming from anyone but it is also your question too. So there is a possibility – and in fact it always should be the case – that the question is perhaps not yours but the answer is for you. Somebody else has asked your question.My experience is that it is always good to let somebody else ask your question. Then you can listen more attentively, more peacefully, more at ease because it is poor Shantideva’s!Shantideva cannot listen so peacefully and so silently. He will be tense, worried because nobody knows what I am going to say. Most probably he will get a few hits, so he is sitting in a defensive posture. Everybody else is enjoying, at the cost of poor Shantideva.But Shantideva, there is no problem. You will have your chance when somebody else asks; you can relax and you can listen and laugh. But remember one thing: any question that any human being can ask will be relevant to you too because we are all in the same boat. Maybe quantitatively somebody may be more involved in the question, somebody less; but it is impossible, unless you are enlightened, unless there is no question left in you, but only the answer…This is one of the miracles of existence: when there are questions you don’t have the answer, and when the answer comes, the questions disappear – just like when you bring the light in the room and the darkness disappears. The questions and the answers never meet. They cannot face each other because the question is only a shadow, a darkness, an absence of light.But my answer cannot become your answer. Your answer is hidden in your own being at the deepest center. You will have to search for it. I can give you indications, I can give you devices, I can show you the path, but you will have to walk alone. I cannot come along with you because it is an inner journey.On his ninth birthday, little Hymie walked into the local pub and yelled to the barmaid to bring him a scotch on the rocks. “What do you want to do?” exclaimed the pretty barmaid. “Get me into trouble?”“Maybe later,” replied little Hymie, “But right now I want the drink.”Very few people get beyond the age of thirteen or fourteen as far as mind is concerned. That creates a strange situation. Physically they look older and you start expecting something wise from them, but you don’t know their mental age is still thirteen or fourteen, and they will behave according to their mental age, not according to their physical age.At the annual gathering of the MacTavish clan, Hamish MacTavish suddenly raced to the microphone, interrupted the singing of “Blue Bells of Scotland,” and cried, “Hoots! Hear this all ye fine and loyal MacTavishes! My money purse is lost! There is a hundred pounds in that purse and I will give a reward of fifteen pounds to whoever brings it up here, now!”From the back of the crowd came a voice, “I will give twenty-five.”In real situations you are bound to behave according to your actual mental state. Ordinarily you can pretend to be a wise old man, but your wisest old men are still as retarded as anybody else.Mulla Nasruddin was sitting on his balcony and suddenly he shouted to his servant, “Bring my glasses, quick.”The servant brought the glasses, but he said, “What is the hurry?”Mulla said, “What is the hurry? You idiot! A beautiful woman was passing and I could not figure out whether she was a woman or a man. I needed glasses quickly. But you came a little late and that beautiful woman is no longer on the street. She turned the corner into a smaller lane.”One day Mulla Nasruddin is walking on the road. All his hair has become absolutely white. He finds a beautiful young girl and he pinches the girl’s backside. The girl shrieks and says, “You are an old man, the age of my grandfather, all your hair is white – and what are you doing?”Mulla Nasruddin said, “It is true that my hair is white, but my heart is still black – and I follow my heart, not my hair.”Shantideva, it is perfectly good that you take my answers to questions not asked by you very personally. That’s the right attitude. It doesn’t matter who has asked; what matters is that the question is also yours, lurking somewhere in your unconsciousness. Because the other has asked, it has surfaced. My answer is as much for you as for the man who has asked the question.I am talking to you all almost as if you were one individuality. I am not answering questions for different people because my understanding is that all questions are human, and those who are understanding enough will take as much out of the answer for themselves as they can without thinking whose question it was.And it is easier, I repeat again, to understand the answer when it is not your question because you are relaxed. It has nothing to do with you, it is somebody else’s problem; you can listen more attentively, more totally. The person who has taken the trouble to ask the question cannot relax while I am answering.You can feel it, Shantideva, right now. You will be tense because I am not a reliable man. Sometimes I am good, sometimes I am not; sometimes I can be absolutely mad. If you can provoke me by your question, then I can behave just like a bull in a china shop.The third question is also from Shantideva, so I am not going to answer it today. It is enough. We will take his question another time. Three questions in one morning session – he will get dengue fever!

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,How can I leave my ego outside the front gate? It follows me like a shadow and even hides behind my back and then I am not able to see it.Anand Shantideva, the question shows you have not understood the meaning of the ego. It is not something visible or tangible; it is not even a shadow that follows you. It is something that sits upon your head – that’s why you cannot see it. It is all that you know about yourself: your name, your respectability, your power… Whatever you have, it is your ego.The ego is simply a mind formation. To understand it is a very subtle process. The society you have been brought up in does not want you to know yourself. But it will be very dangerous not to allow you to know yourself and to leave you in a state of chaos. The danger is that in that chaos you may start looking for yourself.One cannot live in a chaos. One has to find the center of the cyclone; it is an absolute necessity for survival. The society creates the mind as a substitute for your being. And for its own part, the mind creates the idea of “I,” the ego. That substitute is absolutely necessary to keep you away from yourself because once you believe that this is you, the very question of any search for yourself does not arise. That has happened to millions of people who have lived on this earth and that is happening even today to the millions of people that are on the earth.Today we have more ignorance in the world than ever, just because of the population. Now there are five billion idiots on the earth. It has never happened before; it is absolutely unique. You are living in a world that is very special – five billion people knowing nothing about themselves. The ignorance was never so thick and the night was never so long.But whatever the case with the world, each individual is capable of coming out of this darkness. The first thing he has to realize is that he does not know himself. And whatever he knows about himself is just opinions imposed on him by others.Somebody has said to you, “You are so intelligent,” and it was so satisfying to believe it that you believed it. It needs tremendous courage to disassociate yourself from all that you have been believing you are.Shantideva, you are the ego; hence you find it difficult to leave it outside the gate. If you leave it outside you will be leaving yourself outside because you don’t know anything else about yourself, except the ego. It can be left outside the gate only if you understand its very structure. It is a false substitute to keep you engaged and busy so that you don’t have time, you don’t have the energy and you don’t have any need to look for your authentic self.In short, you are completely false. I don’t believe in compromises. Either you are real or you are unreal; it is not possible that half of you is real and half of you is unreal. The real and the unreal cannot meet. It cannot be that a certain percentage in you is real and the remainder is unreal. It is impossible. It is not allowable by the universal law of consciousness. The real and the unreal never meet.Have you ever seen light and darkness meeting? Either it is light or it is dark; you cannot have both together in your room – one sitting on this side of you, the other sitting on the other side of you so that you can enjoy both the light and darkness.A meditator enters into his mind and starts watching how the mind functions. Just the very fact of watching the mind makes him aware that he is not the mind, and he is not anything that belongs to the mind. He is a faraway entity, qualitatively different, just a pure watching. In other words, just a pure mirror which only reflects the reality but is not imprinted by any reality.If the ugly face comes in front of it, without any judgment, without any condemnation, it shows the ugly face in its full detail. And when the beautiful face appears there is no appreciation, no evaluation either. It shows the ugly face and the beautiful face with the same detached, faraway, reflective witnessing.The moment you become a witness there will be no need to leave your ego outside the gate. In fact, the ego will have left you; even if you run after it you cannot catch hold of it.So the right process has to be understood. The ego is not something like your umbrella and your shoes and your raincoat that you leave outside the gate. The ego is hidden inside your mind. Of course you cannot leave your head outside, and the ego comes along wherever you go.The ego has to be understood. In that understanding it disappears. Only a witness knows that the ego is a false entity and you need not fight with any false entity.Do you ever fight with darkness? When you find darkness in your room, do you struggle with it to throw it out? Do you wrestle with it? Do you start taking out your sword to cut off the head of darkness? If you do any of these stupid things, you will simply show your unintelligence. You will not be able even to touch the darkness that is in your room. You cannot put it into bags and take out the bags and throw them into the neighbor’s house.With the negative nothing can be done directly. If you want to do anything with the negative, do something for the positive. When you don’t want darkness in the room you bring the light. You don’t bother about darkness. Your whole approach is totally different. You bring the light in, and the moment the light is in you don’t find any darkness.The same is true about your ego. It has no existence of its own; it is a false substitute that has been given to you so that you can go on playing with it and completely forget the search for the real self. And the demands of this false ego are immense, never fulfilled. It will demand money, it will demand respect, it will demand power – and you go on fulfilling it but it will always remain empty.You cannot make an egoist contented. The ego is always like an open wound; it goes on growing bigger. The more you try to fill it the more you find it is empty and the more demanding it becomes. You become almost a slave to a false entity. Your whole life is wasted in ambitions created by the ego.The ego is the most dangerous invention that society has managed to create. When you want to drop it, don’t think in terms of dropping it – because even the word drop gives you the idea that it is something. It is nothing. You cannot drop it, you cannot put it out of doors. You have to look into the reality of it.In deep meditations you have to become a witness of all the functionings of the mind because the ego is the combined by-product of your mind’s functioning. Its thoughts, its desires, its ideologies, its prejudices, its politics, its philosophy, its religion – everything contributes in some way to create a certain ego in you.I had a professor, Doctor Das, a very famous philosopher not only in India but in almost every country. He had been teaching around the world; he had come back to India, to his home, just to retire. He was my teacher for only three months; after those three months he went into retirement. But those three months were a great revelation to me and to him.The first day when he entered the classroom I was sitting in his chair. He looked so embarrassed standing by my side and I was so relaxed in the chair. The students started laughing and he said, “What is going on?”I said, “Nothing is going on. I find this chair more comfortable than the other chairs; and I am not a stupid person, I can choose what is right for me.”He said, “You seem to be a very strange person. This chair is for the teacher.”I said, “Then there is no problem. I will teach! What is the problem? If this chair is for the teacher, then the teacher is sitting in it. You can find some other chair and sit down.”He was an old man, a world-famous philosopher, and his ego was immensely hurt. He said, “You don’t understand with whom you are talking.”I said, “I understand perfectly well. You don’t understand with whom you are talking.” But I did not leave the chair. I told him he can do whatever he wants to do. He can go to the vice-chancellor, he can bring the vice-chancellor…“I am going to remain in this chair.”He said, “What is the purpose of all this mess?”I said, “The purpose is to show you that it is not my sitting in the chair that is hurting you, it is your ego. If you accept it I will leave the chair. If you don’t accept it then you can bring anybody to help you, but as far as I know the students, nobody is going to help.”He waited a minute. There was utter silence in the class. Everybody was afraid that if the vice-chancellor came and the proctor came, there was going to be trouble for me. They would immediately expel me. I had already been expelled from so many places, but I always continued to do strange things. What was the need to sit in his chair?But Doctor Das was certainly an intelligent man. He did not go out. He said, “Perhaps you are right. It is my ego that is hurting, it is not a question of the chair.”I said, “Then I can leave it. But remember, before you retire you have only three months more in this university. It will be good if you retire but don’t take your ego away with you. Leave it here in this chair for somebody else to use.”I left the chair, and he was in such confusion that he told the students, “Today it will not be possible for me to teach.” And to me he said, “I would like you to come with me to my home. I want to discuss some important matters with you.”He was an unmarried man. He had written many beautiful books, and before encountering him I had read everything that he had written. He took me in his car to his home. On the way he said, “I am sorry that I did not understand your purpose. You are the first man in my life who has pointed at my ego. I certainly have a very big ego and it has gone on becoming bigger and bigger as I have become more and more respected in the world of philosophy. You will have to help me to get rid of it. I am also feeling the torture of it, I am also feeling the burden of it, but I don’t know what to do with it.”He had never thought about meditation. Philosophers never meditate; their whole approach to life is intellectual. They think about everything, but never become a witness of any experience, particularly the experience of their inner thought processes.Shantideva, if you really want to get rid of the ego, you will have to go so deep into your meditations that you can create a distance between you and your mind – and immediately you will see the phoniness of your ego. And the moment you have seen it, it is dropped. Not that you can drop it, but your seeing it, your understanding it, your witnessing it and it drops on its own accord.Little Elmer was in the toy section of the huge department store checking out the latest electronic kids’ toys. Over the loudspeaker came an announcement, “Mrs. Ethel Evan is missing her son, Elmer Evan. Will little Elmer please come to the manager’s office immediately.”Little Elmer was visibly depressed. “Damn it,” he grumbled, “I am lost again.”But in fact everybody is lost – lost because you don’t know who you are, lost because you have not encountered your being, lost because you are not a real, integrated individual but only a phony personality.An Englishman was marooned on a desert island where he was looked after by a beautiful native girl. On the first night she gave him the most exotic drinks. On the second night she fed him the most delicious food imaginable. On the third night she said to him, “Would you like to play games with me now?”“Don’t tell me,” replied the passionately-excited Englishman, “that you have got a football here as well!”An Englishman is just an Englishman!Everybody has grown a certain ego, and the ego goes on dominating you in every sphere of life. It dictates to you the style in which you should live. It dictates to you what is right and what is wrong. And if you look deeply, the day you will be able to see your ego as a false entity you are bound to feel so sorry for yourself: you have been dictated to by a false entity your whole life. Now you will be able to see that whatever was told to you as right, is nothing but nourishment for the ego; and whatever was told to you as wrong, is nothing but deprivation of nourishment to the ego.All your right and wrong, all your moral and immoral acts, all your good and evil can be demarcated with a single thing; a definition that you may have never thought about. All that fulfills your ego is moral, virtuous, spiritual, religious, and all that goes against your ego is a sinner’s life, a criminal way of living, immoral, unspiritual, condemnable. All honor is for the ego, all dignity is for the ego and all dishonor is for the person who is not fulfilling the demands of the ego.But once you become a witness, you can see this subtle strategy, this whole psychology of destroying you and keeping you away from yourself and the very center of existence.Your ego is your hell, your ego is your misery. Your ego is the cancer of your soul. The only way out of it is to become a witness of your mind processes.Osho,The other night during discourse I realized that I am so stubborn and pigheaded. I always have this “but” inside me, and I don't know how to jump over it. Osho, how can I surrender to you totally?Your question is tremendously interesting. You say, “The other night during discourse I realized that I am so stubborn and pigheaded.” The moment anybody realizes that he is pigheaded, he no longer is. No pig can ever realize that he is pigheaded; that’s an impossibility. If you have realized that you are pigheaded, one thing is absolutely certain: you are not a pig.And you have also realized that you are “so stubborn.” I would like humbly to say to you that you are not because a really stubborn person will jump any “but,” howsoever big it is. It will become a challenge to his stubbornness.You are asking, “I always have this ‘but’ inside me and I don’t know how to jump over it.” Just be pigheaded and stubborn and jump!Moreover, I have never asked you to drop your “buts” and “ifs”. You cannot. Your mind is always schizophrenic; it is always split in diametrically opposite directions. So one part of the mind says one thing and the other part immediately contradicts it. That is the “but.” One part wants to complete the sentence but the other part comes in.But I have never asked you to drop it or jump over it! You have misunderstood me. I only want you to understand whatever is the case within you. Just the understanding is enough to dispel all darkness. This is the language of the ego: How can I jump? How can I drop? Every “how” is born out of the ego.The man of understanding simply wonders: Where is the ego? Where are all those “buts” and “ifs”? They have simply disappeared. In the intense light of your awareness all these things cannot exist.And finally you say, “Osho, how can I surrender to you totally?” From where did you get the idea that you have to surrender to me? You have to surrender to existence, not to me. That’s my continuous fight with all the religions: they all want you to surrender to them.A few months ago the Catholic pope even declared that you are not allowed to confess to God directly; he has called it one of the greatest sins. You have to go via the right channel. First you have to confess to the priest, who has a direct line with God. Then he will persuade God on your behalf – but you cannot do it directly.Even God is not allowed to you; you have to surrender to the priest, to the pope, to the shankaracharya, to the imam, to the prophet. And who are all these people? Most probably they are highly egoistic personalities who are enjoying the ego of being a prophet, who are enjoying the idea that they have come to save the world – that they are the saviors – who are enjoying the idea they are the only begotten son of God. They don’t have any evidence, not even a birth certificate. These people seem to be very pious egoists, and their piousness hides their ego.I am not a savior. Surrendering to me is absolutely futile. I am not a prophet; I am not even a faraway cousin of any god. I am just simply myself.And do you understand the responsibility? When you surrender yourself to anybody, you are also surrendering your freedom. You are becoming a slave in the name of religion and spirituality. And this slavery goes far deeper than the ordinary slavery when your body is enslaved. This is spiritual slavery.You can revolt against physical slavery because it has been imposed on you by others. You have accepted this spiritual slavery on your own. You have surrendered to someone – a Jesus Christ, a Gautam Buddha, a Mahavira. How can you revolt? Not a single Christian has revolted against Jesus Christ in two thousand years. Not a single Buddhist has revolted against Gautam Buddha in twenty-five centuries. The simple fact is: it is your own surrender, you never think of it in terms of slavery.I have never asked you to surrender to me even partially, what to say about totally.Surrender to existence, surrender to the stars and the ocean and the mountains, and they will not become a bondage to you. They will give you freedom and they will give you tremendous blessings. The whole existence will become your home. Surrender to the whole. In that surrender there is some significance because in that surrender your ego will disappear.And surrender can only be total; it cannot be partial. You cannot say: “I surrender to existence twenty percent, thirty percent.” It is not a business deal. It is not in any way a negotiation. Either one hundred percent or zero percent – these are the only two simple alternatives.But remember never to surrender to any man. Howsoever the man may be bragging, all men are just made of the same flesh and the same bones and the same marrow as you are. Just a few cunning people, pretenders, hypocrites take advantage of your innocence and start calling you “the sheep” and they become the shepherds. And you enjoy being called “the sheep” and you don’t feel the humiliation in it and you don’t see that you are being spiritually insulted. On the contrary, you think that it is something to rejoice about – the shepherd, the only begotten son of God has accepted you.In the first place there is no evidence of God. In the second place there is no evidence that he has any wife. In the third place there is no evidence that he has ever produced a son, and he is described as omnipotent in the scriptures, and he is finished by giving birth to only one son in eternity! I don’t think he knows anything about birth control methods because they were not in existence in the beginning when he was creating the world. He himself never created them.Neither does God exist, nor are there messengers of God, nor are there prophets of God, nor are there only begotten sons of God. All these people have only one thing more than you: their egos are very big – so big that they can convince themselves because of any illusion, for any hallucination. The best way to get convinced of any illusion is to spread it to people, and when a few people start believing in you… There are always people ready to believe in anything: interplanetary visitors only six inches in height, colored forest green, who come and meet people…Just the other day I received a letter from a sannyasin couple: “We both have been visited by these green visitors from faraway planets. And now we are feeling very much afraid because they have promised they will be coming again and again and they want to know more and more about human life. What do you say? What are we supposed to do? Should we meet them or avoid them or escape from this place?”And whenever such cuckoo letters come to me I have only one answer: Send these fellows to Kaveesha. That is her department because I am tired of answering such things.People are ready to believe any stupid thing because they are so hollow anything seems to fill them. It is said that to a drowning man even a straw seems to be a saving device; he clings to the straw, knowing perfectly well that a straw cannot save him. On the contrary, he will also take the straw with him down the river. All your beliefs are nothing but straws you are clinging to because you know you are drowning.I don’t want you to surrender to me. It is against my whole conscience. You are my fellow-travelers; I cannot degrade you and I cannot humiliate you. If anything, I can give you more dignity and more self-respect. To me, that is the authentic function of a master. Only the fake, so-called masters demand surrender.Yes, I also preach surrender, but the surrender is to be not to me, but to the whole. And it will be easier for you to surrender to this infinite beautiful cosmos. Your “buts” will disappear.But never surrender to anything less than the whole. That kind of surrender is going to be your slavery. That has been the slavery of the whole of mankind for thousands of years.I teach you freedom, not surrender. I teach you totality in your living, and I teach you tremendous respect and love and gratitude for the whole.You must have got this idea from all kinds of bogus scriptures that are continuously being written by ignorant people, but they are so ignorant that they cannot be aware of their ignorance. And out of their ignorance they go on saying all kinds of things because those things have been repeated so often they have become almost true.Beware of crowd psychology and beware of the human past. It has been ugly, utterly ugly. Unfortunately we inherit it, but fortunately there is a possibility to disinherit it. You can cut yourself off from the whole past and you can start a totally new approach and a new style of life that is in tune with existence – not in tune with the Holy Bible, not in tune with the holy Koran, not in tune with me, but in tune with the whole of existence.Unless you fall in tune with the universal heartbeat, I cannot call whatever you do spiritual. It will be some kind of slavery – maybe some new kind, but slavery is slavery whether it is old or new.Bridget and Maureen were returning from church, where the priest had just preached a sermon on married life.“What did you think of the sermon?” Bridget asked.“I wish,” said Maureen, “that I knew as little about marriage as he did.”It is a very strange world. Here, people who are not married, who have taken the vow of being celibate for their whole life, teach people about marriage, and these idiots are called “Father” by others: father to whom? All your religious scriptures that teach you how to live are written by people who have renounced life. They don’t even know the ABC of life. And they are cowards because they have escaped from life and its struggle and its challenges, and now they are trying to preach the essential meaning of life, the fundamentals of life to people.People who have never loved anybody write treatises on love. Because of these strange people it is a very strange world: they never think for a moment that they don’t have any authority to talk about something that they have not experienced. But it is so ego-fulfilling to preach, to advise – whether you know anything or not.It happened once that I was invited to a religious conference and a Jaina monk spoke before me. He was saying beautiful things, but I could feel the vibe of the person, whatever he was saying was just like a parrot: he knew nothing. It was not in his eyes, it was not in his face, it was not in his gestures, it was not in his words, even though they were from the scriptures, they were so hollow, so empty.I had to speak after him. I was very new in that city and the monk who had spoken before me was a very famous man in those parts, so people had really come to hear him. I was too young and absolutely unknown in that part. I was visiting that city for the first time, so as he stepped down, people started leaving.I had to shout on the microphone, “Everybody should stop, wherever he is!” Naturally, they had never heard such a man. I told them, “Sit back down in your seats. You don’t know me. Just give me five minutes and then I will order you to go out. After five minutes I will pause and anybody who wants to go should go immediately. But five minutes is absolutely my right. You have invited me and you are misbehaving with me.”So they all sat down feeling, “This is a strange man. Perhaps there may be something.” And in those five minutes I criticized the monk who had spoken before me.I said, “The first thing is, he knows nothing about what he was saying.” There was a wave of shock because they had all respected that old man – he was almost seventy-five. And I said, “Although he is seventy-five, he is utterly retarded because he does not know how to interpret the scriptures he has been quoting. All his interpretations are misinterpretations, and I am going to contradict him point by point.”And then I told the people, “Now five minutes are over. Anybody who wants to leave should leave immediately.” Out of almost ten thousand people, not a single person left. It was too difficult now to leave; they wanted to know exactly what I was going to say against the monk.I contradicted the monk completely, in absolute detail, not leaving anything to be improved upon. The monk must have been a sincere man. There are still a few people who must have been present in that meeting. One I particularly remember is Ishwarbhai from Mumbai and his wife Guna.I remember them because after that day they became my people, and Ishwarbhai’s wife Guna told me, “When you were in the middle of destroying that Jaina monk so completely, I told my husband, ‘It is time we got out of the crowd. There is going to be a riot without any doubt. After this man has finished there is going to be immense fighting.’”Ishwarbhai was also willing: “It seems dangerous, but to move is also dangerous because that man is strange.” They were sitting in the front row. “He will immediately stop and he will say, ‘Sit down!’ And I cannot stand up; I am feeling so shaky. We have been hearing that old monk for years. We thought he knew, and he is sitting there with his head down. It seems that perhaps this young man is right.”After the meeting that old monk sent two messengers to me. “I would like to meet you because it is the first time in my life that anybody has been so sincere and so honest, so fearless to expose me. It is true: I don’t know anything, and all that I was quoting was practiced and rehearsed. I have been preaching for years so it has become almost my profession. But nothing was spontaneous and nothing was supported by my own experience because I don’t know what consciousness is, what meditation is.“Just one thing you will have to grant me, because I am the head of my whole community and they won’t allow me to go to the place where you are staying. They are already angry with you. Their long-standing teacher has been completely contradicted. Although they are angry, they cannot do anything because I am not supporting them, I am saying you were right. But one thing they will certainly do: they have made it clear to me that, ‘You cannot go to see that man at his place. If you want to see him, invite him to your own place. It is a question of the prestige of our community.’”So when those two strangers came to me, I said, “There is no problem. I don’t have any community and I don’t have any chains on me. I am a free man. I can go anywhere; nobody can prevent me. I am ready to come with you.”They were thinking that it would not be so easy. I went, and there was a big crowd; great sensation, apprehension in the air that there might be some trouble. But when they saw me coming alone they could not believe it because I had been informed that they were violently angry against me.Their teacher, their master, the man to whom they had surrendered, had been utterly humiliated, although I had not humiliated the man. This was my way of giving respect to him, to bring him to his reality, to wake him up. It is not humiliating. And as I reached the temple where the man was staying, he asked me, “I would like to talk to you in aloneness, so please, everybody should go out and close the door.”And as the door was closed, that old man simply started crying like a child. I can still see his face and his tears.I said, “You don’t have to feel so desperate. There is still time.”He said, “But seventy-five years are lost, and not a single man ever told me that what I am talking is parrot talk. For a moment, in the beginning, I felt a certain anger arising in me. My ego hurt. But then I thought it was better to listen to the whole thing. And as I listened to you, slowly, slowly it became clear that you are right: I don’t know myself. And without knowing myself, I have been preaching things. It is really not only criminal but absolutely a sin to tell people something that you don’t know yourself.”Sharon was supporting Paddy at the altar at their wedding, when the priest announced that he would not perform the ceremony so long as Paddy was drunk.“Take him away from here,” he told Sharon, “and bring him back when he is sober.”“But Father,” wailed Sharon, “he won’t come when he is sober.”Who will get married when he is sober? A certain kind of drunkenness is needed, a certain unconsciousness. In your unconsciousness you are repeating about surrender, about totality. You have heard these words – and perhaps you have heard these words from me – but you have managed the meaning that you wanted to.Surrendering to me is giving your responsibility to me. There is no way that any individual can perform your spiritual journey on your behalf. So one day you will be frustrated, then you will be angry, then you will start condemning me: “I have wasted ten years and I have not reached anywhere.”It is such great stupidity, but you won’t recognize that from the very beginning you have chosen a wrong way. You have not listened exactly to what I am saying. You are managing to listen to what you want to listen to. If you surrender to the whole, you won’t feel that you can condemn the whole one day if nothing happens. Then people will laugh and they will say, “What do you mean by ‘the whole’? The stars, the sun, the moon, the sky, the mountains, the rivers – do you think these are going to transform you?” You will be laughed at. But I want to tell you that only such a surrender can bring a transformation to you.But transformation is not brought by the stars, neither is it brought by the mountains, nor by the whole. The transformation is brought by your surrender and your totality – but remember the meaning of surrender and totality. Ten years or ten lives, you cannot go back if surrender is total. You cannot take back your surrender one day and say, “Now I am no longer surrendered.”If you do that, that means that all the time you thought you were surrendered, you were not. Surrender is absolute, unconditional, and there is no way to take it back. That’s why I insist on totality. Don’t hold back anything. Just give up all to the whole to which it belongs.You have come out of the whole. You belong to the whole. Your life is nourished every moment by the whole. Just allow the whole to take over your being completely, entirely.And in the right moment, in the right season, the spring comes and the flowers start blossoming.

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why am I forcing situations according to my will, instead of accepting them and letting them just happen? I have a feeling that my body makes me aware of it, reacting with a high fever.The upbringing of man is so poisonous, so crippling, that it destroys all that is significant and valuable in you and replaces it with cruelty, violence, a desire to dominate. The whole of society from all sides supports this destruction of your innocence; it is favorable to these.Forcing anything simply means you are forcing against yourself. This creates the schizophrenia, the split personality that is fighting with itself. This is the most ugly and destructive device that has been used by the vested interests for thousands of years. They found a simple clue to how to destroy the individual because the individual is a danger – a danger against exploitation, a danger against slavery, a danger against any kind of enforcement. An individual would rather like to die than submit.Individuality has a dignity, but man has been taken away from his individuality by a simple device: put the individual in conflict. And you know the ancient proverb: A house divided cannot stand for long.You are continuously fighting with yourself because you have been given such stupid ideas about yourself that you have to either choose between your nature, your relaxedness with nature; or you have to choose thousands of years of conditioning. And conditionings go deeper and deeper every day. Pleasure has been condemned, non-seriousness has been condemned, playfulness has been condemned. The whole of humanity has been turned into utter seriousness – and seriousness is a psychological sickness. It can seep deeper and can even make your soul sick.There is nothing to be serious about in the world. There are only three things that happen in your life. One has already happened – your birth. You could not do anything about it. Another is death. Again, although it has not happened yet, you cannot do anything about it. So drop these two things completely, they are beyond your grasp. Between these two remain life, love, rejoicing.A man who is alive cannot be suppressed so easily. A man who loves has a clarity of vision and cannot be befooled by any politicians. And a man who knows how to be playful will not be found in any church, any temple, any mosque, any synagogue. Those are the places where people who have died before their death go; people who have taken a standpoint against life, against love, against playfulness, against joy, against the whole universe.But if you become blinded by these conditionings, then you will start repressing within yourself any possibility that can make you livelier, more loving, more blissful, more ecstatic. It is a struggle between you and your whole past. The past is long; it has gone to your very roots. But if you are alert enough there is still time to get out of the net, out of the chains of the past.A man who is free from the past is the only man who is free to live in the present. And a strange thing to be remembered: the man who is free from the past – as if he is absolutely new and fresh on this beautiful planet – will also be automatically free from the future.The future is a projection of the past. The past no longer exists, the future does not exist yet, but the past gives you ambitions and desires and all kinds of stupid ideas of greed and desire. Automatically you start looking at the future as a refuge.And the reality consists only of now – the present. It has nothing to do with the past and nothing to do with the future. It is so concentrated in this moment that if you can be in this moment, all that you are seeking and searching will be fulfilled.This moment is the door to the divine.My whole effort here is to pull all my people away from the past and from the future and just make them available to the intense beauty of the present.Live moment to moment, dropping the past continuously as dust gathered on the mirror. A man who is contented in the present will never bother about the future. You think about the future because your present is misery; you are in utter agony. To avoid it, not to look at it, you focus on faraway goals. Those goals are never to be fulfilled. You will become addicted to ambitions and goals; but remember, wherever you will be, it will always be the present, never the future.Once you have forgotten to live the present you have already died. It is another matter that it may take sixty, seventy or eighty years for you to be buried or burned on a funeral pyre. You have died long before. The moment you have lost contact with the present your death has happened. But if you can regain the contact, resurrection is possible.Only the present can give you the space to relax and not to force anything. It is the past that gives you ideals, moralities against nature. You cannot win against nature. It is so big and so huge and you are simply a small dewdrop in the ocean of nature. The dewdrop cannot fight with the ocean. It just has to relax and become one with the ocean.According to me, an authentic sannyasin, a seeker of truth, is a seeker of the present.You are asking, “Why am I forcing situations according to my will?” These are stupid ideas that have been given to you. You don’t have any will. The very idea of willpower is an absolute fallacy. The will belongs to existence. You can participate in that will. If you drop your personality, your separation, you will have the universal will within you. You don’t have individual wills. But it is ego-satisfying when people tell you that you are a man of great will.What is man? – just a fistful of dust. Yes, something is also present within that dust, but it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the total.Secondly, why are you forcing situations? Haven’t you seen a river coming from the mountains’ high peaks where the snow has never melted; passing through valleys, passing through unknown territory? Where is the river going? It is utterly relaxed – no goal to be tense about, nowhere to reach. Each moment it is enjoying the trees it is passing by, the mountains it is descending. And one day every river, without exception, reaches the ocean.But every man is not so fortunate. Most of them get lost in a desert and evaporate on a funeral pyre. Only a few fortunate ones, the blessed ones, reach the ocean. The secret is so simple and so obvious. That’s why it misses you.Who are you to force situations? What power have you got to force situations? Situations are coming from existence itself. The wiser course will be to be in accord with them, not in discord. When you are in accord, you can ride on those situations, but the moment you start fighting, you are so tiny and the universe is so vast. There is no possibility of any victory. Then frustration sets in; then misery, agony, suffering follow.Be just like a white cloud passing in the sky without any desire to reach anywhere. There is no need; you are already there. What more do you want? If the winds are blowing toward the south, the white cloud goes toward the south. Each moment of floating high above, on the air, in the sky, is such an ecstasy – who cares whether the direction is south or north or east or west? And if suddenly the winds change and they start moving again toward the north, the cloud does not complain; it does not say that this is illogical. “We were going toward the south and suddenly for no reason at all you started moving toward the north again.” Without any resistance the cloud simply starts moving with the winds, wherever they are going. There is no conflict between the cloud and the wind.That should be the right standpoint for all seekers of truth: no conflict with nature, no conflict with existence, and all your misery, all your tension, all your anguish and angst will disappear on their own accord. They are your creation. Of course you are not totally responsible; they are the heritage of a long, ugly, unnatural past.What kind of situations do you try to change? Love arises in your heart, but the society says, “Love is blind: beware of it! It is infatuation; it is a kind of slavery and you will repent for it, so it is better from the very beginning not to allow such things.” The head is full of all this kind of morality, puritanism, and you start fighting with your heart.Your head and your heart are not together, that is the problem. Your head is full of all kinds of nonsense, and that nonsense does not belong to you. It has been given to you by your parents, by your society, by your teachers, by your professors, by your priests, by your politicians. You have a head full of all kinds of bullshit. And this head tries to dominate the heart, which is still beyond the capacity of anybody to distort, to contaminate.That is the only hope for man: to listen to your heart and go along with it. Then your life will become a blissful pilgrimage. All the methods of meditation I teach you are nothing but… In short, it can be said they are bringing you from the head to the heart, from logic to love, from ego to egolessness, from your separation to a deep merging and melting with the whole.The whole knows better. The whole knows nothing of your ideals, the whole knows nothing about your moralities and conceptions of right and wrong. But the miracle is, the moment you merge with the whole, everything is right and everything is good and everything is beautiful. Satyam shivam sundaram: it is true, it is divine, and it has a beauty that is not of this earth.You are also stating… The thing I said just yesterday to Shantideva, “Don’t ask so many questions otherwise you will get dengue fever.” You have got dengue fever! You are saying, “I have a feeling that my body makes me aware of it, reacting with a high fever.” It is not a high fever, it is simply dengue fever. It will go within two days, so don’t be worried. It is bound to happen in this city of Pune, where there must be at least twenty times more mosquitoes than people – and not small mosquitoes. Maharashtrian mosquitoes are very stubborn!I am reminded…I was staying with one of the Buddhist monks, one of the most learned in India, Bhikkshu Jagdish Kashyap, in Sarnath. There were so many mosquitoes that even in the daytime we would sit inside the mosquito net. He would sit in his mosquito net, I would sit in my mosquito net.I asked him, “Jagdish Kashyap, do you know why Buddha never came again to Sarnath?” Because it is a strange thing that Sarnath is the only place that Buddha visited only once and stayed only one day. He visited Vaishali twenty times and he visited hundreds of towns dozens of times – because in forty-two years of continuous preaching he was always on the move. But in the whole of history no one has ever wondered why he did not come to Sarnath again.Jagdish Kashyap told me, “I am a great scholar of Buddhist scriptures, but I cannot answer your question. How can you find such strange questions?”I said, “Write down in your scriptures that Buddha never came back to Sarnath because he had no mosquito net!”And when I came to Pune, I realized the mosquito net is far more necessary in this religious city, this cultured city. You can see all around –even in such a hall you have to put up a mosquito net. I have looked at the mosquitoes. They are bigger than the mosquitoes of Sarnath.Don’t be worried about the dengue fever. It will go.Osho,What is religion?Religion is not what people understand it to be. It is not Christianity, it is not Hinduism, it is not Mohammedanism. Religion is a dead rock.I teach you not religion, but religiousness – a flowing river, continuously changing its course, but ultimately reaching to the ocean.A rock may be very ancient, far more experienced, far older than any Rig Veda, but a rock is a rock, and it is dead. It does not move with the seasons, it does not move with existence; it is simply lying there. And have you seen any rock with any song, with any dance?To me religion is a quality, not an organization.All the religions that exist in the world – and they are not a small number, there are three hundred religions in the world – are dead rocks. They don’t flow, they don’t change, they don’t move with the times. And anything that is dead is not going to help you – unless you want to make your grave. Then perhaps the rock may be helpful.All the so-called religions have been making graves for you – destroying your life, your love, your joy and filling your heads with fantasies, illusions, hallucinations about God, about heaven and hell, about reincarnation, and all kinds of crap.I trust the flowing, changing, moving because that is the nature of life. It knows only one thing is permanent, and that is change. Only change never changes; otherwise, everything changes. Sometimes it is fall and the trees become naked. All the leaves fall down with no complaint. Silently, peacefully they merge back into the earth from where they have come. The naked trees against the sky have a beauty of their own, and there must be a tremendous trust in their hearts because they know that if the old leaves are gone, the new will be coming. And soon new leaves, fresh, younger, more delicate, start coming out.A religion should be not a dead organization but a kind of religiousness; a quality which includes truthfulness, sincerity, naturalness, a deep let-go with the cosmos, a loving heart, a friendliness toward the whole. For these no holy scriptures are needed.In fact, there are no holy scriptures anywhere. The so-called holy scriptures do not even prove that they are good literature. It is good that nobody reads them because they are full of ugly pornography.When I said this, one of my friends started working on the Holy Bible, and now he has found five hundred solid pages of pornography. If any book has to be banned from the world, it is the Holy Bible. But that friend does not know that the Holy Bible is just nothing. If you look into the Hindu puranas, you will be surprised. They are the most ancient editions of Playboy! Not only the human beings but even the gods described there are such ugly, dirty old people. It is strange, and they are still worshipped as gods.For example, the moon is worshipped as a god by the Hindus and by the Jainas. But the story is that the moon was very much sexually interested in a beautiful woman who was the wife of a saint. In India the saints go to take a bath early in the morning before the sun rises, and that was the time when the moon would come – in disguise, of course, because gods can do anything. He would knock on the door and the wife would think her husband was back. The moon would make love to somebody else’s wife and then disappear.Almost all the so-called Hindu gods are rapists. And they are not satisfied that in heaven they have the most beautiful women – not covered with skin, of course, but covered with plastic. In those days it seems they had no word for plastic, so they say that these heavenly girls – the word is apsara, which you can translate very accurately as a call girl, not ordinary prostitutes, but very high class – don’t perspire.When I came to know that they don’t perspire, I started thinking: How is it possible for a man or woman with skin not to perspire? Plastic seems to be the only alternative. And they remain stuck at the age of sixteen; they never grow up. For centuries they are only sixteen. And how many saints have enjoyed them? I don’t think they can even remember the number over millions of years.An authentic religiousness needs no prophets, no saviors, no holy books, no churches, no popes, no priests because religiousness is the flowering of your heart. It is reaching to the very center of your being. And the moment you reach to the very center of your being, there is an explosion of beauty, of blissfulness, of silence, of light. You start becoming a totally different person. All that was dark in your life disappears, and all that was wrong in your life disappears too. Whatever you do is done with utter totality and absolute awareness.I know of only one virtue, and that is awareness.And if religiousness spreads all over the world, religions will fade away. It will be a tremendous blessing to humanity when man is simply man: neither Christian nor Mohammedan nor Hindu. These demarcations, these divisions have been the cause of thousands of wars all through history. If you look back at the history of man, you cannot resist the temptation to say that we have lived in the past in an insane way. In the name of God, in the name of church, in the name of ideologies that have no evidence at all, people have been killing each other. Religion has not happened to the world yet.Unless religiousness becomes the very climate of humanity there will be no religion at all. But I insist on calling it religiousness so that it does not become organized. You cannot organize love. Have you ever heard of churches of love, temples of love, mosques of love? Love is an individual affair with another individual. And religiousness is a greater love affair with the individual directed toward the whole cosmos.When a man falls in love with the whole cosmos, the trees, the mountains, the rivers, the oceans, the stars, he knows what prayerfulness is – it is wordless. He knows a deep dance in his heart and a music that has no sounds. For the first time he experiences the eternal, the immortal; that which always remains. In every change it renews its life afresh. And anyone who becomes a religious person and drops Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Jainism, Buddhism, declares his individuality for the first time.Religiousness is an individual affair. It is a message of love from you to the whole cosmos. Only then will there be a peace that passeth all misunderstanding. Otherwise these religions have been parasites exploiting people, enslaving people, forcing people to believe. And all beliefs are against intelligence, forcing people to pray with words without any meaning because they are not coming from your heart, but only from your memory.I have often told the beautiful story of Leo Tolstoy. The story is about three uneducated, uncultured villagers who lived on a small island in a big lake. Millions of people were coming to them and worshipping them, and the archbishop of the old Russia – before the revolution – became concerned.The churches are empty, nobody is coming to the archbishop, and the Russian church is the oldest church in the world, very orthodox. People are going to those three persons who are not even initiated into the secrets of Christianity.How had they become saints? In India it is easy to become a saint, but in Christianity it is not so easy. The English word saint comes from a root, sanctus. It means that unless you are sanctioned, certified by the pope or the archbishop, you cannot be accepted as a saint. But people were saying, “Those three people are so saintly.”One day, in anger, the archbishop took a boat and went to those three people who were sitting under a tree. He looked at them and he could not believe it. What kind of saints are these?From the very beginning he declared and introduced himself: “I am the archbishop.” The three saints all touched his feet. Then he felt relaxed: “These are fools, and things have not yet gone too far so that they cannot be managed.”He asked them, “Are you saints?”They looked at each other, and they said, “We have never heard the word. We are uneducated, uncultured. Don’t talk Greek to us; just simply say what you mean.”“My God!” said the archbishop, “you don’t know what a saint means? Do you know the Christian prayer?”Again they looked at each other, and nudged each other as if to say, “You tell him.”The archbishop now became really powerful. He said, “Tell me what your prayer is.”They said, “We are very uneducated. We don’t know what Christian prayer is. We have made a prayer of our own.”The archbishop laughed. He said, “Nobody makes his own prayer. Prayer has to be authorized by the church. What is your prayer, anyway?”They felt very embarrassed, very shy, and finally one said, “Because you are asking, we cannot refuse, but our prayer is not much of a prayer. We have heard that God has three forms – God, the Holy Ghost, and the Son – so we thought to make a prayer of our own. Our prayer is: You are three, we are three, have mercy on us.”The archbishop said, “You idiots! Do you think this is a prayer? I will teach you the prayer authorized by the church.”But the prayer was too long, and all three said together: “We cannot remember such a long prayer. We will try our best, but please repeat it one time more.” And they asked him to repeat it a third time because it was too big. “If we remember the beginning, we forget the end. If we remember the end, we forget the beginning. If we remember the beginning and the end, we forget the middle.”The archbishop said, “You need education.” But they said, “We cannot write, otherwise we could have written your prayer. Just one time more and we will try our best.”The archbishop was very happy that he had converted three idiots who were being worshipped by millions of people. He said the prayer a third time, they touched his feet, and he went back into his boat.Just as he was in the middle of the lake he saw a huge something coming toward him. He could not believe it. What could it be? He started praying. As they came close, he understood that it was those three idiots walking on the water. He said, “My God! Only Jesus has ever walked on water.”And they came with folded hands saying, “We forgot the prayer, so we thought – one more time.”The archbishop, seeing them standing on the water, realized the fact. He said, “You don’t need my prayer. Your prayer is perfect. I have been praying my whole life, I have reached the highest post in the Orthodox Church of Russia, but I cannot walk on water. God seems to be with you. You just go and do your old prayer.”They were very happy. They said, “We are so grateful because that long prayer would have killed us!”Here is a beautiful story saying that the traditional, the orthodox religion becomes dead. Religiousness has to arise within your heart as an individual offering of love and fragrance to the cosmos.Even God is not necessary for a religious person because God is an unproved hypothesis, and a religious person cannot accept anything unproved. He can accept only that which he feels.What do you feel? – the breathing, the heartbeat… Existence breathes in and out, existence goes on giving you your life every moment. But you have never looked at the trees, you have never looked at the flowers and their beauty, and you have never thought that they are divine. They are really the only God that exists.This whole existence is full of godliness. If you are full of religiousness, the whole existence simultaneously becomes full of godliness. To me, this is what religion is.Osho,Why do I get so sensitive? Where does it come from and is it possible to share sensitivity?Every child is born sensitive, utterly sensitive. But the society does not want so many sensitive people in the world. It wants people with thick skins. It needs laborers, it needs soldiers, it needs all kinds of hard people who have bypassed their hearts. It needs professors, intellectuals; it needs scientists. They are the people who don’t know anything about their own hearts, about their own sensitivity.It is absolutely blissful that you are feeling sensitive. Perhaps a woman is more capable of being sensitive than a man because she is not going to be a soldier, she is not expected to kill people. A woman is more sensitive than a man because the society has rejected the woman for any important work.It has been a blessing in disguise. The woman has remained still human, while man has become a monster. His whole work seems to be either to kill or to be killed. His whole life is devoted to accumulating more and more war weapons. It seems the Second World War has not satisfied him; he is preparing for the third. And remember, whenever a soldier dies on the front, a father dies, a son dies, a husband dies. Men fight and kill each other and women suffer.And because women have suffered for centuries, they have become more and more sensitive to subtle nuances of joy, of suffering, of pain, of pleasure. Don’t ask, “Why do I get so sensitive?” You are born sensitive; it is your birthright. When you don’t feel sensitive you can ask the question, “Why I am not feeling sensitive?” Sensitivity is one of the great qualities of being religious.It is told of one of the great men of this century, George Bernard Shaw, that a man had come to meet him, a creative artist, a novelist. He saw so many beautiful flowers in George Bernard Shaw’s garden that he could not believe it. And when he went into George Bernard Shaw’s room there was not even a single flower there. He asked him, “This is strange. You have so many beautiful flowers in your garden, an abundance. Can’t you pick a few flowers for a flower vase in your room?”George Bernard Shaw said, “I love children too. They are as beautiful as any flower, but I don’t cut their heads to decorate my sitting room. The flowers will blossom, they will dance in the rain, in the sun, in the wind. There, they are alive. I am not a butcher; I cannot cut a flower from its life source, and I don’t like corpses in my room.”He was right. He was a sensitive man, very sensitive.You are asking, “Where does it come from?” It comes from your very being. Don’t look for any outside source; it is your nature. “…and is it possible to share sensitivity?” Of course.You may have observed that when shaking hands with a few people, you feel as if you are shaking hands with a dead branch of a tree – no life, no warmth, no energy. And you will have also experienced shaking hands with someone else, and you feel something is being transferred, something has transpired between your energies – a warmth, a loving friendliness. These are the people that you will feel nourished by if you sit with them. And those others, like dead branches of a tree – if you sit with them you will feel strangely as if you are drained.Sensitivity can be shared in a thousand and one ways. The most fundamental is a lovingness – not a love relationship but just pure lovingness, without any conditions. Not asking anything in return; just pouring your heart on people, even on strangers because it is overflowing with sensitivity.Now the scientists say you can shake hands with a tree, and if you are friendly you will feel tremendous sensitivity in the tree itself. There are old stories, unbelievable ones, which cannot be factual – but one never knows, maybe they are factual. It is said that whenever Gautam Buddha passed, trees that had been without leaves suddenly grew leaves to give him shade. Whenever he sat under a tree, suddenly thousands of flowers blossomed and started falling over him. It may be simply symbolic, but there is a possibility of its being real too. And modern scientific research about trees supports what I am saying.It was the first Indian Nobel prizewinner, Jagdish Chandra Bose, who proved to the scientific world that trees are not dead. But since Jagdish Chandra Bose much has happened. He would be tremendously happy if he could come and see what scientists have managed.Now they can have something like a cardiogram attached to the tree. A man comes to the tree, a friend with love in his heart, and the tree starts dancing even without any wind and the cardiogram becomes very symmetrical. The graph on the paper almost has a harmonious beauty.When another man comes with an ax, with the idea of cutting the tree, even if he has not come close, the graph of the cardiogram goes berserk. It loses all symmetry, all harmony. It simply goes insane: something is going to harm the tree. It is strange because the tree has not been harmed; it is just an idea in the woodcutter’s mind. The tree is so sensitive that it even catches your ideas. And the same man comes with the ax, not desiring to cut the tree, and the graph remains sane. There is no fear, nervousness in the tree.And another thing they became aware of, that they had not thought about before, was that if one tree was trembling with fear and a scientist just put a few cardiograms on other trees surrounding it, when the tree started trembling with fear, the other trees also participated. They must have been old friends. Growing in the same grove, they must have shared their love with each other, they must have been friendly. They also reacted immediately.The whole of existence is full of sensitivity – and man is the highest product of this existence. Naturally, your heart, your being, is ready to overflow. You have been hiding it, repressing it because your parents and your teachers have told you to be hard, to be strong because it is a world full of struggle. If you cannot fight and compete you will be nobody.So only a few people like poets, painters, musicians, sculptors – who are no longer in the competitive world, who are not hoping to accumulate billions of dollars – are the only people who have some trace of sensitivity left.But a meditator is on the way of the mystic; he will become more and more sensitive. And the more you share your sensitivity, your love, your friendliness, your compassion, the closer you will come to the goal of being a mystic.Even small children, particularly male children, are deprived from the very beginning and are told, “You are not supposed even to cry.” It is something condemnatory. Women can weep and cry because they have never been accepted up to now as equal human beings. They are somewhat subhuman; so it is allowed for them – “these women are weak.” Sensitivity has been thought to be weak. The strong person should not have any sensitivity. When he cuts off people’s heads he will not think twice.The day President Truman ordered the first atom bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – which killed more than two hundred thousand people – he remained awake till he received the message that the atom bombs had been dropped. According to the calculations they had functioned perfectly well. Then he went to sleep.In the morning he was surrounded by the news media and their first question was, “After killing two hundred thousand innocent people” – because they were just citizens, they were not soldiers – “could you sleep in the night?”And President Truman said, “Of course! I slept as deeply as possible for the first time in a few months. The work is done perfectly. Now Japan is bound to surrender. When I received the news, I was so contented that I slept the whole night without waking up even once.”These are the insensitive people – and his name is “True Man!” Since that day I have started calling him President Untrueman.But from our very childhood, the head is trained and the heart is left absolutely untrained.Ernie was talking to Ronnie, the little boy from next door.“How old are you?” asked Ernie.“I don’t know,” replied little Ronnie.“Do women bother you?” inquired Ernie.“No,” said Ronnie.“Then,” said Ernie knowingly, “You are four.”My final suggestion to you is, keep climbing upward. You may never reach the top, but it is definitely the right direction. Sensitivity is the beginning of a new opening in your being. Don’t be afraid; just go on climbing higher and higher. Become more and more sensitive. Hopefully, it will bring you the ultimate flowering of humanity – the mystic rose.It was a very special day in Paddy’s household and Maureen came down to breakfast with an air of expectancy.“This is our tenth wedding anniversary,” she whispered to Paddy, who was reading the newspaper, “so let’s have a chicken from our own farm and celebrate.”Paddy looked up and said, “Why kill an innocent bird for what happened ten years ago?”“Some young man is trying to get into my room through the window,” screamed old Mrs. Kleinman into the telephone.“Sorry, lady,” came back the answer, “you’ve got the fire department. What you want is the police department.”“No, no,” she pleaded, “I want the fire department. What he needs is a longer ladder!”“My poor husband,” said Mrs. Ginsberg to her psychoanalyst, dragging her husband behind her. “He’s convinced he’s a parking meter.”The analyst looked at the silent, morbid fellow and asked, “Why doesn’t he say something for himself? Can’t he talk?”“How can he,” said Mrs. Ginsberg, “with all those coins in his mouth?”You are living in a very insane, pathetic world. If you don’t take yourself out of the mob psychology and manifest your authentic reality, you will be drowned in the mess of the whole world.In my vision, a sannyasin is one who is making every effort to get rid of the insanity that he has been conditioned for.Sensitivity will help immensely to make you sane, sensible. And if you go on moving in the right direction it will become your meditation, and finally your mystic experience of enlightenment.

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The United States government proudly proclaims itself “the land of the free and the home of the brave” and points to its constitutional protections of fundamental rights. At the same time it twists and breaks its own laws to persecute you who embody freedom and truth. It seems the politicians always tell the biggest lies in the loudest voice. The worst tyrants talk most about peace and freedom. Could you please comment?Prem Niren, there are many questions in your question, many implications of tremendous importance. I would like to go step by step, giving you the total view of the situation that exists in the United States of America. And what I am going to say is not only true about the United States of America; it is more or less true about every nation dominated by the cunning, clever and crooked politicians.The first thing you say is, “The United States government proudly proclaims itself ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ and points to its constitutional protections of fundamental rights.”The first thing to be noted about the United States of America is that the land does not belong to the so-called Americans; the land belongs to the natives, the Red Indians. And America is, in fact, one of the strangest places to talk about freedom and democracy. If they really mean what they say, then all Americans are foreigners except the Red Indians – simple hearted, innocent people who have been forced to live in forests, in special reservations. The whole land is theirs, but they don’t rule it. Those who rule it are from either Britain or France or Italy or Switzerland or Sweden or Belgium or Greece. They all come from European countries. If they are really sincere, they should pack their luggage and go back home.It is a strange kind of democracy in which the people of the land, the real owners of the land have no participation at all. And the foreigners – the invaders – who have mercilessly killed the innocent people of America are proudly proclaiming freedom, democracy, basic human rights, freedom of expression and all kinds of nonsense. At least Americans should not use these words at all. It is the greatest slavery that is still in existence, and there seems to be no possibility that the Red Indians will ever again be rulers of their own land because they are poor, they don’t have modern war technology.That is what has irritated the Americans the most: when I said to them, “You are just as much foreigners as I am here. The only difference is that I am new and you are old tourists. I have come with a valid visa, and you entered America with your guns, not with your visas. In what way have you become citizens of America? Who accepted you? You destroyed the poor people, peaceful people, at the point of a gun and proclaimed yourselves the Americans. And you call the real Americans “Red Indians” – giving the sense that America belongs to the Americans. It creates an illusion.”The Americans are all invaders, and if they have any self-respect and dignity they should leave America and go back home.They deported me. This is strange – foreigners deporting another foreigner. At least I had a valid visa and I was not an invader. They are invaders and entered America with force and violence – and now they have become the proclaimers of freedom and democracy. America will be free the day it is in the hands of Red Indians. It is the greatest land of slavery today.As far as their constitution is concerned, Americans have been very proud, proclaiming that they have one of the best constitutions. The latest research has just been published. Just two or three days ago I received the information that all that is beautiful in the American constitution is borrowed from the Red Indians and their old, ancient books of wisdom. So the so-called “great American fathers,” the founders of America, were simply thieves and nothing else. They have not mentioned, not even once, that they have borrowed the whole constitution from the poor Red Indians and their books of wisdom.And you are saying, “At the same time it twists and breaks its own laws to persecute you.” It has been persecuting the Red Indians; if it has decided to persecute me, there are valid reasons for this persecution.One of the most shocking things to the fundamentalist Christians of America – and Ronald Reagan belongs to that group… They have always been sending missionaries to the East, to the poor countries of the East. There are thousands of missionaries all over India, converting the beggars into Christians, the orphans into Christians, the prostitutes into Christians, the aboriginals into Christians, the uneducated, uncultured. But they have not been able to convert a single cultured, educated, high-class brahmin, or a Jaina or a Buddhist.Their shock was that I was there and the most cultured and educated people of their country – doctors, surgeons, scientists, engineers – were dropping Christianity and becoming sannyasins. And I am not a missionary; I have never told them, promised them any salvation or any heavenly pleasures. I have not told them, “I will be your protector against hell.” I was simply telling them what is true and what is divine and what is beautiful. Satyam shivam sundaram.Christianity has nothing to offer to the educated and the cultured. The shock was tremendous. Before me also there have been many people from the East – but they were all cunning, clever and the Christians were not annoyed with them. For example, Vivekananda: he was the first Indian who was very much appreciated by the Christians because he proclaimed that Christianity is teaching essentially what all religions are teaching. This was very ego-fulfilling.When I said that Christianity comes lowest as far as the hierarchy of religions is concerned – it has nothing that can be compared with Zen or Sufism or Hassidism; it has not even known the word meditation. All that it consists of is hypothetical. In fact, it prevents people from experiencing the truth. Its emphasis is on believing in God and believing in Jesus Christ.Whenever a religion emphasizes belief, it is against wisdom, it is against enlightenment. It does not want you to become high peaks of consciousness and freedom. It simply wants you to become just a sheep and the shepherd, Jesus Christ, will take care of you. It takes away your responsibility, and you think, “This is very good. We are unburdened.” But with your responsibility, your freedom automatically disappears. A Christian is the poorest religious person in the world.Before me there was Ramateertha, but he praised Christianity just as Vivekananda did. These are not authentically enlightened people; their whole interest is in how to get more admirers. And it is very easy to get admirers in a Christian country if you admire Christianity. If you admire Mohammedanism in a Mohammedan country, you will have thousands of admirers. It is a very mutual conspiracy: they fulfill your ego, you fulfill their egos.I am a simple person and I simply say whatever is the truth. Whether it hurts you, shocks you, does not matter. To me truth is what matters – and certainly only the very cultured cream of the society has been attracted toward me. I cannot attract the beggars, I cannot attract the orphans, and I cannot attract the aboriginals because they will not even be able to understand what I am saying. Everybody is not capable of understanding the music of Mozart or Wagner. You will need very trained ears to understand those great masters.And as far as spirituality is concerned, it is the highest point of intelligence. Unless you have that intelligence you are bound to misunderstand. Authentic religion is only for very few people because it requires a tremendous preparation beforehand.The American Christians were tremendously puzzled how to protect, to prevent their educated and cultured people from moving toward me, because that will ultimately become a movement where even less cultured people will start following the more cultured. That is human nature. When people see that all the geniuses, scientists, engineers, doctors, surgeons are moving toward a certain magnetic force, a certain charisma, the others – without even understanding – also start following. That was the danger.And the politician was also in difficulty. His difficulty was that I had created a commune of five thousand people according to my ideas, which go essentially against a Christian society, or a Hindu society, or a Mohammedan society. I am against any organized religion because to me truth can never be organized. It is an individual affair, just between one individual and the cosmos.This was appealing to all those who had the intelligence. The commune became an alternative society in the eyes of the politicians. They could see the great success of the commune – it was the highest quality of communism – and they could not believe that five thousand people are living there, and there is no murder, no theft, no rape. Women could move alone in the middle of the night without any fear. And because my concepts about marriage, about family, about education, are absolutely against the traditional concepts, their fear was: “If this commune goes on succeeding, more communes will arise.” And I am absolutely anti-political. Deep down I am an anarchist. My ultimate goal finally is that there should be a humanity without any government.Government is a condemnation of every one of us. The very existence of the government and the police and the army shows that we are still not civilized. Otherwise there is no need for courts, judges, police officers – what is the need of them?If man is really man, if people become meditators and their criminal mind disappears, then the politician is naturally alerted. It is dangerous. If this commune succeeds, then there will be more communes arising in the country, and the politician will be in danger.I have been condemning the politicians and the priests together because they are two sides of one coin. They are conspiring against humanity together. They have made a division: the politician will rule the body of man, and the priest will rule his soul. And they will support each other because their interest is the same – domination over humanity.My effort to make life absolutely based on freedom and to destroy all possibilities of domination by anybody naturally brought the politicians and the Christian priests together.This persecution was not the simple persecution that every religion does against any competitive religion. This was a very unprecedented persecution. All religions, all societies, all nations were against a single man who had no organization, but only friends and lovers and fellow travelers.It is a strange fact that Christians are against Hindus, Hindus are against Jainas, Jainas are against Buddhists, Buddhists are against Mohammedans – but as far as I am concerned they are all together. On one point at least I have created a unity: they are all my enemies because I am hammering on the basic roots of every religion, which are the same.You are saying, Niren, “At the same time, it twists and breaks its own laws to persecute you who embody freedom and truth.” That is my crime: freedom and truth. Politicians are very happy if you simply talk about it. But if you start creating a certain group of people who start living truth, who start living in freedom, then the danger immediately arises in the hearts of the priests and politicians. They are perfectly at ease if you are only talking. I was not only talking.My effort is that I want to see whatever I am saying as a realized experience for all those who have come in some deep loving commitment with me. This was the danger.You say, “It seems that politicians always tell the biggest lies in the loudest voice. The worst tyrants talk most about peace and freedom.” There is some hidden psychology behind it.First, the worst tyrants talk most about peace and freedom. They have to, just to create a facade around them, so that you cannot see their reality in the smoke of their talk of peace and freedom. They have to make much fuss around themselves just to hide behind it. And the biggest lies come in the loudest voice from the politicians.One of my vice-chancellors was one of the greatest legal experts of his time. He had three offices: one in London, one in New Delhi and one in Peking. He was continually running from China to India, from India to England, and he was fighting the greatest cases. I was not his student, but even though he was a vice-chancellor, he loved law so much that he used to teach law in the university, and I used to go to his class. I had a certain friendship with him that arose by accident.I used to go for an early morning walk at three o’clock in the morning, and by chance he was also a lover of going at three o’clock. We met every day on a lonely place by the side of a lake. I have never seen such a beautiful lake with so many lotus flowers; it was almost covered with flowers. And just by the side there was a huge forest and mountain, and a small path going around the lake.We were the only two persons every day, so naturally we started talking to each other, we became friendly. He told me that he would be very happy if I sometimes turned up to his class, although I was not a student of law. I said, “What will be the point?”He said, “At least you will be a challenge to me. I have lived my whole life challenging the greatest legal experts all around the world, and I feel sorry… Why have you joined the philosophy department? You should have been in the department of law because your logic is so sharp and so clear.”So I started going to his class, and I started arguing with him. I had no idea about law – but logic I understand, and law is simply a by-product of logic, just logic applied. But if you understand logic in its purity, you can understand law without any difficulty.One day it was the final day before the examinations and he was saying in the class to his students, “My last advice to you: if you have facts in your hands and you also have the support of the law, be calm and quiet. Lay out your facts, lay out your laws. There is no need for you to be excited, angry or in a fighting mood; that will spoil the whole thing. Just be utterly silent. Evidence and law is enough.“But if you don’t have any evidence for your case and you have only the law, then bring all the law books in your car to the court and make as much fuss as possible about laws, ancient precedents, ancient decisions by other courts. Create a jungle of laws. Because you don’t have any evidence for your case, it all depends how much you can enforce on the mind of the judge that your position is logical and legal.“But sometimes there are situations when you don’t have evidence for your case and neither do you have any support of the law. Don’t be worried. Shout as loudly as you can. Go on hitting on the judge’s table. Let everybody present shake and be afraid, and make it a point that you must have all the evidence and the laws, otherwise you could not be roaring like a lion. It all depends on how much louder you are and how many times you hit the judge’s table.”Whenever you see politicians telling the biggest lies in the loudest voice, you should know that lies can only be told in loud voices. The loudness of the voice hides the lies. Truth can be whispered, but lies can only be loudly declared. Their strength lies in your voice.Truth is self-evident. Just whispering it is enough.Prem Niren, what happened with me in America and with my people has to become a historical fact, exposing both the religions and the politicians, and all their bogus talk about great words.Niren himself was one of my attorneys. In fact he was my chief attorney because he was my sannyasin. All the other attorneys were chosen by him. He was the coordinator. The others were paid, only he was working for love. You cannot depend on the paid people because their interest is money. They don’t care what is true and what is not true.Secondly, you can never be sure of their own prejudices, which I became aware of sitting silently for three days in North Carolina. They were all insistent that I should not say a single word. They were afraid that if I said anything the case would become too long, complicated, and that I might say things that may become contempt of court and it would complicate things.Their insistence was that I should remain completely silent. So I enjoyed complete silence for three days, watching, witnessing what those attorneys were doing. And the first thing that came to my vision was that although they were fighting for me, their hearts were with the American government. Although they were fighting for me, their conditioning was for the Christian church – so deep down they were not for me. Except for Niren, I could not feel any of the attorneys – and they were the best attorneys in America.A man may be an attorney or a judge, but it doesn’t matter; he is still a human being with the whole unconscious conditioning. Even they – being Christians, being Americans – could not accept my approach toward life’s problems. And, moreover, I was a non-American, a non-white, against whom they have deep prejudices. Because they were paid so much money, they were ready. But they were simply paid people, servants, and I could see that their arguments were halfhearted – as if deep down they wanted that I should be persecuted, that I should be fined, that I should be jailed. Except Niren, I could not feel the sincerity and honesty in any of those attorneys.There came a situation when one of the best experts, Peter Schey, who is head of the department of law in a Californian university – Niren must have been his student, so he had employed him. He was one of the best experts, there is no doubt about it, but at a certain point Niren came running to me in the jail and said, “Peter Schey seems to be shaky. He is not willing to say a few things under the oath of truth, so what should we do?”I said, “There is no problem. You simply go to the witness stand instead of Peter Schey. Only you can overcome the prejudices of Christians.”Niren did a beautiful job. And in a roundabout way he brought Peter Schey into his witnessing: “Peter Schey told me…” and then he repeated the whole thing that was supposed to have been told by Peter Schey.I was sitting by the side of Peter Schey and I could see his head down – afraid that this man, Niren, was bringing him in. And I could see these lawyers’ split personalities: they cannot say no to money, but just for money they cannot go against their prejudices either. It was a strange experience.One of our attorneys, Jack Ransom, told Niren, and he informed me, “We are fighting a losing battle because the people we depend on…” A man like Jack Ransom, a topmost attorney, said to Niren, “We cannot fight as totally as we could have fought for any American because Osho will go to India. But we have to live in America and we cannot annoy these magistrates and judges because we have to be continually in the courts in front of them. This is not our last case.”Niren again became very shaken that our attorneys were saying that they would only go so far, not more than that; that they couldn’t annoy the magistrate; they couldn’t annoy the judge – even if he ruled illegally, against the constitution.And that’s what finally happened. They did everything against their own constitution, against their own law.Just the other day I was informed by Barkha – she was an important sannyasin in the commune; she was the head of the commune police. The government wanted the city to have a magistrate and a police department because the commune had become a city, had been incorporated as a city. We did not want non-sannyasins to be in the commune because they would feel strange and our people would feel strange. So the only way was to train our own people as the police, to train one of our own people as the magistrate. So one woman was the magistrate. Sangeet is here, she was the city attorney; and Barkha is here, she was the city’s police chief.The day I was arrested and I was shown on all the television stations of America, the chief of police of Oregon phoned Barkha because Barkha was working under him as chief of police of the city of Rajneeshpuram. He phoned to tell her that this was absolutely illegal; you cannot arrest anybody without an arrest warrant. And even in special cases when the warrant has not arrived yet, but you have to take somebody into custody – you have been told to do so – then you cannot put handcuffs and chains on the person because he is not yet confirmed as a criminal by the magistrate.But that’s what was done. And the police chief said, “I am feeling so sad and sorry that they arrested Osho with twelve loaded guns, and they did not show any arrest warrant, they did not even show verbally what was the cause of arrest.”And the second day when he saw that I had been taken to another jail and I was descending the staircase of the airplane with handcuffs, chains on my feet, and with another chain around my waist to which the handcuffs were joined – a fly was sitting on my head and I could not even scratch my head – he said, “It is absolutely unprecedented: a man for whom they have no warrant, a man who has done no wrong.”In three days the government attorney could not prove a single thing against me, and he accepted it in his summarizing statement: “We have been unable to prove anything against Osho.” Still, the way they were behaving was simply to humiliate.But you cannot humiliate me, and they felt it. Even the jailers said to me, “Everything is being done to humiliate you, but it is strange, we don’t see any humiliation. You are taking it so coolly and so silently and so peacefully as if this has been your whole life’s practice.”I said, “Who knows? It may be in the future. So I am training myself because one never knows about tomorrow. This may be my whole lifestyle in the future, and I never miss a single moment of learning.”According to every psychoanalytic school, politicians suffer from an inferiority complex. In fact, if a man does not suffer from an inferiority complex he will not try to dominate anyone. The very effort to dominate is just to convince oneself that “I am not inferior, I am superior to those whom I rule, whom I dominate.” It is strange that your presidents, your prime ministers are all psychologically sick people. They are full of jealousy, competition.They became jealous of the commune because the commune was living according to my ideology. I am against poverty; hence in the commune there was nobody poor and nobody was rich either. There was not a single beggar, and the commune itself was comfortably rich. It had its own airport, its own four airplanes, its own hundreds of cars, its own one hundred buses – particularly for the celebration days when people used to come from all over the world and the population of the commune, which was only five thousand, used to rise to twenty thousand.We had every arrangement for twenty thousand people. We created new kinds of tents which can be air-conditioned, which can be centrally heated, which can be used around the year, whether it is hot or cold or snow is falling. These were our own invention. They could be folded in ten minutes and could be put back again in ten minutes. We were keeping those tents for the fifteen thousand people coming for the festivals.And the festivals were exactly what festivals should be – twenty thousand people eating together under one roof, and while people were eating, somebody was playing guitar and somebody was dancing and somebody was playing on the flute. That was my idea always, that people should live as festively as possible. Their lives should be one long celebration.Happy people can never be forgiven, and the commune was one of the happiest collections of people that has ever happened on the earth. You could not find a single person who was miserable. Misery was simply sent away to other American cities.In five years there was not a single fight between two sannyasins. The whole of America, and particularly the politicians, became jealous: “This is dangerous because if people came to know more and more about it…” And they were going to know because every day planes were landing in the commune – television stations, reporters, all kinds of news media.For a time it looked as if Rajneeshpuram had become the capital of America. I was on the television more than the president of America. Naturally, jealousy arises.I was not even a tourist because my tourist visa expired in three months. I asked for an extension. That expired again in three months, and then I applied for permanent residency and the immigration department was in trouble. The trouble was that they could not say yes to me because the government was pressurizing them, the church was pressurizing them: “This man should not be allowed in America.”They could not say yes and they could not say no either, because if they had said no I could have gone to the court. On what grounds could they say no to me? They have six categories of people who can be allowed to stay in America as permanent residents; I fulfilled five categories. I could not fulfill only one category, and that was marriage. But if the worst had come to the worst I could have fulfilled that too. There was no problem in it.They could not say no, they could not say yes, so for five years I was there without any visa, without any permission. A man without a visa who is getting more attention than the president of a country is naturally going to create a great violence in these inferior, psychologically sick and almost retarded beings – then they will forget all the constitutions and all the laws that they have themselves made.Paddy was showing…[There is an outburst of sudden and surprised laughter as Osho, after all this serious talk, begins reading a joke.]I will have to begin it again.Paddy was showing Sean his pet turtle. “Wow,” said Sean, “that certainly is a magnificent turtle.”“Maybe,” replied Paddy, “but he is very shortsighted.”“Shortsighted?” asked Sean in surprise. “How can you tell?”Paddy smiled and said, “He has fallen in love with my old army helmet.”Politicians are almost like Paddy’s turtle – very shortsighted. The day America deported me, I told a few of my friends who had come to send me off at the airport, “This is the beginning of their downfall.”Existence functions in its own way, not according to human stupidities. After Socrates, what happened to Greece? It was at the highest peak of consciousness, but the day they poisoned Socrates, they poisoned themselves. Never again in these twenty-five centuries could they rise back to being a world power. What happened to Judea that crucified Jesus? It has disappeared from the map completely.The day they fined me without my having committed any crime, and forced me to leave America immediately, they were not aware that existence is more just than any human court or any human constitution can be. I told my friends, “My leaving America – you will soon see it falling from being a world power.” And it has come true. Now every day America is falling into a ditch, and I declare that it will never again be the world’s greatest economic power, as it has been.Existence supports even a single innocent man against a whole country, against a whole government because existence has no fear of your atomic missiles, your nuclear weapons. It does not care about anything except innocence. The only value in the eyes of existence is the eyes of a sage, so utterly innocent and mystified and wondrous that for a single sage like Socrates or Jesus, the whole country can be removed, erased from history.Sean and Paddy were having a drink at the pub when Sean said, “I heard you having a great argument with Maureen, your wife, last night. How did you make out?”“Ah,” said Paddy, “she came crawling to me on her hands and knees.”“Is that so?” said Sean. “What did she say?”“She said,” replied Paddy sipping his beer, “come out from under the bed, you coward.”America behaved with me and my people like utter cowards. If they had had any guts, they could have called me to their senate and I was ready to answer all their questions and I was ready to defend all my ideas. That would have been dignified, rather than forcing me into a jail under loaded guns and then trying to poison me. And because they failed to send me to jail for twenty or thirty years, they managed to have a bomb planted under my seat.Just today I received the whole investigation report. I had asked them whether they had investigated how the bomb had entered the jail with all their security, and how it managed just to be under my seat. Now comes a long report with so many contradictions and stupidities.The report says that at four o’clock, just after the judgment was given by Federal Judge Leavy against me, an anonymous phone call came to the police station, to the jail, and to a television station – that a bomb had been placed under a certain seat in the visitors’ room. And the report from the police department of Portland says: “We searched the whole place, we evacuated the whole ground floor. But it was only a threat. No bomb was found.”I have asked my legal secretary to write to them, “If you had evacuated the whole ground floor, why did you take me there? You evacuated everybody from the ground floor and immediately you took me there.” The first thing I noticed was that there was nobody on the ground floor, where there used to be hundreds of people working. I asked the man who had taken me there, “What has happened to all the people – some kind of holiday?” If it was a bomb threat, then certainly they should not have taken me to the ground floor.But it was not a bomb threat, and the ground floor was not evacuated because of the bomb threat. It was evacuated in case the bomb under my seat exploded. Then nobody else would be hurt. When I asked that man, he said, “I don’t know. Perhaps it is a shift change.”I said, “I do understand a little bit about shift changes. The second shift people should be here; only then can the first shift people go. This gap cannot be left between the two.”He became shaky and he said, “I don’t know anything at all about what has happened.” And he left me inside the waiting room, exactly the same waiting room that the anonymous call had indicated: that under a certain seat there was a bomb that was going to explode at five minutes to six.That was their calculation: that the case would take at least that much time, that the court would not decide before five. And after the court’s decision my fine would have to be paid and only after my fine was given to the court would I be allowed to be taken to the jail. So they had calculated perfectly – at nearabout six I may come back to take my clothes.But because there was no trial… The government was not ready to go for a trial, knowing perfectly well that they didn’t have any evidence against me. For three days they had seen the same government attorney general fighting in the court of North Carolina and concluding in his speech, “We don’t have any evidence against him.” Now, what more could they do?It was absolutely clear that if they went for a trial they would be defeated. And they told my attorneys, “You should remember one thing: you can win the case, but it may take ten years or twenty years. We can go on postponing it. And the second thing you should remember is that the government of the United States of America is not going to be defeated by a single individual. If you are interested in saving Osho’s life, it is better not to go for a trial.”That’s why the case was finished within two minutes. I reached the jail too early. In the waiting room where they were going to deliver me my clothes, there was only one man, and he was shaky. The form in his hand showed that his whole being was shaking. I asked him, “Is something wrong with your hand, or is something wrong with the form?”He said, “Sit on this seat, and just wait. It will take ten or fifteen minutes for me to get my boss’s signature on the form – which was an absolute lie because there was no place on the form where anybody else’s signature was needed. It was a simple form saying that I had received my clothes back. Only my signature was needed.When he went out, locking the door from the outside, he indicated the chair on which I had to sit. That was the same chair under which the bomb was found. Perhaps he had gone to ask what had to be done now because he may not have been aware what the decision in the court had been. If I was released, then there was no need to explode the bomb; if I was going for trial, then it was better to finish it on the first day. Why wait unnecessarily for years of trial and millions of dollars to be wasted?Looking at the police department’s report, it is absolutely clear that now they are trying to make it simply a rumor. But if it was a rumor, why did they evacuate the prison? And if they believed in the rumor and evacuated the prison, they should not have taken me in there. It is so clear.So what they have been doing for an investigation is finding out who phoned. They found out the locality where the call had come from, but in that locality there are many people and many phones. That is the end of the street. The investigation has stopped. Where to go from there?Even a certain belief in an anonymous phone call was stupid because the jail was so secure and safe; it was perhaps the most modern jail in America. It had opened only three months before I entered it. It has all the latest security equipment: doors that only open with remote control buttons; nobody can open them by hand. And there were doors beyond doors. As far as I remember, there were three doors through which they took me in.Just inside the car they had the remote control, and then the first gate would open. The gate was a solid steel rock, rising up to give just enough space for the car to move in. Then there was the second gate, and the second gate would open only when the first gate had come down. And then there was a third gate, and the third would open only when the second had come down. It was all automatic.It was absolutely impossible for any individual who was not an insider to reach inside and plant a bomb.The American government may have the nuclear weapons, but it has a very cowardly soul. They could not encounter a single individual. That very day I thought, “How are these people going to manage in the Third World War with the Soviet Union?” And now their situation is becoming worse every day.It will be good for you to be reminded that it was not Columbus who first discovered America. It has been discovered many times, and then it was found that it was not worth discovering. Then it was hushed up.In Turkey there exists a map eight hundred years old that has America on it, exactly as you have it on any modern map. That was four hundred years before Columbus discovered America – but that also is not very old.In Mahabharata, a great war happened five thousand years ago in India. The hero of the war was Arjuna, perhaps the greatest archer of all time. He married many wives from different countries, and one of his wives was Mexican.Of course America was known, but it has been hushed up again and again. Perhaps the time has come again to hush it up.

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,From what I heard you say, I understood that for enlightenment to happen, meditation is a preparation, but also an intense urge is required, a realization that nothing else really matters. I see myself being interested in all kinds of things, all kinds of mind-stories, music, women, sense perceptions. Will these interests prevent enlightenment?A very ancient story is that an old man came to his master and said, “I have been to see a great number of teachers and I have given up a great number of pleasures. I have fasted, been celibate, and stayed awake all night seeking enlightenment. I have given up everything I was asked to give up and I have suffered, but I have not been enlightened. What should I do?”The master replied, “Give up suffering.”Neither music can prevent your enlightenment, nor sense perceptions, nor women. Only one thing can prevent your enlightenment, and that is suffering. Enlightenment is the ultimate celebration, so any small celebrations that you are having will become just like steps toward it. But suffering cannot become a step toward enlightenment.You are asking, “I see myself being interested in all kinds of things, all kinds of mind-stories…” They will disappear as your meditation grows, just as when you bring the light in, the darkness disappears. The darkness can never be a hindrance. You cannot say that the darkness is so thick and so old that whenever I bring the light in, the light goes out. Darkness cannot put the light out.Your mind-stories are just soap bubbles. Once you have touched even a glimpse of meditation – what to say about stories, mind itself disappears.Music will be deepened as your meditation grows; your music will have new flavors, new flowers, new fragrances. Your music will become more and more in tune with your meditation. Ultimately the music comes to a point of perfection when no instrument is needed – but pure silence, without any sounds. In fact, what you call music is a play between sound and silence. Those who emphasize the sound miss the deeper meaning of music. The deeper meaning is between two sounds, in the gaps.Meditation is not against music. On the contrary, music has been born out of meditative consciousness. For the first time it was used to express something about meditation. But the gestalt has to change; from sound the emphasis should change to the silence. And meditation will do that miracle automatically.As far as women are concerned, it is impossible to become enlightened without women. They are the real driving force! People say that behind every great man there is a woman. That may be right, may not be right, but behind every enlightened man there are many women – torturing him, harassing him until finally he decides it is better to become enlightened. If there is no woman to harass you, why should you try to become enlightened in the first place? Women have not become enlightened for the simple reason that no man is harassing them. So don’t be afraid of women; they are an immense help, absolutely necessary.Sense perceptions are not a hindrance. Your sensitivity, your perceptivity will become deeper as your meditation deepens. So, finally, the old man in the story was given the right answer by the master. That’s my answer also to you.Just get rid of suffering. Nothing else in the world can prevent your meditation.Osho,Sometimes, sitting with you is pure delight. My whole body is flooded with a strange and lovely feeling, like a silent orgasm that has no top or bottom. But more often I feel so busy with my aches and pains and thoughts that I can't be here, I can't seem to relax into myself, or let anything be. Then I get really worried that there is some unconscious resistance. Can you tell me if I am fighting or what? And if I am fighting – what for?What is happening “sometimes” will start happening more and more. Your emphasis, your attention should be on what is happening, not on what is not happening. You have to understand a fundamental law: attention is nourishment.Your question is: “Sometimes, sitting with you is pure delight.” Why sometimes? If it can be even once a delight to sit with me, then pour your whole attention into what is happening that is making you so delight-full, so peaceful, so relaxed. Once in a while you will find that the mind is “…so busy with my aches and pains and thoughts that I can’t be here.” It is natural. Old habits, long friendships, drop slowly. These aches and pains and thoughts are your old habit.It is a miracle that sometimes you come out of your old structure, out into the open sky. Just pay more attention to these moments. Nourish them, relish them. And when it does not happen, don’t be worried. Just remember one thing: it is an old habit. But don’t give it any attention, don’t be bothered. It is absolutely human. For centuries, for many lives, we have not known anything other than misery, pain, agony. Naturally they have gone deep into our unconscious.No fight at all is happening within you. It is just that an old habit takes possession of you. You should remember that it is just a habit and “I am not to be concerned with it, not to be bothered with it. Let it be there.” And soon those old habits will start falling like dead leaves from the trees.In fact, there seems to be no problem; it is just that you are not aware of your habits, unconscious accumulations. It is good that they are coming up because that is the only way to get rid of them. Don’t repress them, otherwise they will go on coming up. And don’t give them attention, otherwise you are giving nourishment to things that should be starved and allowed to die.Your whole focus should be on those beautiful moments that happen to you, those orgasmic spaces. Fill them with all your energy and slowly, slowly it is an absolute inevitability that that which is blissful is going to win over the suffering, that which is ecstatic is going to win over the agony – unless you decide to pay more attention to the agony and take the ecstasy just for granted. Then there will be trouble.So the only thing to remember is: pour your attention and love, and rejoice and feel grateful for those moments which give you orgasmic blissfulness. The others are not to be even talked about. Let them come, it is good that they are surfacing.Now there are three things you can do. You can repress them: then you will not get rid of them, they will come again. Or you can give nourishment to them. That will make them stronger and your orgasmic moments will become shorter, fewer. And the third thing is: don’t repress them and don’t give attention to them. Just accept them. It is your past; it is dead. It will go away by itself. Don’t even fight with them because fighting is another name for suppression, and fighting is also giving attention to them.Sandy MacTavish, a young Scotsman, went down to London for a holiday. When he returned, his friend Hamish asked how it was. “All right,” said Sandy, “but they are funny folk down there.”“Why is that?” asked Hamish.“Well,” said Sandy, “one night, very late, it must have been about two in the morning, a man came banging on the door. He screamed and shouted and was in a really nasty temper – at two o’clock, man.”“And what did you do?” asked Hamish.“I didn’t do anything,” replied Sandy, “I just went on quietly playing my bagpipes.”Just a little awareness, and all problems can be solved so easily!But the mind’s tendency is negative. And it is not only for you, it is for all to remember that mind tends to be negative because the negative balance of the mind is big. Your suffering has been long, your pains have been too many, your agonies too much, your failures innumerable.If you count the moments of joy, you will be surprised that in the whole life of a man he may not be able to find even ten moments of joy to be counted on ten fingers. But if you want to listen to his miseries, the story is so long! It is his whole life: a seventy-year-long story of misery.And if you think of many other past lives, the same is true about them. Naturally, the negative is too heavy on you. It is such a mountainous load, it is a vast dark night around you. And what are your pleasures? – just a few fireflies here and there in the deep darkness. Naturally you tend unknowingly, unconsciously, to pay more attention to the negative. You don’t pay attention to the positive. The positive has been so small that it has not made even a dent in you.Because of this negative habit a small thing becomes so big that it prevents your energy from flowing toward the positive. I want you to pay all your attention to the positive and ignore what is negative. That’s what Gautam Buddha’s advice has been.Buddha’s word for ignoring the negative was upeksha. It is a very beautiful word. Ignoring is a literal translation of upeksha, but it misses something immensely valuable which I will have to explain to you. Upeksha is ignoring, plus. When you ignore something, there is a possibility that even in ignoring you are paying attention. Even though you are ignoring, you are paying attention. You may not look at somebody, but you are holding yourself back from looking. You may not be speaking to somebody, but you are holding back. It is the same – whether you are speaking or you are holding it back.Upeksha means: as if the negative does not exist, as if it is just a shadow which will disappear on its own; no attention at all. You don’t pay attention to your shadow, or do you? The whole day it follows you and you don’t take any note of it. That is upeksha.Ebenezer MacTavish was known to be the grumpiest farmer in the neighborhood. One year when MacTavish’s apple crop was exceptionally good, a neighbor was confident that he would not complain.“I’ll bet you are happy with your apple crop,” said the neighbor, “just about every one of them is a perfect apple.”“I suppose they are all right,” replied MacTavish grudgingly, “but what am I going to do? I have got no rotten ones to feed to my pigs.”That is the tendency of the negative mind. Even in paradise you will find so many things wrong that paradise will not be a paradise with the negative mind; it will become a hell. Psychologically, the negative mind is hell and the positive mind is heaven.I have told you the story of Edmund Burke, one of the great English philosophers. He was very friendly with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the archbishop of England. They had graduated together and they loved each other very much. And the archbishop was waiting, that some day Edmund Burke would come to listen to him. But he never came, although the archbishop was always going to any meetings that were addressed by Edmund Burke. This was very strange.Finally, he invited him specially: “This Sunday you have to come. You have not heard me even once and I have heard you each time you speak.”Very reluctantly, Edmund Burke said, “If you invite me, I will come.”He came and sat in the front. The archbishop had prepared his sermon as perfectly as he could because Edmund Burke was there and he wanted to impress him. But all the time he was becoming more and more nervous because Edmund Burke was sitting there with the same face, with no movement of any emotions, no encouragement in his eyes, no joy in listening to what was being said. The archbishop thought, “This is strange. He is sitting just like a dead man. And I am trying my best. It is the best sermon that I have ever delivered.”Coming back home there was a long silence. Finally, as they were parting, the archbishop could not resist the temptation. He asked, “What is the matter with you? Are you sick or something? – because I did not see a single emotion on your face. If the sermon was not good, then there should have been some emotion; if it was good, then too some emotion. But you remained almost like a stone statue. When people were laughing you did not even smile; when people were crying I did not see that your eyes were wet with tears. You behaved strangely, and I had prepared the best sermon of my life.”Edmund Burke said, “You created such contradictory statements that it is enough that I did not hit you then and there. I was holding myself back. That’s why I looked like a stone statue. If I had been relaxed I would have come near you and given you a good hit!”The archbishop said, “But what was so bad that you wanted to hit me?”Edmund Burke said, “You made two statements without realizing that they are contradictory. First you said, those who believe in Jesus will enter into paradise. Secondly, you said, those who are living a moral life will enter into heaven.”The archbishop said, “But what is the contradiction?”Edmund Burke said, “You studied philosophy with me, but you don’t understand philosophy at all. What about a man who is living an immoral life but believes in Jesus Christ? And what about the man who is living a moral life and does not believe in Jesus Christ? That’s where the contradiction is. It is not apparent to you or to your listeners, but you cannot deceive me.”The archbishop thought about it. Certainly it was a contradiction.Edmund Burke said, “You can answer me now. A man who has been moral and good his whole life, but does not believe in Jesus Christ – what is going to happen to him? What happened to Socrates? – because Jesus Christ was born five hundred years later; he had no idea of Jesus Christ, and he never believed in anyone else, but he was one of the most pious, most moral, and one of the greatest human beings that the earth has produced.“What about Gautam Buddha, who did not believe in any Jesus Christ, who did not believe in any Hindu gods, who did not believe even in the existence of God, but who lived one of the greatest lives you can conceive of? You cannot find a single fault in his life.“Have they gone to hell? And if the law of your God sends Socrates, Gautam Buddha, Lao Tzu to hell, your God cannot be said to be just, cannot to be said to be compassionate. He seems to be absolutely ugly and cruel. All that he wants is belief in him. And I know millions of people who believe in Jesus Christ, who come to your churches, who believe in your God, who believe in your Holy Bible, and who live an utterly ugly and immoral life, doing all kinds of crimes and committing all kinds of sins. What is your answer?”The archbishop was taken aback. He had never thought about the implications. Very few people think about implications. He said, “Right now I am not able to answer, but next Sunday… Give me seven days to think because you have raised a very fundamental question and I am caught in a dilemma. If I say yes, a moral man will enter heaven even if he does not believe in Jesus, then naturally the question arises: What is the need to believe in Jesus? And if I say a man who believes in Jesus is bound to go to heaven, then the question arises: If that is enough, then why bother about living a moral life? Why not enjoy all kinds of sins and crimes? So just give me seven days to figure out how I can come out of the dilemma.”Edmund Burke said, “Granted. I will come again next Sunday. Be ready with the answer!”Those seven days were the most torturous days for the archbishop. However he tried, he was always caught in the dilemma. Utterly tired, he could not sleep. The whole night he was thinking, but no answer seemed to be arising.On Sunday he got to the church earlier than ever before, just to pray to Christ in silence and ask him, “Now help me. I cannot manage to find the answer. You give me the answer” – because he had not slept for seven days.Utterly tired, he fell asleep while he was praying at the feet of Jesus Christ, and he saw a dream. He was in a train, a very fast train, and he inquired, “Where are we going?” Somebody said, “You don’t know where we are going? We are going to heaven.” He felt very relaxed because this was a great chance to see whether Gautam Buddha, Socrates, Chuang Tzu – people like that – were in heaven or not. He was immensely happy.When the train stopped at the railway station of heaven, he looked out of the window and he could not believe his eyes. It was just a desert – no greenery, no flowers, dead trees without leaves, and under those dead trees were sitting even more dead saints, with no juice. The dust had gathered on them because they had been sitting there for centuries. He said, “My God, if this is heaven, what will be the situation in hell?”He asked a saint, who could hardly open his eyes, and who said, “We have never heard of these people here.” He inquired of another man who said, “Gautam Buddha? Socrates? Lao Tzu? From where did you get these names? These fellows are not here.” He was shocked because even though he was an archbishop – a fanatical Christian – still, to put Gautam Buddha in hell seemed to be too cruel.He rushed to the railway station to inquire, “Is there any train going to hell?” The train was ready, so he jumped in. As they started coming closer to hell, strangely, the air became cooler, there was beautiful greenery all around, beautiful lakes and so many flowers, and everybody looked so happy. People were playing on their musical instruments; a few people were dancing.He said, “This is hell?” He got down, inquired of the stationmaster, “Are you certain this is hell?” The stationmaster said, “Absolutely certain. What is your problem?” The archbishop said, “My problem is, I want to know whether Gautam Buddha, Socrates, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, all these people who never believed in God, who never believed in Jesus – are they here?”The stationmaster said, “You see all this greenery and all these flowers and all these crops and you see all this singing and dancing? It started when Gautam Buddha, Socrates, Lao Tzu and people like that started coming into hell. They transformed the whole face of it. Now there is nobody in hell who wants to go to heaven.”This was even more shocking, and the very shock of it woke him up. The early members of the congregation had started coming. Edmund Burke had arrived. The archbishop must have been a very sincere man. That day he did not deliver any sermon, he simply told his whole dream. And he said, “I don’t have to conclude. You can draw the conclusion yourself.“My own simple understanding now is that wherever there are good people, there is heaven. I used to think that heaven was a certain place; now I think heaven is a certain spirituality, a certain flowering of your being. Wherever these people are, whether they believe in Jesus or not, whether they believe in the Bible or not is irrelevant because I have seen both. I have seen the believers, and heaven seems to be a complete graveyard. And hell seems to be such an oasis that even I am wondering what to do – to continue to believe in Jesus Christ, or to start living like a Gautam Buddha.”It all depends whether you are paying too much attention and allowing your consciousness to go to the negative. All your saints are negative; condemning everything is their whole profession. There are millions of people who are not sensitive but continuously negative. They cannot see anything good anywhere. If by chance they come across something good, they pass it by with absolute indifference. They don’t count the roses, they only count the thorns. They are so accustomed to viewing things negatively that it is almost impossible for them to see any beauty anywhere: all is wrong. Naturally, a person who thinks all is wrong is going to live in a world which is all wrong, in suffering, in misery, in pain, in agony.A sannyasin has to change his gestalt. Try to find the positive, the beautiful, and you will be surrounded with the positive, the beautiful, and the blissful.I am not saying that there are no wrong things in the world. I am not saying that there are no thorns in the rosebush. It is a question of your emphasis. If you look at the roses you will be so ecstatic that who cares about the thorns? But if you look only at the thorns – and not only look, but count them – you are going to have bloody fingers, and in that pain you will forget all about roses.Life is absolutely balanced between the positive and the negative. Now it is your choice which side you want to be, in heaven or in hell. Wherever you want to be, try to find it in your life, every moment. And whenever you have found something positive, pour all your attention and all your love on it. That will make it grow; that will make it more and more important in your life, more and more taking the space of your being.Remain absolutely indifferent about the negative. I am not saying it is not there. It is there because a few people need it. A few people are so much in love with the negative that if there is no negative they will die out of sheer agony: “Now there are roses and no thorns, what am I going to do? Everybody looks so beautiful, nothing ugly, everything seems to be so right, nothing is wrong.” They will lose all interest in existence. Their only interest was in the negative.But they are both there. There are positivist thinkers in the world, particularly in America, who say, “Go on thinking about the positive because the negative does not exist. It is always the positive; the negative is your imagination.” I don’t agree with them.The negative is not your imagination, neither is the positive your imagination. They both are there, absolutely balanced. It is up to you to choose.I have heard about a young man meeting an old lady. That old lady belonged to a positivist group that was very prominent fifty years ago in America – the Christian Scientists. They believe there is no negative. Everything is divine. There is nothing wrong; everything is right. They forget completely that if there is nothing wrong, how are you going to define right? If there is nothing negative, how are you going to define positive? If there is no darkness, how are you going to define light? But it was a very interesting, attractive philosophy.The old woman asked the young man, “I have not seen your father coming to our weekly meetings.”The young man said, “He is very sick.”The old woman said, “All nonsense! Has he forgotten our philosophy? Sickness is your imagination. Just go home and tell him, ‘Sickness is your imagination.’ There is no sickness, no death, nothing wrong in the world. It is God who created the world. How can there be wrong?”The young man said, “I will convey your message.”Three weeks passed and the old man still did not turn up. Again the woman encountered the young boy and asked him, “Did you convey my message?”He said, “I did.”The old woman said, “But he has not turned up to the meeting.”The young man said, “I am sorry to tell you that now he imagines he is dead!”He could not say that he is dead because that woman will immediately bounce on him with all kinds of positive philosophy – how can he be dead? So he managed to say that now he imagines himself to be dead.“What can we do? We had to put him in a grave. He is so certain of it that he does not speak, he does not breathe. He believes so much that he is dead that his pulse has gone, his heartbeat has gone. We tried hard your way. I told him, I whispered in his ear, ‘It is all imagination; remember your positivist philosophy.’ But his imagination is so strong.”You live in a world, in an existence that has both. Out of sheer necessity it needs balance in opposite polarities. But you need not be worried about that which makes you miserable.Choose the flowers and leave the thorns.Osho,I see that I am eager to drop my jealousy, judgments, greed, anger – all the baddies. Yet at the same time I am reluctantly clinging to the parts of my personality I still enjoy indulging in – my passion, my clown, my gypsy adventurer. Why am I so afraid that just to be the watcher will be boring?Deva Dwabha, I can see you must be in a great conflict. You say, “I see that I am eager to drop my jealousy, judgments, greed, anger – all the baddies. Yet at the same time I am reluctantly clinging to the parts of my personality I still enjoy indulging in – my passion, my clown, my gypsy adventurer. Why am I so afraid that just to be the watcher will be boring?”It seems you are not experienced enough. You have just heard these great things, that if you drop your jealousy, judgments, greed, anger and all the baddies, you will have all the pleasures and blissfulness of paradise showering on you.In fact, you are not really interested in dropping them. If you can get all the pleasures and ecstasies of enlightenment and can still keep your jealousy, judgments, greed and anger, I think you will be immensely happy.The trouble is you will have to choose. How can you drop your greed and jealousy and judgments and anger, if you enjoy your passion, your clown, your gypsy adventurer?My suggestion is, first enjoy your gypsy adventurer, your passion, your clown as much as you can. Be completely fed up with them. Don’t get in a split. This happens to many people, hearing great words they create a split within themselves. I don’t want you to be schizophrenic; I want you to be psychologically and spiritually healthy.My suggestion is, first indulge in your passions as much as you can till you get really bored. This has to be the first step. Only then can you take the second step very easily. It is the first step that is preventing you from taking the second step. When you are utterly finished, you are bound to drop all greed, jealousy, judgments, anger. What are you going to do with these things? It is one complete package. But begin with your passion because I have never heard that there has ever been a single person in the world who did not become fed up with his passion.Yes, if you live a lukewarm life you may not get fed up. But live totally, pour your whole energy into your passion, into your clown, into your gypsy adventurer, and soon you will see that what you were thinking was going to bring great blessings to you has only destroyed your energies and has left you like a spent cartridge.Only then will you be able to drop jealousy. There will be no need to drop it. They will all drop on their own accord. And then at the third step you will not be able to ask: “Will being the watcher be boring?”Do you think I am bored? I am not even bored with you! Every day, in the morning, every day in the evening, I come with such joy to see you. I never remember that you are the same people I have seen the night before. I am absolutely fresh every moment.The watcher is not boring. The watcher is such an utter silence, such tremendous peace – and such a joy arising within yourself, not coming from outside. And the watcher brings you experiences that you have not even dreamed about.You have heard the word ecstasy but you don’t know what it is. You have heard the word truth but you don’t know what it is. You have heard the word beauty but if somebody asks you what it is you will not be able to answer.The watcher brings satyam shivam sundaram to you. It opens the door of truth, of godliness, of immense beauty and eternal life. It gives you new eyes, new perception. The trees look greener than they are looking now, and even a small wild flower gives you so much joy, so much wonder. The whole world becomes such a mystery. There is no question of being bored.And for the watcher the world goes on changing so quickly. It is only for the people who are blind – and I call all those people who don’t have their watcher awake, blind. That is the only spiritual blindness. That’s why you think these are the same trees, these are the same birds, this is the same sun, this is the same ocean. You can’t see that existence goes on renewing itself every moment.I love to quote Heraclitus, who says, “You cannot step in the same river twice.” Finally I have improved upon Heraclitus. I say you cannot step in the same river even once because the river is constantly flowing.But to the blind it seems it is the same river. You are becoming different each moment; otherwise from your childhood, how did you become a young person? If your first photograph, taken the day you became part of your mother’s body, is shown to you, you will have to see it with a magnifying glass, and it will be nothing but a full stop. You will not be able to recognize where your nose is, where your ears are, where your eyes are. “Is this me?” But once it was, and since then things have been changing continuously.Do you remember the date when from a child you suddenly became a young man or a young woman? It doesn’t happen suddenly. It goes so gradually that unless you are a watcher you will not be able to see the subtle changes that are happening every moment all around. It is the same world for the blind.You are asking, “Why am I so afraid that just to be the watcher will be boring?”You are afraid not because you know that the experience of being a watcher will be boring – because there is not a single exception in the whole history of mankind that any watcher, any meditator has said that the inner experience is boring. That is not the fear because you don’t know what the inner explosion from the watcher arising is going to be.Your fear is that the watcher will not arise unless you drop your passion, your clown, your gypsy adventurer. Your fear is of change. You don’t know anything about the watcher. In fact, as far as I can see you must be utterly bored right now because only a bored person becomes a gypsy adventurer. You can see all these tourists running from one place to another…This is a different class of humanity and a different category: the tourist. They are utterly insane people, loaded with cameras, and always in a hurry. Even if they come to the Taj Mahal, they don’t have much time. They immediately take a few photographs and the taxi moves on. They have not seen the Taj Mahal; they were adjusting their cameras. By that time the taxi-driver has started honking that it is time to go, there are many other places to see. And finally they decide, back at home, relaxed, “We will look at the album and we will appreciate the beauty of the Taj Mahal and the Himalayas and Kashmir.”This seems to be such a stupidity. You could have purchased all those photographs in your own town. They are available, and you cannot have better photographs than those that are available because they are taken by great, professional photographers. Your photographs will be just amateurish. Did you go around the world just to collect photographs? What was the fear of remaining with the Taj Mahal for at least for twenty-four hours?Those who know the Taj Mahal the way I know it remain there exactly fifteen days. When the moon starts rising, the first day of the moon, you have a beautiful Taj Mahal, just a glimpse for a moment and then there is darkness. Then the second day more light, the third day more light… As the light grows, the Taj Mahal also becomes more and more clear, as if a dream is becoming a reality.And on the full moon night exactly nearabout nine o’clock, the Taj Mahal is the most beautiful. The combination of the full moon and the Taj Mahal has been made not by ordinary architects; it has been made by Sufi mystics. It has been made to create gratitude and prayerfulness in you. It is not a place for tourists. It is a place for seekers.Seekers are not in a hurry. They will wait, they will look at the Taj Mahal from every side in different lights: in the day, in the night, in the morning. When the sky is full of stars, the Taj Mahal has a different beauty. The beauty goes on changing. That is the grandeur of this Taj Mahal – and this is the grandeur of this whole existence. The Taj Mahal is just a representative.The adventurer, the gypsy is really a bored person. He is trying to get rid of boredom, so he goes on running from one place to another place, from one woman to another woman. He gets bored quickly with everything, runs after another thing, thinking perhaps he will not be bored there. But he forgets completely that things are not boring, you are bored. Wherever you are, you will be bored.If you come to meet God himself, you will take a few photographs – what else to do? – and will start getting fed up. The same God, eternally ancient, how many pictures can you take? You can finish your whole roll of film and then you are stuck with this old dull and dead God. You will start running, even if it is to hell, and you will enter into it. Maybe there is some adventure there. But you will get bored in every place because boredom is your approach and attitude; it is not a quality of things. What is your passion? How long does it take you to get fed up with one passionate relationship? Perhaps one night, or perhaps that is too much.There is a Sufi story…A king was very angry because he wanted a beautiful woman, a poor woman in the city, to be his lover. But the most shocking thing was that she was in love with one of his servants. That was too much, too humiliating and insulting. When the king wants her, the girl refuses and she is interested in a poor servant of the same king.He asked his council of wise men what should be done. The oldest of them suggested both should be brought to the court, stripped naked, tied together embracing each other, and “…let them stand in your garden for twenty-four hours surrounded by guns so they cannot escape.”The king said, “What? Allow them to embrace naked in my garden? What kind of advice are you giving me?”The old man said, “I am old enough, and I know how much it takes for one to be bored. Just do it, and in the morning you will see the result.”This young man and young woman had been hankering and dreaming about when they will get married and when they will go for a honeymoon and how beautiful it is going to be. Perhaps there has never been such a beautiful honeymoon ever because nobody has ever loved so much. Every lover thinks that way. Every lover thinks, “I am the first, the foremost lover in the world.”But when they were brought and made naked and told to embrace each other, it looked very awkward, surrounded by a gang of people with loaded guns – and the whole court was watching. But the order had to be followed, so they embraced each other and then they were tied so that they could not separate from each other.And you can see what happened. In twelve hours they pissed on each other, they had to defecate, and it became such a stinking phenomenon. That was really the greatest honeymoon: it was a hot night in New Delhi, and they were perspiring and stinking and just hoping when the morning comes…They started hating each other that night – in just twelve hours. Everything became very condensed. In your life it is spread in a thin layer, so it takes a little time, fifteen days. They were experiencing it really totally and intensely. That is passion.In the morning they were released, and the story is that they ran away from each other, never to see each other again. They had seen enough, more than enough. They never met again in their lives. They both left New Delhi, just for the simple reason not to see that ugly man again, not to see that ugly woman, that bitch, who was pissing on him.What is your passion? Make it total and intense, and within twenty-four hours you will be finished with it. And then a few more experiences perhaps, it depends on your intelligence. If you are intelligent one affair is enough. If you are an idiot, then you may go on hoping for your whole life that perhaps another affair will be the right one.The more intelligent a man or a woman is, the sooner comes the realization that all these lusts, passions, are sheer stupidity. And if you can understand the reason for your being an adventurer, that deep down it is your bored life that goes on seeking for new avenues – perhaps somewhere, someplace you will not feel bored. You go on running, just simply wasting your life.And the day your passions are gone, how can you be jealous? Jealousy is a by-product of your passions. And when you are no longer interested in anybody, except the exploration of your own being, judgments will fall away. When you discover your treasure, the hidden splendor within you, your greed will disappear. And when you are feeling so fulfilled, how can you be angry? – because that anger will destroy your contentment and your fulfillment.But the secret of all this transformation is watching. No meditator in the whole of history has ever felt bored. In fact, the meditators are the only people who destroy boredom completely. They are so thrilled by existence, they are so thrilled just by their consciousness, they are so thrilled by falling in tune with the heartbeat of the universe that it is impossible to be bored. And it is changing every moment: it is every moment a new universe, and it is every moment a new dance, a new song, a new music, which you have never heard before.Moishe Finkelstein had just entered the parlor of a familiar whorehouse when to his great surprise he saw his father coming down the stairs. Moishe reeled back in surprise. “Dad!” he exclaimed, “what are you doing in a place like this?”Old man Finkelstein was equally stunned, but recovered quickly. “Now Moishe,” he said nonchalantly, brushing off his suit, “for twenty lousy dollars would you want me to bother your dear, hard working mother?”People go on finding strange excuses, but the real thing is they get bored.Hymie Goldberg had been having lunch in the same restaurant for twenty years and every day he ordered chicken soup with never a change. But one day Hymie called the waiter back after receiving his soup. “Yes, Mr. Goldberg?” inquired the waiter.“Waiter,” said Hymie, “please taste this soup.”The waiter was shocked: “What do you mean, taste the soup? For twenty years you have been eating the same chicken soup every day. Has it ever been different?”Hymie ignored the waiter’s comments. “Please taste this soup,” he repeated.“Mr. Goldberg,” cried the waiter, “what is the matter with you? I know what the chicken soup tastes like.”“Taste the soup!” Hymie demanded.“Okay, okay,” said the waiter. “I will taste it. Where is the spoon?”“Aha!” cried Hymie.He is not bored with the soup – the spoon is missing.First be finished with your passions. It is too early to be a watcher. And as you are finished with your passions and your adventures, you will find your anger and jealousy and greed disappearing. Then will be the right time, the right moment to start the ultimate adventure of being a witness, a meditator, a watcher.First, play around with the toys you are playing with. In each child’s life a moment comes when he throws his toys away and forgets all about them. In each intelligent man or woman’s life also comes the time when he is finished with the toys of ordinary life, which are available even to the animals. Then comes an urgent urge to go beyond the animals, to go beyond this so-called human society, to inquire into the very life source – one’s consciousness. Then you have entered a mystery that is unending.You will never be bored. I say this to you with absolute authority because I am not talking about it, I am within it, part of it. I have never felt a single moment of boredom.But I will not tell you to believe in what I say. I can only tell you to proceed step by step, so that one day you can also experience this immense benediction. It is your birthright.

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 16 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why am I always running so fast? Is there something that I don't want to see?It is not only you; almost everybody is running as fast as he can from himself. And the problem is, you cannot run away from yourself. Wherever you go you will be yourself.The fear is of knowing oneself. It is the greatest fear in the world. It is because you have been so immensely condemned by everybody for the smallest things, for the smallest mistakes – which are absolutely human – that you have become afraid of yourself. You know that you are not worthy.That idea has sunk very deep into your unconscious – that you are not deserving, that you are utterly worthless. Naturally, the best way is to get away from yourself. Everybody is doing it in different ways: somebody is running for money, somebody is running for power, somebody is running for respectability, somebody is running for virtue, saintliness.But if you look deep down, they are not running for anything, they are running from. That somebody is running after money madly is just an excuse; he is deceiving himself and the whole world. The reality is that money gives him a good excuse to run, and hides the fact that he is running from himself. That’s why when he accumulates money, he comes to a point of tremendous despair and anguish. What has happened? That was his goal; he has achieved it – he should be the happiest man in the world.But the people who succeed are not the happiest people in the world. They are the most miserable. What is their anguish? Their anguish is that their whole effort has failed. Now there is nothing more to run after, and suddenly they are encountering themselves. At the highest peak of their success they meet nobody else but themselves. Strangely enough, this is the fellow they have been running from.You cannot run from yourself. On the contrary, you have to come closer to yourself, deeper into your being, and to drop all the condemnatory tones that have been handed over to you by everybody you have known in your life. The parents, the husband, the wife, the neighbors, the teachers, the friends, the enemies – everybody is pointing to something that is wrong in you. From no source comes any appreciation.Humanity has created a very strange situation for itself in which nobody is at ease, nobody can relax because the moment you relax you face yourself. Relaxation becomes almost a mirror, and you don’t want to see your face because you are so much impressed by the condemnatory opinions of others.You have not been allowed even the smallest pleasures by your church, by your priests, by your religion, by your culture. Only misery is acceptable, not pleasure. In this situation when from every source, from every direction comes only condemnation, it is very natural for you to feel that you are a sinner. Every religion has been shouting for centuries that you are born in sin, that suffering is your destiny – from so many sources without exception – that it is very natural for any individual to be impressed by this vast conspiracy. Everybody is caught in it.And if you try to understand it you will be very much surprised. Just as others have condemned you, you are condemning others. It is a very mutual conspiracy. Just as your parents have never accepted you as being of any worth, you are doing the same with your children – without ever becoming aware that everybody is what he is, he cannot be otherwise. He can pretend to be otherwise, he can be a hypocrite, but in truth he will always remain himself.Your running away is nothing but creating more hypocrisy, more masks so that you can hide yourself completely from the eyes of everyone. You may succeed in hiding yourself from others, but how can you succeed in hiding yourself from yourself? You can go to the moon; you will find yourself there. You can go to Everest; you may be alone but you are with yourself. Perhaps in that aloneness on Everest you will become more alert and aware of yourself.That is one of the reasons why people are also afraid of aloneness; they want a crowd, they want always to have people surrounding them, they want friends. It is very difficult for people to remain silent and peaceful in aloneness. The reason is that in aloneness you are left with yourself – and you have accepted the stupid ideas that you are ugly, that you are sensuous, that you are lustful, that you are greedy, that you are violent, that there is nothing that can be appreciated in you.Prem Amita, you are asking, “Why am I always running so fast?” Because you are afraid you may be overtaken by yourself. And the implications of running so fast have many dimensions. This running fast from yourself has created a craziness about speed. Everybody wants to reach somewhere with as much speed as possible.It happened once…I was coming from a place called Nagpur, back to Jabalpur. I was traveling with the vice-chancellor of Nagpur University, and the car broke down on the road. I have never seen anybody become so miserable.I told him, “There is no hurry. Nobody is waiting for you there, and the conference which you are going to is going to begin in twenty-four hours. And Jabalpur is only three hours away. There is no problem. Either we will get the car repaired, or we will call for another car to come from Jabalpur, or we may get a lift, or buses are continually passing by. There is no problem. You need not be so miserable.”He sat in the car and I went looking for somebody. It was a small village, but maybe some mechanic or some help was possible. Perhaps the landlord of the village had a car. When I came back from the village, that man was almost in tears. I said, “What is the matter?”He said, “I cannot afford to be alone. It exposes me so deeply, it makes me utterly naked before myself. It makes me aware that I have wasted my whole life – and I don’t want to know it.”I said, “Your not knowing it is not going to help you in any way. It is better to know it, and it is better to go deeper into yourself. Why this misery and aloneness?”Aloneness should be one of the greatest joys.People are running. It does not matter where they are going; what matters is whether they are going at full speed or not.You are asking, “Is there something that I don’t want to see?” There are many things. Fundamentally, it is you that you don’t want to see – and it is because of a wrong conditioning.My whole approach of inner transformation is that you will have to drop your conditionings. Whatever has been said about you by others – simply drop it. It is absolutely crap. They don’t know about themselves; what can they say about you that can be truthful?And the opinions that you have collected from others – just try to watch from whom you are collecting your opinions. They are not from a Gautam Buddha, or from a Jesus, or from a Socrates. They are from people who are as ignorant as you are. They are simply passing on others’ opinions that have been given to them.There is a beautiful story. Whether it is factual or not does not matter; its beauty is in its meaning. One of the greatest emperors India has known was the Mogul emperor, Akbar. He can be compared only to one man in the West, and that is Marcus Aurelius. Emperors are very rarely wise people, but these two names are certainly exceptions.One day he was in his court talking with his courtiers. He had collected the best people in the country – the best painter, the best musician, the best philosopher, the best poet. He had a small, special committee of nine members who were known as “the nine jewels of Akbar’s court.”The most important of them was a man called Birbal. Immensely intelligent and a man with a great sense of humor, he did something which was improper to do in front of the emperor. Every emperor has his own rules, his word is the law, and Birbal’s behavior was against something about which Akbar was very stubborn. Akbar immediately slapped Birbal. He respected Birbal, he loved Birbal, he was his most intimate friend, but as far as the rules of the court were concerned, he could not forgive him.But what Birbal did is the real story. He did not wait for a single moment; he immediately slapped the man who was standing on his other side. The other man was shocked, and even Akbar was shocked. He had thought that this man was very wise. “Is he mad, or what? I have slapped him. This is strange; absolutely absurd and illogical.”And the other man was standing there, shocked, and Birbal said, “Don’t stand there like a fool! Just pass it on.” So that man slapped somebody else who was standing by his side – and now the game became clear: you have to pass it on.In the night, when Akbar went to sleep with his wife, his wife slapped him. He said, “What is the matter?”She said, “It has been going on around the city, and finally it has reached its original source. Somebody else slapped me, and when I asked, ‘What is the matter?’ I was told that this is the game that Akbar started. I thought it is better to finish it, to complete the circle.”And the next day, the first thing, Birbal asked was, “Have you received my slap back or not?”Akbar said, “I had never thought that this would happen!”Birbal said, “I was absolutely certain because where will it finally go? It will go around the city. You cannot escape; it is bound to come to you.”Everything goes on being transferred for centuries; being passed on from one hand to another, from one generation to another generation – and the game continues. This is the game that you have to come out of. The only way to come out of it is to rediscover your self-respect, to again attain your dignity – which you had when you were a child, when you were still not contaminated, when you were still not conditioned and poisoned by the society and by the people around you.Be a child again and you will not be running away from yourself, you will be running within yourself. That is the way of the meditator. The worldly man runs away from himself, and the seeker runs within himself, to find the source of this life, this consciousness. And when he discovers the source, he has discovered not only his life source, he has discovered the life source of the universe, of the whole cosmos.A tremendous celebration arises in him. Life becomes moment to moment just a song, a dance. One becomes absolutely free from all the jargon that the society has handed down. One simply throws away all conditionings, all traditions – the whole past.I say unto you, only one thing you have to renounce, and that is the past and nothing else.If you can renounce the past you will be absolutely fresh, just born. And to be in that freshness is such a blessing, such an ecstasy, you cannot even think of going away even for a single moment. The man who knows himself never takes any holiday. But most people go on behaving stupidly.An American was driving along a small country lane in Ireland when he was horrified to see a cartload of hay coming out of the field into the narrow road. He jumped on the brakes but couldn’t stop in time, and ended up driving through the fence into the field where the car burst into flames.“Bejabers!” exclaimed Paddy to his friend Seamus, who was driving the hay cart, “Some of these tourists are terrible drivers. We only just got out of that field in time.”The old farmer, plowing his fields with a pair of bulls, was asked by a neighbor why he did not use oxen.“I don’t want to use oxen,” replied the farmer, “I want to use bulls.”“Well,” continued the neighbor, “If you don’t want to use oxen, why don’t you use horses?”“I don’t want to use horses!” retorted the farmer, “I want to use bulls!”“Well, perhaps,” tried the neighbor, “you could try using that new tractor your son has just bought.”“I don’t want to use tractors, either, I want to use bulls.” reaffirmed the farmer.“Why do you only want to use bulls?” asked the neighbor at a loss.“Because,” said the old boy, “I don’t want them to think that life is all romance.”This is simply the situation in which you are born, in which you have been conditioned. Nobody wants you to know that life is simply romance. And that is my crime because that is my whole teaching, that life is nothing but romance.The newlywed couple flew to Miami and checked into the honeymoon hotel. For days nothing was seen of them, until the morning of the sixth day, when they came to the dining room for breakfast. As the waiter approached their table, the bride turned to her husband and said, “Honey, do you know what I would like?”“Yes, I know,” he replied wearily, “but we have to eat sometime.”So once in a while it is good to have breakfast; otherwise life is a continuous romance. And I teach you not only the romance of the body, which is very ordinary. I teach you the romance of the spirit, which is eternal, which begins but never ends. But this is possible only if you start going inward.Going inward is going godward. Going inward is the whole secret of all alchemical transformation of being.Running away is simply wasting tremendously valuable time, and a life that could have been a great song, a great creativity, a tremendous festival of lights. The farther away you are from yourself, the darker your life will become, the more miserable, the more anxiety ridden, the more wounded, condemned, rejected by yourself.And the farther away you are, the more difficult it becomes to find the way back home. You have been going away from yourself for many, many lives. But if you move in a right, meditative path you have not gone very far away.Meditation is the short cut from where you are to where you should be. And meditation is such a simple method that anybody, even a small child, can enter into its wonderland.Rather than running away, run withinward. Come closer to yourself to have a better look – because nobody else can see your inner reality, only you can see that splendor and that glory. And because nobody else can see your inner beauty, they go on condemning you. Only you can assert your blissfulness, only you can ultimately assert your enlightenment.Even then people will be suspicious. They were suspicious about Socrates, they were suspicious about Gautam Buddha, they were suspicious about Jesus. In fact, their suspicion is rooted in their own unawareness of their inner being.How can they believe Gautam Buddha: that in the inner silences of the heart is the ultimate ecstasy? They don’t know anything of the inner, not even the ABC. They don’t know anything about ecstasy. They may listen to a Gautam Buddha – just because of his presence, his charismatic eyes, his magnetic vibration – but when they go home, they will start suspecting, doubting.And this is happening even here. I receive many letters saying that, “When we listen to you everything seems to be absolutely right. As we reach home doubts start arising; the mind starts saying that we have been hypnotized.” There are millions of people who want to come close to me but are afraid – for the simple reason that they may be hypnotized.It is something far deeper than hypnosis. You are not hypnotized, you are simply taken into a different vision of your own self. It is not something like magic; you are not being befooled. You are being awakened.The word hypnosis means sleep, and my whole work is to awaken you. You are already asleep and you have been asleep for lives together.It is time to wake up.You have wasted too much valuable time, energy, opportunity already. But still there is time – and the moment you wake up, for you the night ends and the dawn begins.Osho,I am becoming more and more conscious of the barriers I have built up in myself over the years against being a joyful self-loving open being. It feels like the wall in me is getting stronger and stronger the more I am aware of it, and I can't come through. Do I first need more courage? Could you please help me with your understanding?It is the same question again. I have been answering Amita, but I have also answered you – although you have phrased your question in a different way. A few small details are different; otherwise it is the same problem. I will discuss those small differences in detail.You say, “I am becoming more and more conscious of the barriers that have built up in myself over the years against being a joyful, self-loving, open being. It feels like the wall in me is getting stronger and stronger the more I am aware of it, and I can’t come through.”The first thing to understand is that the wall is not becoming stronger; it is only that your awareness is becoming clear. There is no reason at all why the wall should become stronger when you are becoming more aware. It is simply when you bring the light into your dark house, you start seeing the cobwebs and the spiders. Not that they have suddenly started growing because you have brought the light in; they have always been there. It is just that you are becoming aware, alert.But don’t think that they are growing. Your light has nothing to do with their growth. Yes, it reveals their presence. Your growing awareness is revealing the presence of your prison walls.And you say, “I am aware of it and I can’t come through.” Because these walls are not true walls, they cannot prevent you. They are not made of bricks or stone; they are only made of thoughts. You just have to know the secret of how to come through them. If you start struggling with your thought processes, which constitute the prison walls, then you will get into a tremendous mess. One can even go insane.That’s how people go insane: they are surrounded by so many thoughts and they are trying hard to come out of the crowd and they go on getting deeper and deeper into the crowd. And then naturally a breakdown follows. Their nervous system cannot sustain so much pressure and so much tension. They have opened Pandora’s box. It was all hidden there, but they were blissfully unaware of it. Now they have brought a meditative awareness and suddenly they see a great crowd, so thick that the more they try, the more they feel their impotence against the walls that are surrounding them.If you start fighting with them then there is no way. Sooner or later – tired, tattered – you will find yourself slipping from your sanity. But if you use a right method, instead of a breakdown you will have a breakthrough. The right method to deal with all that you feel you are surrounded with is to be just a witness: not to fight, not to judge, not to condemn. Just remain silent and still, purely witnessing whatever is there.This is almost a miracle. I have not come across any miracle other than the miracle of meditation, the miracle of witnessing. Because if you can witness, you will be surprised that the strong wall is becoming thinner, the crowd is dispersing. Slowly, slowly you see doors and gaps through which you can get out.But there is no need to get out. Remain where you are. Just go on witnessing. As your witnessing becomes stronger, the wall that surrounds you will become weaker. The day your witnessing is perfect, you will find there has been no wall, nothing is surrounding you, the whole sky is available to you.Rather than fighting with thoughts, fighting against wrong conditionings, just become a pure witness. Fighting, you cannot win. Without fighting victory is yours. Victory belongs only to those who can witness.Hymie Goldberg was having trouble getting Becky, his wife, to make love to him anymore. So one night just before bedtime, he offered her a glass of water and two aspirins.“What are you giving me these for?” Becky asked. “I have not got a headache.”“Great,” said Hymie. “Let us get started.”This headache was the problem. Every day, whenever poor Goldberg would ask, the wife had a great headache. This time he worked through a different methodology. Becky could not understand that now he is using a very wise strategy – offering aspirins even before she has said she has a headache.So just be a little wise…Doctor Klein finished the examination of his patient and then said, “You are in perfect health, Mr. Levinsky, your heart, lungs, blood pressure, cholesterol level – everything is fine.”“Splendid,” said Mr. Levinsky.“I will see you next year,” said Doctor Klein.They shook hands, but as soon as the patient had left the room, Doctor Klein heard a loud crash. He opened the door and there, flat on his face, lay Mr. Levinsky. The nurse cried, “Doctor, he just collapsed. He fell down like a rock.”The doctor felt his heart and said, “My God, he is dead.” He then put his hands under the corpse’s arms.“Quick,” said the doctor, “take his feet!”“What?” cried the nurse.“For God’s sake,” said the doctor, “let us turn him round. We have to make it look like he was coming in!”Just be a little intelligent.It is said that intelligence is not of much use unless you are intelligent enough to know how to use it.Just the other day I came across a tremendously great discovery. It says that every idiot you meet in the world is the end product of millions of years of evolution.Intelligence is certainly rare but the people who have gathered around me, just the fact that they had the courage to be here is enough proof of their intelligence. Now you have to put your intelligence into action.“My God,” sighed Paddy, “I had everything a man could want – the love of a gorgeous woman, a beautiful house, plenty of money, fine clothes.”“What happened?” asked Seamus.“What happened? Out of the blue without any hint of warning, my wife walked in.”Just be alert. There are dangers on every step. A man who decides to be a meditator has to be very cautious.Lao Tzu’s statement is that a man of meditation always walks as if he is passing through an ice-cold stream in winter, very careful, very alert.Unless you are very careful and very alert, the millions-of-years-old mind and its functioning is going to be difficult to transcend. Although the strategy is simple, sometimes the simple seems to be the most difficult – and particularly when you are absolutely unacquainted with it.Meditation is only a word to you. It has not become a taste, it has not been a nourishment, it has not been an experience for you; hence I can understand your difficulty. But you also have to understand my difficulty. Your diseases may be many, but I have only one medicine – and my difficulty is to go on selling the same medicine for different patients, different diseases.I don’t care what your disease is because I know I have got only one medicine. Whatever your disease is I will discuss it, but finally you have to accept the same medicine. It never changes. As far as I know, in these thirty-five years it has never changed.I have seen millions of people, millions of different questions, and even before I hear their question I know the answer. Because it does not matter what their question is, what matters is how to manage to bring their question to my answer.The math teacher turned to little Ernie and said, “Ernest, if your father borrowed three hundred dollars and promised to pay back fifteen dollars a week, how much would he owe at the end of ten weeks?”“Three hundred dollars,” Ernie quickly replied.“I am afraid,” said the teacher, “that you don’t know your math very well.”“I am afraid,” said Ernie, “that you don’t know my father.”

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 17 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I've had a glimpse of what it could be to just be, but so much fear comes up about doing nothing. I have this sense that I am stuck. What is this fear?Deva Tarshita, the first glimpse of one’s own being is inevitably unbelievable. First, because you have never known it before so you cannot recognize what it is. It is so much vaster than what you have been thinking of as yourself. It is just like a dewdrop coming in contact with the ocean.The fear is necessary. The dewdrop cannot think in other ways except that slipping into the ocean is death, although it is not true. But we have to be compassionate toward the dewdrop too. It is beyond its comprehension. The ocean is so vast; it is almost a necessity to think, “I will disappear and be lost” – and naturally one becomes tremendously afraid.Only one thing can be done, and that is to have courage and take a jump. That’s the fundamental function of the master, to tell you, “I was also a dewdrop one day. I was also afraid when I came closer to the ocean. I was also in deep trembling as much as you are, but there was no way of going back. I have known being a dewdrop for millions of lives and it has been nothing but misery and darkness and anxiety. Why not take a chance and see?”It is risky; one never knows what is going to happen when the dewdrop simply disappears in the ocean. But I can say to you that the dewdrop does not disappear in the ocean. On the contrary, the ocean disappears in the dewdrop. The dewdrop becomes the whole ocean. It is not death, so that you have to be afraid. It is eternal life, for which you have been searching.I have given you the name Tarshita. Tarshita means “one who is thirsty.” Now that you have come so close to the glimpse of what it means just to be, don’t turn back. Turning back is only for the cowards. This is the most precious moment. Allow it to happen.The whole of history is a witness that those who have allowed themselves to disappear into the vastness of existence have not really disappeared. On the contrary, for the first time they have found themselves so huge: without any limits, without any boundaries, without any bondages. This is freedom: to be oceanic. To be a dewdrop is to be imprisoned in a small boundary.Your self is only a dewdrop. The ocean is a no-self.Gautam Buddha has the right word for it. The language he used was the people’s language of those days, Pali. In Pali “the self” has much more meaning than in the English language. The Pali word for self is atta. The very word is not synonymous only with self, but also contains ego, arrogance. And the word for when the atta disappears into the oceanic existence is anatta. The ego is lost, the arrogance is lost, the anxiety is lost; death disappears, and for the first time you are really and totally alive in a cosmic sense. For the first time you have touched the eternal.This fear grips everybody. When the river comes traveling thousands of miles from the mountains and the valleys and the plains to the ocean, for a moment it trembles. Those who can understand even the language of mountains and trees, those who are so sensitive they can feel… There are many references from enlightened people that when the river comes to the ocean, for a moment it trembles. Great anxiety grips it. A moment of decision, a decision of tremendous importance – to go back?But there is no way to go back. You cannot travel backward in time. You have only one possibility: to go ahead. If the river cannot go back, at least it certainly looks back to all those beautiful mountains it descended, to all those beautiful primeval forests it passed, to all those beautiful people. All the memories – just a moment of looking back. But it cannot stay long; it has to take a plunge into the ocean, knowing perfectly well that “this is going to be my death.”But it is not a death. The river itself becomes the ocean. It is the expansion of your consciousness, of your being. You are becoming synonymous with the universe.You have to put aside your fear. If you don’t put aside your fear and you cling to it, there is danger because once you start clinging to your tiny self there is no way to persuade you to take the jump.That’s why I said, this is one of the fundamental functions of the master – to persuade you and show you that I have jumped and I am more alive than I have ever been. I have not lost anything; I have conquered the whole existence. Hence, the master can say to you, “Come, follow me.”There are complications in things. Unless you have a deep love for the master and an absolute trust, he will not be of any help in this moment of fear. Your trust and your love give nothing to the master, remember. They simply give you the opportunity to be courageous.Just the other day a sannyasin asked me a question: “If I can say only yes and not no, then what kind of freedom is this?” You can say no, but remember that this freedom of saying no is the freedom of the tiny dewdrop that is saying no to the ocean.Before you became a sannyasin the freedom was yours: you could have said no, you could have said yes. Once you have said yes, then your yes has to be total. There has not to be any space for no. Otherwise, when you need the yes, the more the no will arise in you. It will support your fear, it will support your ego, it will support your self.I have no objection because I am not going to lose anything. You can say no as loudly as you want. But remember, you have come here for a transformation, and only after the transformation will you know the real taste of freedom. What freedom can you have by just saying no or yes? Your yes is as stupid as your no. You are stupid!And when you say such things and you ask questions like this, I am amazed. Why did you become a sannyasin in the first place? – because sannyas is a commitment, it is a dedication, it is a declaration of your love, your trust. It is a declaration to the skies that: “Now I am dropping the no from my being. It has tortured me enough. It has been a disease. I am entering into the world of yes, into life-affirmation.”And the yes to the master is not only to the master, because the master is only a window to the universe. You are saying yes to the universe. Only in that yes will you expand and know tremendous freedom. Your yes and no are just stupid games of the mind.But if you are still feeling to enjoy the no you can enjoy, but then sannyas is not for you – perhaps a few lives more. And if you can meet somebody like me again, which is not necessarily…The day Gautam Buddha died, Ananda burst into tears. Gautam Buddha said, “Ananda, you have been with me for forty-two years. It is more than enough. Whatever I had to give to you, I have given. You don’t need me. Why are you crying?”Ananda said, “I am crying because even while you were alive and I was with you, day in, day out twenty-four hours a day for forty-two years…” He even used to sleep in the night in the same room where Buddha was sleeping – who knows what he may need in the night? He served him almost like a shadow and followed him almost like a shadow.He said to Buddha, “I am crying because I have not become enlightened yet, and you are leaving the body. I cannot conceive that again, in the future, there will be this immense opportunity; that I may again be so close and so intimate with a man like you. What will happen to me?”Buddha said, “Don’t be worried. Your ‘yes’ was mixed with ‘no.’”And there was a reason for it. Ananda was an elder cousin-brother of Gautam Buddha. So just the ego saying, “I am the elder brother of Gautam the Buddha…” And when he took sannyas he told Gautam Buddha, “Listen. Once I have become a sannyasin I don’t have any right to go against your will. Your will, will be my will. But I am still not initiated, so before initiation I am still your elder brother and you have to listen to me. I have three conditions. Promise me that you will never go against those conditions.”Buddha said laughingly, “What are those conditions?”The conditions were not great – but a condition is a condition whether it is great or small. The condition carries an undercurrent of “no.” He is making it clear from the very beginning that Buddha cannot touch these three things. One was, “You cannot send me away from you. I will always remain with you. You cannot find any excuse like, ‘Go and propagate the word.’ That is not possible. I will remain with you. Wherever you go, I will go.“The second condition is that I will even sleep in your room. And the third condition is that even in the middle of the night, if I want to ask a question or one of my friends wants to ask a question, I will bring the friend in and you will have to answer. You cannot say, ‘I am tired. The whole day’s journey on foot and then the whole day hundreds of people coming to meet me…and their questions. At least in the middle of the night, don’t disturb me.’ You cannot say that.”Buddha said, “You are my elder brother and I cannot deny you. So I promise, all these three things will always be fulfilled.”Then Ananda took initiation.The last day, after forty-two years, Buddha said, “Those three conditions have been the barrier. Many came after you and became enlightened, and you had the first opportunity. But when a dewdrop starts making conditions on the ocean it is creating barriers. Although you have been thinking that you had made those conditions when you were not a sannyasin, the consciousness and its current are the same. You may not be aware, but I have been aware that deep down in you, you still carry that ego that says, ‘I am the elder brother; I have a particularly special place.’ Nobody else has made any conditions.”Initiations cannot be conditional. You are a sannyasin; you should have thought before that you are going on the path of yes. And this path of yes will end up in freedom. If you think you also need the no, then the whole world is free – everybody has the no, the yes, everybody has his mind.The effort on the path of sannyas is to drop your mind, and your mind can be dropped only if your no is dropped.Let me say it in other words: “no” is mind and “yes” is your soul.You can choose and still there is no problem. But remaining a sannyasin you cannot continue to have the no. Freedom will come, but it will come from the door of yes – and that will be real freedom.But many sannyasins go on writing me strange questions that surprise me. Just the other day in the newspapers, one sannyasin has given an interview. In the interview he was asked, “When Osho was in the jails of America, were you disturbed?”He said, “One day Osho is going to leave the body. He cannot be eternally in the body, so we have to accept it. It was a good opportunity to accept his absence.”On the surface the answer looks perfectly right. It is true: I am not going to be in the body forever. But are you going to live in the body forever? The sannyasin has completely forgotten that. There is every possibility you may pop off before me. You are becoming accustomed to my absence, and sannyas is becoming accustomed to my presence. Underlying it, the invisible writing is that you are saying, “No. I am enough unto myself.”But I would like to remind you that even if I leave the body, I am not going to leave you. I will haunt you in your dreams, I will harass you as much as I can. And remember, when I am in the body the harassment is not so much. When I am without the body, I will simply touch you and you will freak out!So pray that the longer I live in the body, the better for you. And if you become so accustomed to my presence, so deeply accustomed… My life source is eternal, just as your life source is. Body or no body, I will be here. I have been here always.Those who are open to me, and that opening means those who will still be ready to say yes to me, will be able to be blessed far more in the silence of my bodiless presence than they are benefited while I am in the body. But to say that it was a good opportunity for you to become accustomed to my absence means that somewhere deep down the no is floating.The relationship between the master and the disciple is not an ordinary relationship. There is no other relationship that can be compared to it. Even love falls far below. Even in love you remain two: struggling, fighting, trying to dominate each other. Only in the relationship between master and disciple you are no longer two. There is no fight, no struggle.The master is already an absolute yes. Slowly, slowly you also become an absolute yes. Only then is the meeting, the merger, the dewdrop slipping into the ocean.Tarshita, if you are too much afraid, stuck, there is every possibility you will always remain thirsty because when you come close to the water you become afraid.The water is not going to come to you.An old farmer went to the circus for the first time. Before he went into the big tent he saw a camel in a cage and stopped in amazement to look at it. He had never seen such wobbly legs, such dozy eyes, such floppy lips and such a huge hump for a back.Soon everyone was inside the tent and the circus began, but the old man was still staring in disbelief at the camel. Finally, after about half an hour, he turned away in disgust, “Darn it!” he cried, “there ain’t no such animal.”He tried hard to figure out how such an animal is possible. Now the only way is to deny it, to get unburdened – otherwise that camel will trouble him.If you become afraid of the ocean, of the very isness of life, the only way to be away from it is to say, “It was just a hallucination, an illusion, a dream. It was not a reality.” You can protect your small ego, but that is the cause of all your troubles.You have to be very watchful about your ego because the language of the ego is “no” and the language of your being is “yes.” The language of the ego is doubt and the language of the being is trust. And only from trust can you grow into satyam shivam sundaram – into the ultimate truth, into the ultimate godliness, into ultimate beauty.Your no will make you more and more small and ugly. Have you ever watched? Whenever you say no, something in you shrinks and whenever you say yes, something in you expands. Whenever you say yes, you are in tune with the universe, and whenever you say no, you declare your ego as separate from life, from existence.It is up to you. In love you will find yourself filled with yes; in hate you will find yourself filled with no. In blissfulness there is no space for no; in misery there is nothing else but no.So it is not as simple as you think. These simple words yes and no belong to two different planes of life: no to the lowest and yes to the highest.Osho,Suddenly, sitting with you again, I tingle inside. Your beat inside the tablas – a magic moment. Is that the quality of non-doing?The question you have asked is immensely significant. You say, “Suddenly, sitting with you again, I tingle inside. Your beat inside the tablas – a magic moment. Is that the quality of non-doing?” Yes, but only a beginning. There is much more to non-doing, but it is a good beginning, a small taste, just a small glimpse. But if you can go on growing in that direction, it has shown you the way.When you are just sitting silently, then even the noises of the birds and the silent trees and a faraway cuckoo – they are no longer separate from you. You suddenly expand; you are not just hearing them, you become them.And it will be particularly helpful for others too that you have used the word again. “Suddenly, sitting with you again…”Mind’s tendency is to take things for granted; then it falls asleep. There has been a gap, and you have come after that gap, after waiting long. You cannot take me for granted. That is giving you a deep communion. You can keep this communion alive every day; you can make it deeper. Your arrow is pointing in the right direction.You say, “I tingle inside. Your beat inside the tablas – a magic moment.” It all depends on you. You can turn every moment of your life into a magic moment. I am only just helping you to have a few glimpses and to learn the knack of how to transform your life into a constant flow of magical moments – each moment bringing more and more wonder, each moment opening new mysteries.Yes, this is the first experience of non-doing. You are not doing anything, you are just being here. The highest peaks of consciousness are when you are just a being – not doing anything, unmoving, utterly silent, as if you are no more. And suddenly the whole existence starts showering flowers on you.Man is trained for doing because society needs him as laborers in different directions, for production, for the greedy, for the cunning, for the powerful. He has to be turned into a slave whose whole life is nothing but doing from morning till night. He is not even rejuvenated by sleep and again he has to go to work on the roads, to work in the fields, to work in the orchards.Out of this vested interest, society has made doing very prominent and respectable. It has completely forgotten that there is another dimension to life. I am not saying you should not do anything. You have to eat, you have to clothe yourself, you need a shelter; so some kind of doing will be needed. But doing should be only utilitarian; it will not give you the great experiences for which life is an opportunity. Your doing will give you survival.But just to survive is not to be alive. To be alive means to have a dance in the heart. To be alive means to have each fiber of your being full of the celestial music. To be alive means to experience the eternal flow of life force within your veins. That is possible not by doing; that is possible only by non-doing. So non-doing is the ultimate value. Doing is just mundane: out of necessity you have to do something.But there is enough time – twenty-four hours. You can devote five or six hours to ordinary necessities and still there are eighteen hours left. If you can find even two hours for non-doing, you will be enriched so much that you cannot conceive beforehand because when you are not doing anything, you are not.Then what is? This whole silence of existence, this whole beauty of all the flowers, this infinitude of the sky surrounding you – all become part of you. And the touch of the eternal and the infinite and the deathless brings so much joy that even when you are doing, slowly, slowly you will find that even in your doing those joys, those ecstasies are entering into your work.Then the work is no longer work. Doing is no longer doing. It becomes your creativity. Whatever you do now, you do with your totality. And the whole of existence supports you, goes on filling you with more juice so you can pour that juice into your actions, into your doings. Suddenly you yourself become a magician. Whatever you touch becomes gold. Wherever you move, existence goes on welcoming you, and whatever you do, howsoever small, becomes part of your meditation.I don’t want you to follow the old pattern, which was basically faulty: to meditate for one hour and then for twenty-three hours destroy whatever you have meditated. There are even Sunday religions like Christianity: just one day, for one hour, go to the church for a good morning’s sleep – that’s enough! Then for six days you can do everything that goes against all divine values, but there is no fear because one day you can again sleep in the church and you will feel very refreshed, all sin gone. Then you are again ready to sin and commit all kinds of crimes and ugly things – anger and hatred and rage – because the church is there and on Sunday everything will be settled again.In Catholic Christianity they have developed really very sophisticated cunningness. They call it confession. You have to go to confess to the priest; he gives you a punishment and he prays for you and persuades God that you should be forgiven. Then you are free again for one week to do whatsoever you want because you have a means to get out of all stupidities.It happened once…A bishop and a rabbi were very good friends, and they decided to go to the golf course. But strangely enough, on that day there were so many confessors that they were standing in a queue. The bishop was finishing them quickly, but still the line was long.Finally the rabbi came into the cabin where the bishop had only a small window to hear the confession from the other side. The bishop said, “I am sorry but the line is too long.”The rabbi said, “Don’t be worried. Just get ready; I will finish the line.”He had seen the bishop; just when he came in a man was saying, “I have raped a woman.” The bishop had said, “Ten dollars in the donation box.” Finished. The rape is finished with ten dollars. It seems the rate for rape is ten dollars.The bishop went away and the rabbi took a seat. Another man came and said, “Forgive me, Father, I have committed three rapes.”The rabbi said, “My son, don’t be worried – forty dollars in the donation box.”The man said, “It seems the rate has increased. I have committed rapes before, too, but it was always ten dollars. For three it comes to thirty. What do you mean by forty?”The rabbi said, “Don’t be worried, those ten are an advance. You can commit one more.”Rabbis understand business far better than anybody else. The man was also happy: “This is new. We have never heard of paying in advance for our sins, so we need not come to bother you again.” These are strategies, these are not religious. This is psychological exploitation.The only religion is the religion that teaches you non-doing.Only when you start coming in communion with the universe, a tremendous change happens in you. Even your doing starts becoming just an expression of your non-doing. The day your doing also becomes an expression of non-doing, you have come back home. You have touched the ultimate beauty and the blessing of existence.It is good, but don’t get stuck. It is only a beginning. On the path, it is always a beginning. Yes, the end also comes, but even the beginnings are so beautiful that you have to be reminded of two things: don’t lose the track, and secondly, don’t feel that you have arrived.The day you arrive there will not be any need for anyone to say anything, not even for you to say anything. The arrival is so tremendous that it brings its own self-evident certainty.The distance between the beginning and the end is not something fixed; it is relative. One can move from the beginning to the end in a single moment. It is only a question of totality and intensity. Someone can go on moving for years if he is partial, just partly involved. If spiritual evolution is not the only focus of all his energies, then there is a danger he may get stuck somewhere because he has so many things to do.Spirituality needs a certain kind of concentrated effort. It demands your total being. You cannot hold anything back. The more you hold back, the longer the journey becomes. I would like your journey to be as short as possible.Humanity has almost forgotten what it means to feel the heartbeat of the universe, what it means to be filled with an absolute silence which is not the silence of the graveyards, which is the silence that music creates, which is the silence that is created by the wind passing through the pine trees.Judge Jeffreys leaned forward and said, “Are you trying to tell this court that the defendant actually strangled his wife in a disco, in front of three hundred people?”“Yes, sir.”“But didn’t anyone try to stop him?” Judge Jeffreys asked in amazement.“No, sir. Everyone thought they were dancing.”We have even forgotten what dancing is. The woman is being killed and three hundred idiots think they are dancing. Our so-called modern musicians and dancers are all cuckoos, but they have tremendous influence on other cuckoos. From the Beatles to the skinheads: all these people need psychiatric treatment, but instead of psychiatric treatment they became heroes.You just have to be a cuckoo who is a little articulate and then all cuckoos immediately start rushing toward you.Old Sammy Moskowitz was walking home late one night when he was stopped by a man with a gun who hissed, “Your money or your life.” There was a long silence while old Sammy just stood there. The robber became restless, looking around in case anyone was coming. He waited a bit longer and then hissed again: “Come on, your money or your life.”“Okay, okay.” old Sammy replied. “Just a minute, I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”We have made mundane things so important that even life has lost all its value. We have made ourselves laughingstocks – but we are all in the same boat, and nobody reminds us. A man who does not know the silences of the heart, a man who does not know a merger and melting with the universe, a man who has never felt what William James used to call oceanic experience – such a man has never been born. He was a miscarriage. He lived, he breathed, he walked around, but he was just a somnambulist – and he died, too.It is a strange fact that people who have never lived, die. Life needs immense centering and deep meditativeness. Only very few people in the trillions of people who have been around this planet have really lived.One day it happened, Gautam Buddha was visited by one of the emperors of those days, Prasenjita. Naturally, nobody interfered because the emperor was talking to Gautam Buddha, although everybody wanted to be close to hear what was transpiring. But one man, a bhikku, a sannyasin, had to interrupt. He asked forgiveness from both because he had to leave before sunset to spread Gautam Buddha’s message to the people. But he could not leave without touching the feet of Gautam Buddha.He was to be gone for many months, and the sun was just going to set, so he said to Prasenjita, “Forgive me, I don’t want to interrupt you. Just a single moment, I want to touch the feet and I will be gone. I have to leave, but I can leave only before sunset.”He touched the feet, he was an old man nearabout seventy-five, and Gautam Buddha asked him, “Bhante” – that was Gautam Buddha’s word of deep respect for sannyasins – “Bhante, how old are you?”The old man said, “I feel ashamed to say it, but I am only four years old.”Prasenjita could not believe it. A seventy-five-year-old man? It is absolutely impossible that he is only four years old. And when Gautam Buddha accepted it, it was even more amazing.He said to Gautam Buddha, “This man does not look four years old.”Buddha said, “Perhaps you are not aware. The way we count life, unless one enters into deep meditation and realizes the light that radiates from his center, he is not thought to have been born. This man experienced his first glimpse of himself four years ago. Those seventy-one years that passed before were of deep sleep. They cannot be counted as his age.”Prasenjita was very much puzzled – but it was true. And he touched Gautam Buddha’s feet and said, “Help me also to be born again. Up to now I was thinking I am alive. You have made me dead.”Gautam Buddha said, “Just the realization that up to now you have been dead is a great beginning.”Now, I have been teaching continuously for meditation, and you have been listening to me for years. It is time to start it. Only listening only won’t help. And that will be your first birthday – when you realize who you are.It happened only in Gautam Buddha’s commune that life was counted from the day you touched your innermost core. Otherwise only corpses are walking, moving around, doing all kinds of nasty things, creating wars, nuclear weapons, destroying beautiful cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are the works of the dead people.The whole history that you are being taught in the colleges, in the universities, is not the history of the living; it is the history of dead people. Living people have been so few that if you make a history of them, every child is going to be very happy.A teacher was asking Ernie, “Why do you hate the past?”Ernie said, “Because past creates history and I hate history.”In fact, the history that is being taught has to be burned completely. It is better that humanity forgets its nightmares – Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini – and the combination of them all, Ronald Reagan.

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 18 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is the secret of the magic rose?Milarepa, it is not a question suitable to you, but I will answer anyway.The mystic rose is an ancient symbol of tremendous importance.Charles Darwin propounded a theory of evolution. Most of it is relevant, but he has missed something very basic. He only thought of the evolution of the human skeleton. He was continually comparing the skeletons of other animals with human skeletons. The ape, the chimpanzee, certain species of monkeys, have an almost similar skeleton; that’s why he finally concluded that man has come either from apes or from chimpanzees or from monkeys.Of course, he was laughed at all over the world, particularly by the Christians because Christianity has a very stubborn, fanatic, attitude which was never so clear before Charles Darwin’s proposing the theory of evolution. Even today, most people are not clear what the problem is, why Christians are so much against Charles Darwin.Christians believe that God created the world in six days in its completion. Obviously, when God creates something it is bound to be complete and perfect, hence the question of evolution does not arise. Evolution means things are evolving, becoming better, more perfect, reaching to higher levels. This was against the idea of a fixed creation; hence Charles Darwin was criticized, condemned.I remember… There was a small school and the teacher was explaining to the students how God created the world. One small boy, whose father was a scientist and had been teaching him about the theory of evolution, stood up and said, “But my father says something else. He says we are born out of the monkeys.”And the Christian teacher said, “As far as your family is concerned, he may be right. We are not discussing your family here. You can see me later after the class.”But that was the attitude all over the world, not only of Christians but of Hindus and of Mohammedans. They thought that Charles Darwin had taken away their dignity as the greatest and the most superior creation of God. He has destroyed their ego: that God created man in his own image. Now this fellow is saying that God created man in the image of a monkey! Nobody was ready to accept it.I am also not ready to accept it, but my grounds are different. It is not a question of comparing skeletons; the evolution is in the consciousness, not in the body. Man has a body, monkeys have their own bodies, chimpanzees have their own bodies.Even Charles Darwin was very much puzzled: How can a monkey suddenly become a man? As far as we know, for at least ten thousand years, there has not been a single case when suddenly a monkey jumps out of a tree and becomes a man. If it has not happened in ten thousand years, it is inconceivable that it could ever have happened.His whole life he was looking for some missing links. The gap between the monkey and man seemed to be too big. He wanted to find a few missing links so he could make smaller gaps: the monkey becomes something else, then something else becomes something else, and then finally a small difference and the animal becomes man.But he could not find any missing link because he was born in the West and had the attitude of a materialist. That caused the whole trouble. Otherwise he was saying something of immense importance.When evolution is not of the body but of consciousness; then it becomes a spiritual progress. But Darwin had no idea of any spirit in man. To him, man was just the body and nothing more.I propound a theory of spiritual evolution, and that has been the basis of all mysticism in the world.Man is born as a seed. To accept the seed as your life is the greatest mistake one can commit. Millions of people are born as seeds; fresh, young, with tremendous potential for growth. But because they accept the seed as their very life, they die as a rotten seed. Nothing happens in their life.The symbol of the mystic rose is that if man takes care of the seed that he is born with, gives it the right soil, gives it the right atmosphere and the right vibrations, moves on a right path where the seed can start growing, then the ultimate growth is symbolized as the mystic rose – when your being blossoms and opens all its petals and releases the beautiful fragrance.Unless you blossom into a mystic rose, your life is nothing but an exercise in utter futility. You are born unnecessarily, you are living unnecessarily, and you will die unnecessarily. Your whole biography can be reduced to a single word: unnecessary.But if you can blossom and release that which is hidden in you, you have fulfilled the longing of existence. You have given back to existence the fragrance that was hidden in your seed. You have come to fulfill your destiny.The mystics have never accepted man as the ultimate product. Man is only a beginning and one should not die as a beginning. That is ugly, insulting, damaging to your dignity. Man should reach to the absolute fulfillment – not only to his own contentment, but to the contentment of the cosmos. That is the secret of the mystic rose.Yes, in a few traditions the mystic rose is also called the magic rose. Both words are meaningful. It is certainly magic when you see the blossoming of the rose within yourself, the beauty of it, and the divinity of it, and the truth of it: Satyam shivam sundaram.You cannot believe your own eyes. You have never dreamed that you contain so much, that your potential is so valuable, that your interiority is an inexhaustible treasure, that you need not be in debt to existence forever. You can return to existence in a millionfold way what existence has given to you. That moment is of great joy, not only on your side but on the side of the whole cosmos.The experience is such a mystery that there is no way to demystify it. You can experience it but you cannot explain it. That is the meaning of the word mystic. You can have it, but you become almost dumb. You cannot utter a single word that may carry something of that rose, its beauty, its fragrance, its dance, its music; nothing can be carried through any word.The word magic is also meaningful. Things like this only happen in magic – unbelievable. You see with your own eyes things which should not be happening but they are happening.One of the greatest losses to India happened when India became divided from Pakistan, and it was the last thing the politicians ever thought about. In my childhood I encountered it almost every day because all over the country the streets were full of magicians.With my own eyes I have seen things which even today I cannot figure out how they were managing. Of course there were tricks behind them; there was no miracle, neither were they claiming that they were performing miracles. They were simple people, poor people – not arrogant – but what they were doing was almost a miracle.In my childhood I have seen magicians planting a small mango tree, just six inches high at the most. In front of everybody they would dig the hole, put the plant in, cover the plant and then chant in gibberish. You cannot understand what they are saying but the pretension is that there is some communication between them and the hidden plant.The moment they removed the cover, that six-inch mango plant would have ripe mangoes. And they would invite people – you could come close, you could see that those mangoes were not in any way tied on. People would come and see and they would say that they are growing, not attached.The magician would offer those mangoes to a few people so that they could taste that they were not false or illusory – and people would taste them and they would say, “We have never tasted such sweet mangoes in our whole life!” And there was no claim for any miracle.I have seen magicians bringing from their bellies big round balls of solid steel. They would be so big it was difficult to take them out of their mouths – people were needed to pull them out of their mouths – and they were so heavy that when they were thrown on the earth they would make a dent.The magician would go on bringing bigger and bigger balls… It was a trick – but how were they managing it? And they would throw those big balls, almost the size of a football – they would throw them in the air and they would fall and create such a big dent in the earth. They would tell people, “You can try” – and people would try, but they were so heavy that it was difficult to pick them up. And they all have come – a dozen or more, all around – from the belly of the magician.He would show, half naked, the upper part of his body naked – he would show that the ball was moving upward. You could see that the ball was moving upward, that it was stuck in his throat, and you could see and you could go and touch and feel that the ball was inside. Then, with great difficulty, he would bring it into his mouth and he would cry, tears coming, and ask people to take it out somehow, because he is not able. It would destroy all his teeth so help him – and the miracle was that as they were taking it out, the ball was becoming bigger. By the time it was completely out, it was so big that that man’s belly could not contain even a single ball, to say nothing of one dozen balls.But all these magicians were Mohammedans: it was not a very creditable job. These were street people. Because of the division of Pakistan, all those Mohammedan magicians have moved to Pakistan. They were coming from faraway Pakhtunistan, Afghanistan. But now the roads are closed. Now you don’t see the magicians anywhere.Otherwise it was almost an everyday affair: in this marketplace, in that street, near the school; anywhere where they thought they could gather a crowd.With my own eyes I have seen something, and I sometimes wonder whether I have seen it or I have dreamed it. I have not dreamed for thirty-five years, but this thing is such that it is absolutely unbelievable that it really happened…A magician came to our school. The school was a very big school, with almost one thousand students and nearabout fifty teachers. Even the principal of the school, who was a postgraduate in science, first rejected the man: “We don’t want any nonsense here.”But I had seen that man doing impossible things, and I told him, “Wait!” I went into the principal’s office and said, “You are missing a tremendous opportunity. You are a scientist. I know this man; I have seen him performing things. I can ask him to do the best that he can. And what is the harm? After school time, those who want to see can stay.” And those magicians were so poor that if you could give them five rupees, it was too much.I told the magician that I had convinced the principal, he was ready to allow it after school – “but you have to do the greatest trick that you know. On your behalf I have promised – and he is a man with a scientific mind, so be careful. There will be fifty graduates, postgraduates, so you have to be very alert. You should not be caught because it is also a question of my prestige.”He said, “My boy, don’t be worried!”And he did something so that my principal called me and said, “You should not associate with such people. It is dangerous.”I said, “Have you any idea what he did?”He said, “I don’t have any idea, and I can’t even believe that this has happened.”Because the magician threw up a rope which stood in the air just like a pillar – a rope which has no bones, nothing. It was just coiled and he had carried it on his shoulder; an ordinary rope. He went on uncoiling it and throwing it out, and soon we could not see the other end. What happened to the other end?All magicians used to have a child who was their helper. He called the boy, “Are you ready to go up the rope?”The boy said, “Yes, master” – and he started climbing the rope. And just as the other end of the rope had disappeared, at a certain point the boy also disappeared. Then the magician said to the crowd, “I will bring the boy down, piece by piece.”I was sitting by the side of the principal. He said, “Are you going to create some trouble for me? If the police come here and see that a boy is cut into pieces…”I said, “Don’t be worried, he is just performing a magic trick. Nothing is going to be wrong. I have been watching him in many shows, but this I have never seen.”The magician threw a knife up and one leg of the boy came down, and everybody was almost breathless. He went on throwing knives…another leg…one hand…another hand…and they were lying there on the ground in front of us, not bleeding at all, as if the boy was made of plastic or something. But he was speaking, he was doing all the things the magician was saying. Finally his body came, and just the head remained.My principal said, “Don’t cut his head!”I said, “Don’t be worried. If he has cut him, what does it mean? If the police come, you will be caught.”He said, “I was saying from the very beginning, ‘No nonsense here’ and now you are talking about police. I have always been suspicious of you. Perhaps you have informed the police beforehand to come at the right time.”I said, “Don’t be worried.”And then the magician shouted into the sky, “Boy, only your head is there; let it drop.” The head came rolling down, and he started putting the boy together again. He joined him perfectly well, and the boy started collecting his things and said, “What about the rope? Should I start pulling it back?” The magician said, “Yes” and the boy started pulling the rope back and coiling it.I had only heard about the rope trick, which is world famous. Akbar mentions in his Akbarnama, his autobiography. Since Akbar it has been a rumor in the air that there are magicians who can perform it, but no authoritative account is available. One British viceroy, Curzon, mentions in his memoirs that he saw the rope trick in New Delhi before his whole court.I was making every effort to find some magician – so many magicians were passing through my village, and I would ask them, “Can you perform the rope trick?”They said, “It is the ultimate, and only very rare masters in magic can do it.”But this man – I had not asked him particularly for the rope trick, but he did it. Even today I cannot believe it. I can see the whole scene, I can see the principal freaking out – and all the magician got was five rupees.Magic simply means something unbelievable, so absurd, so irrational that you cannot find a way to figure it out. That’s why both the words have been used, the mystic rose or the magic rose. But even the rope trick is nothing compared to your inner flowering – because you don’t think you have anything inner, just hollowness. But in that hollowness is the possibility and the potentiality of a rose blossoming.And this is no ordinary rose. It does not die. It is not that it blossoms in the morning, dances the whole day, sings songs, plays with the wind and the rain and the sun – and by the evening all the petals have fallen to the ground and tomorrow you will not find even a trace of it.This inner rose is eternal. Once you have found it, it will be always within you.But, Milarepa, I repeat again, these are not the questions that are suitable to you! What is suitable to you… I will tell you this small joke.Rubin Moscowitz went crazy and was committed to the local lunatic asylum. Immediately he started causing trouble there because he demanded kosher Jewish meals. So the staff hired a chef to prepare this special food for Rubin. One Friday night after a delicious dinner, Rubin leaned back in his chair and lit up a large Havana cigar. This was too much for the director of the asylum, and Rubin was summoned to the office.“Now, look here, Moscowitz, you get the best meals of anyone here because you claim you only eat kosher food. And now, on your Sabbath night, you flout your religion and smoke cigars!”Rubin shrugged his shoulders and said, “Why are you arguing with me? I’m crazy, aren’t I?”What is the point of arguing with a crazy man? He can do anything, any time, any day. He can ask for special Jewish food, kosher food, and he can flout his religion. On Friday nights the traditional Jewish community stops everything; nothing must be done on the Sabbath. From the night, as the sun sets on Friday, nothing should be done. And to smoke a Havana cigar… But Rubin is perfectly right: “Why are you arguing with me? Don’t you know I am crazy?”So is Milarepa. When he asks crazy questions that look very perfect; they have the quality of his being in them. But asking such questions as, “What is a mystic rose?” is not for you, Milarepa. It is for Kaveesha, the head of the cuckoo department.Osho,You say we don't know what love is. What is it I feel for you? It caresses my heart, it makes me laugh and cry, it makes me feel ecstatic, it takes me deep inside. Beloved master, what is it?It must be the beginning of a great love affair.But remember the difference between ordinary love affairs and the great love affair. The great love affair is qualitatively different from what you call love affairs. Your love affairs are just soap bubbles. One day you are in deep love and another day – or perhaps the same day – the soap bubble is gone and with it your love affair too. It is momentary.The great love affair is not really with the master, but with the universe through the master. The master is at the most only a window through which you can see the whole sky with all its stars. You don’t fall in love with the window frame.There are many who have fallen in love with the window frames too. What is being worshipped in temples, in mosques, in churches, in synagogues? – just windows, and those windows also are not present there. Once they used to be: two thousand years ago, three thousand years ago, four thousand years ago there used to be a window.Those who were contemporaries of the window must have condemned it because it takes them away from their mundane activities. It disturbs them – their peace, their life, their business, their job. Why was Jesus crucified? Why was Socrates poisoned? Why were many attempts made on Gautam Buddha’s life?The simple reason is that these people were disturbing everybody: Whatever you are doing is wrong; wherever you are is not the right place; your greed is wrong, your anger is wrong, your jealousy is wrong, your lust is wrong, your desire is wrong.They were not telling you something that was not right; they were absolutely right, but their right was disturbing your life. Then they became almost a harassment to everybody. People like Jesus going around a small country, Judea, harassing people: “This is not the real world; these parents and these children are not your real relatives… Your real father is in heaven, and unless you believe in me, there is no way to find your real father.”People were distracted. They could not figure out what was right. These people were creating confusion. Jesus was saying, “Blessed are the poor because they shall inherit the kingdom of God.” It was disturbing to the rich and it was also disturbing in a certain sense to the poor, because every poor man is trying to be rich. Now this man is saying that you are blessed as you are, so don’t try to become rich.The rich were very angry because Jesus was saying, “Even a camel can pass through the eye of a needle, but a rich man cannot pass through the gates of heaven.” Whoever heard him was disturbed. People could not sleep easily. People could not do their work.And if you don’t listen to him and don’t believe him, at the last day of judgment he will choose his people and the remaining ones will be thrown into utter darkness, into hell for eternity. Then there is no possibility of your liberation.Naturally, such things are bound to disturb people. And finally they could not bear to be disturbed anymore. They had to crucify Jesus just to have peace in the land, just to have a certain relaxedness in life.Contemporaries have always been condemnatory to people who could have led them to the ultimate. But there is something strange: nobody wants to go to the ultimate. And there are a few people like me whose whole business is that it does not matter whether you want it or not, they are bent on taking you to the ultimate. They are ready to sacrifice themselves, but they will not leave you. They will haunt you for centuries.Now Moses is still haunting people, Jesus is still haunting people. Gautam Buddha is still nagging, but once these people die, you start feeling a little guilt that you did not listen. Perhaps the man was right. Your own experiences in life teach you that jealousy is not right, anger is not right, greed is not right, and what these people were teaching perhaps was right – and you killed them. Now that guilt takes revenge.Once I was asked, “Why does Jesus have more followers in the world than anybody else?” I said, “The simple reason is the crucifixion.”Mahavira was never crucified, so there was no guilt. But because Jesus was crucified, people started feeling guilty, started thinking about it. Perhaps that innocent man, he had not done any crime and we killed him. They found the blood on their hands; now how to wash it?Guilt turns into worship. This is a strange psychology. The moment you start feeling guilty, the only way to get rid of the guilt is to worship the man whom you have crucified. The worship will help you to feel good. Even though you crucified him, now you recognize that you committed something wrong, and you are ready to do everything. You will worship, you will pray, you will read the Holy Bible, you will follow him for centuries. You will become a fanatic – just as fanatical as the contemporaries of Jesus who crucified him were. They were fanatically against him and their descendants are fanatically for him. This is a very strange psychological change that happens again and again.If while I am alive and if you can behave with me just humanly, there is a possibility of a window opening for you. And if you can love and if you can trust, then nothing is impossible. Only very few will be able to do it, but only those very few will be able to attain something – not the millions of Christians who are worshipping someone whom they crucified. Their worship is only a compensation, it is not love. It is a consolation, not love.Love has a totally different quality. It is a rejoicing, it is feeling blessed in the presence of the person with whom the great love affair is happening.Your question is, “You say we don’t know what love is.” Even if you start loving you will not know what love is. You will experience it, you will be full of it, you will be overflowing with it, you will be able to share it, but you will not be able to understand what it is because love is one of the ultimate mysteries of life.You are asking, “What is it I feel for you? It caresses my heart, it makes me laugh and cry, it makes me feel ecstatic, it takes me deep inside. What is it?”Don’t seek for any explanation. Every explanation becomes a disturbance in the growth of the mysterious. Never ask what it is. If you are rejoicing in it, it must be right. If you are celebrating it, it must be right. If you are dancing it, you are on the right path.But never ask what it is because the moment you start asking what it is, you start making it something intellectual. It is something of the heart which knows experience but does not know any explanation. Something tremendously beautiful is happening to you, but don’t give it a name. Words are dangerous beyond a certain stage. If you give it a name, you may think you have come to the end.Don’t call it love. You are on the right path, you are in the right direction, but don’t give it any name. If you call it love you will become satisfied and you will stop growing – “What more can there be?” You have arrived at the final stage: it is love. Please avoid giving names; just remember that you are on the right path.One day the mystic rose will open within you and the fragrance will be released. Even then, don’t give it a name. Existence is so eternal, there are no boundaries to growth. There are skies beyond skies, and there are peaks beyond peaks.That’s the beauty of existence, that it ends nowhere. It is always an adventure; it is always a pilgrimage; it is always a searching, searching for more, searching for deeper realities. But you never come to an end so that you can say, “I have passed the final examination.” There is no final examination as such.Hymie Goldberg went to see a fortune-teller. After he had sat down in the darkened room, the fortune-teller said, “I will read your palm for fifty dollars, and that entitles you to ask three questions.”“Questions about what?” asked Hymie.“About anything,” replied the psychic.“But isn’t fifty dollars an awful lot to charge for that?” complained Hymie.“Maybe,” said the palmist, “and what is your last question?”In life the last question comes very soon; but in real existence, even the first question never arises. One goes on becoming more and more silent. In that silence questions don’t grow, and when there are no questions, the possibility of any answer becomes impossible.Those who know, they don’t know the answer. We call them the awakened ones, the enlightened ones because they have dropped all their questions; now they don’t have any questions in them. If you want to call this absence of questions the answer, you can call it that – but there is no answer either.A man is stretched out on his back across four seats in a theater. The usher comes down and says, “Mister, you will have to get out of those four seats. You are only entitled to one.”The man only grunts and does not move. The manager comes down and says to the man, “Mister, you will have to get up. All you are entitled to is one seat.” The man grunts and does not move.Finally a policeman is called in. He walks down the aisle and says to the man who is still on the four seats, “Get out of those seats!”The man grunts, and the policeman says, “Okay, wise guy, where are you from?”The man moans and says, “The balcony.”You love to laugh. Everybody should love to laugh because in my vision of religiousness laughter is far more valuable than any prayer. Prayer is just intellectual. Laughter is total; your body, your mind, your heart, everything joins in it. You laugh as a single unitary whole.Three famous surgeons were bragging together over their morning coffee.The first said, “I grafted an arm onto a man and now he is a professional golfer.”“That’s nothing,” said the second, “I grafted a leg onto a man and now he’s one of the world’s best long distance runners.”“So what?” said the third, “I grafted a smile onto a donkey and now he is the president of America.”

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 19 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Sometimes I have the feeling that sex has dropped me. But it seems I have not got it yet, or I just don't want to accept the fact of it. Can you help me to understand what is going on?Sarjano, the Western mind has completely forgotten that sex is not life, hence everyone born in the West carries in his unconscious the idea that the moment sex is finished, all is finished. This is not true. On the contrary, the moment sex falls away from you, real life begins. On the graveyard of sex grows the mystic rose. It is not only happening to you, it is going to happen to every sannyasin who is honestly and sincerely seeking the truth.Sex is so childish, so stupid that if you take a photograph of yourself making love, you will be surprised to note a few things. The woman you are making love to has closed her eyes because she cannot see you in such a stupid activity. The only way is to keep the eyes closed and let this ugly moment pass. People have chosen the night to make love – except a few idiots. And you will see yourself doing such gymnastics, huffing and puffing and perspiring over the poor woman – and you are not even ashamed that the fragile woman is under you and you are on top!But you are so much engaged in the futile activity that you are not aware of it. In fact, in a few cities in Europe and America there are restaurants, hotels, which have a very special attraction…I have heard about one man who asked, “What is this special attraction?”And the manager said, “The fee is high, but if you are interested and you have the money, you will get one of the most gorgeous women to make love to.”He could not resist the temptation, so he paid the money and he was led into a room. The woman was certainly gorgeous, and as he started making love, he started hearing a few giggles from this side, a few giggles from that side. He could not understand what was happening. He has made love many times, but giggles, and from all sides?When the lights came on, he could see that those people had made a great arrangement. There were holes around the room – it was a round room – and people were watching him through magnifying glasses. That’s why those giggles were coming. He said, “My God, these restaurant people are cheating!”He went back and he said, “What is all this? You never told me.”The manager said, “The fee for watching the show is much more. There is no harm done. Tomorrow you can watch the show. And what is a show if there is no watcher?”He paid the money because he felt that the people who had been giggling were enjoying more than he had been. And the next day he was sitting by a magnifying hole and he enjoyed it so much he started giggling himself.The person who was watching the show by his side said, “What are you giggling at? This is nothing, you should have come yesterday, the man was absolutely nuts!”Sex has been kept hidden for centuries, in the darkness of the night, with the woman’s eyes closed. One day, at nearabout thirteen or fourteen years of age, it begins. It is a biological device for reproduction; it has nothing to do with you. You are just being used by the blind forces of biology. And if you are understanding enough, my own calculation is that by the time you are forty-two you will start feeling that sex is dropping.Not that you have to drop it, let me insist again and again, you should never drop it because that is the only way to keep it alive to the very last breath of your life. And what you will do by dropping it is what has been done by Hindu, Christian and Buddhist monks all over the world. They call it celibacy: a beautiful name for an ugly fact. In the name of celibacy they are repressing their sex, and sex is a vital energy because it reproduces life. You cannot repress it. It will find perverted ways to come out – in homosexuality, in sodomy. And the ultimate perversion of all the religious teaching is the disease AIDS. It is the outcome of your so-called celibacy.But nobody is condemning the Vatican, nobody is condemning the shankaracharyas saying, “You are responsible that at least ten million people in the world today are AIDS positive sufferers.” These are the data from only the Western world because the East has not yet the facilities, the processes, the experts to find the AIDS virus. So these ten million people belong to the Western part of the world.Hundreds of people are dying every day because AIDS has no cure; it is slow death. For between six months and two years, you will be dying slowly. Dying quickly has a beauty about it: you don’t suffer. But hanging in limbo, knowing perfectly that there is no cure, for two years your life becomes a horrible nightmare. You don’t think about anything except death.If you repress sex, you are not going to transform the immense energy contained in it. But if it drops through your meditations and through your understanding – by itself, with no effort on your part – it will release such a tremendous beauty and openness to your being that all you have been always dreaming and thinking will become a reality.And Sarjano, just as I said, it is going to happen to every sannyasin. I call it celibacy only when sex drops, not before it. If you force it before it drops by itself, you are simply becoming perverted. This is a fundamental law of life: you can change the natural flow of life energy, but once it gets perverted, then it becomes very complicated. First you have to bring it back to the natural state and then only transformation is possible. Perversion cannot be transformed.It is not only you; your ancient girlfriend has also written to me. Her name is Prem Premal. She says:Osho,Is it possible that sex has dropped me and I did not realize it?It seems it is very hard for the Western conditioning to realize the disappearance of sex with joy and as a blessing from the beyond because they only believe in the material body. So then sex becomes the only possibility of having any moments of orgasmic joy – if you are fortunate enough, which millions are not. Only once in a while somebody will get a little glimpse of orgasmic joy. Your conditioning prohibits it.In the East, if sex drops by itself it is a celebration. We have taken life in a totally different way: we have not made it synonymous with sex. On the contrary, while sex continues you are not mature. When sex drops a great maturity and centering comes to you, and a true celibacy, an authentic brahmacharya. And now because you are free from the chains of biology, which are the only chains that are making you a prisoner of blind forces, you open your eyes and you can see the beauty of the whole of existence. You will laugh in your days of celibacy about your own stupidity: that you once thought that is all that life has to offer.I have heard about an old drunkard who was sitting early in the morning on the sea beach, and he saw a young man doing push-ups. The drunkard could not believe it. He went around the young man; he looked from this side, he looked from that side.Finally he could not contain his curiosity, and he said, “My poor boy. Why are you unnecessarily perspiring and doing these push-ups? Your girlfriend is not here” – because he knew only the push-ups which people go on doing in the name of love.Sarjano and Premal, it is perfectly okay, not just okay, that sex is disappearing. As sex disappears you will find authentic love growing in you. Sex is not love: it is just a fallacy, a blindness. You are tricked by biology into believing that this is love. But once sex has disappeared your whole life energy is redeemed from its animal past. And just as sex was reproducing more and more children, sex-freed energy starts giving you every moment a new birth. Your whole life becomes fresh, growing in a new direction.Sex is horizontal; love is vertical. It takes you upward to higher realms of being, and the higher you are in your love, the closer you are to the ultimate truth. The day your love has reached its climax, you will experience what I have been defining as satyam shivam sundaram – the truth, the godliness and the beauty. And these experiences are not momentary glimpses any more. They become part of you; you become part of them. They become just like the heartbeat – they are with you for eternity.But I can understand your problem: up to now you have known only one joy and that was sex. You are absolutely unaware that there are skies beyond skies and you are just creeping on the earth. You are not aware that you have wings and you can fly just like an eagle across the sun into the faraway sky. The whole sky becomes your kingdom.Because of this fact, a misunderstanding arose. Down the ages mystics have experienced it, and because they experienced that sex is functioning as a blinding force, as something imprisoning you, they started condemning sex. And the misunderstanding was that people started thinking that if sex can be repressed, they will also become part of the mystical world and its experiences. Nobody has had the courage to say that this is not a true understanding of the fact.Celibacy is not something to be practiced, it is not something to be rehearsed, it is not something to be imposed on you by any method, any effort, any doing. Celibacy comes when sex disappears of its own accord. Certainly the word celibacy has tremendous meaning in my sense. But the misunderstanding was that seeing the mystical people rejoicing and dancing and singing, and their eyes and their faces and their charismatic pull, people started repressing sex – thinking that it is sex that is preventing them from knowing higher realms of being. And there lies a great misunderstanding.My effort has been to destroy this misunderstanding. It has brought me condemnation from all over the world, from all the religions because they are all living in this misunderstanding. I am not for sex, but I am not against sex either. It has a time, its season, its climate – and that time should be given to it. It is absolutely a natural phenomenon, but it should not spread beyond its limits.Just as at the age of fourteen it appears, if you live it totally, intensely, without any guilt created by religions, you will be out of the imprisonment by the age of nearabout forty-two. This is an average: those who are more intelligent may get out of it sooner. Those who are a little dull-witted will take a little more time. But misunderstandings are everywhere.Just before the operation, the high-powered surgeon was explaining all the new recovery techniques to his patient. “Now, you should begin walking as soon as possible,” explained the doctor. “On the first day, you must walk around for five minutes; on the second day ten minutes, and on the third day you walk for at least an hour. Do you understand?”“Yes, doctor,” answered the apprehensive patient, “but is it all right if I lie down during the operation?”Things were not going so well for Gilroy and Loretta when they went to bed together for the first time. Gilroy was working away hard, but Loretta was not responding at all. Finally in exasperation he asked her, “What is the matter?”“It’s your organ,” Loretta replied, “I don’t think it is big enough.”“Well,” Gilroy replied indignantly, “I did not think I would be playing in a cathedral.”Misunderstanding – there is so much in the world. It creates confusion, it creates chaos, and when everybody has misunderstood something and you stand alone to make them understand, they feel offended. Not a single religious leader has logically condemned, refuted whatever I am saying because they don’t have any logic. But they have been condemning me without refutation, and because they are all together in the same boat, naturally it seems that I am alone against the whole world. But what I am saying is a simple truth to understand.You cannot bring sex in forcibly. Can you make a seven-year-old child potent enough to reproduce children? The very idea looks absurd. Sex comes on its own accord. It is a certain maturity of your body, of your chemistry, of your physiology that brings it at the age of twelve.If the coming is not in your hands, the going is also not going to be in your hands. It will go at the age of forty-two without any problem. Just one thing has to be remembered: don’t be corrupted by your religions, don’t be corrupted by your scriptures, don’t be corrupted by your so-called saints. They are the most poisonous people on the earth. They have destroyed man in so many ways that their crimes are uncountable.The greatest crime is to create a guilt against sex because it keeps sex alive beyond its natural boundary. So even a person of seventy is still thinking of sex. In fact, there is nothing else for him to think about. Retired, what can you do? You simply have to think about it and talk about it. Sex, which used to be a part of the physical body, has moved and become just cerebral, just in the mind. Even at the time of death, most people die with some sexual image floating in their minds. This is ugly, and the responsibility is on your so-called saints. Neither do they understand the psychology and the science of the transformation, nor do they care that what they are teaching is going to destroy people’s lives.I teach you that when the sex energy is starting to function, allow it full support. At the age of nearabout eighteen or nineteen, man has his greatest sexual energy; that is the peak point. But your society prevents you: you have to go to college, you have to go to university, you have to come back after university – maybe twenty-five years old – and then you will have to be married.But at twenty-five years old, you are already six years downhill! This is absolutely unscientific. Boys and girls in the colleges and in the universities should live together, not in separate hostels, and they should be given all that the scientific approach has found out about sex. In the past, of course it was a little difficult because of the problem of the girl becoming pregnant, but now there is no problem at all. The pill has been the greatest revolution in the world – even greater than the Russian Revolution!And now two more pills have come into existence, which have made sex simply fun, nothing to worry about. The first pill was to be taken by the woman for a certain period of time; only then was it possible to prevent pregnancy – and that too was not a hundred percent safe. And it used to happen that you were not expecting your lover and he suddenly comes and you have not taken your pill. And the human mind is so stupid that it goes on thinking that nobody gets pregnant every time; it is very rare, so there is nothing to worry about, you can take the chance. But that chance has always proved very dangerous.I have heard about a man traveling with a busload of children. Somewhere he stopped for the children to take some drinks, tea or something. The manager of the small hotel asked him, “My God! Are all these children yours?”He said, “They are not my own. I am a salesman for birth control methods. These are my failures! I am going to take them to the factory to show the owner that something is wrong with his birth control methods. Just count these children! And every parent is sitting with a loaded gun wanting to kill me because I promised them a one hundred percent guarantee.”The first pill was not a hundred percent guaranteed. The second pill is tremendously important. The second pill has to be taken after you have made love – so there is no problem, no risk. And the third pill is even more important because it brings about the equality of men and women. Why should only the woman take the pill? The third pill can be taken by the man.If one looks in a scientific way without any prejudice, then every young man and young woman who is sexually potent – at their highest peak – should be allowed to make love without any guilt. But we force them to remain repressed about sex, and by the time they are declining in their energies we allow them to get married.Two problems arise out of this. Firstly: for twenty-five years you have been telling them that sex is wrong, to prevent them from getting into any sexual relationship. Twenty-five years is one third of your life! It is a long time to create a great prejudice against sex. And then suddenly, in one day, everything changes. You allow them to get married. This is idiotic because what will happen to twenty-five years’ propaganda against sex? And those who are getting married are also idiots; they don’t ask the priest and their parents, “What will happen to that twenty-five years’ conditioning? Now you are giving us license to make love, but what about those twenty-five years that you prevented us?”So the first problem is that man is the only animal in the whole world – he is the most intelligent animal, but absolutely unintelligent as far as sex is concerned. There are no sex classes for deer and lions and horses and donkeys. They don’t need to be taught about sex at all. It comes naturally. But because of twenty-five years’ constant insistence from the religion, from the society, from the university, from the parents, man gets confused. On the honeymoon he does not know what to do.I have heard about a young man who got married and went to the honeymoon hotel in a holiday resort. It was a full-moon night. The woman immediately undressed and lay down on the bed, but the young man was sitting at the window looking at the full moon. Minutes passed, hours were passing, and the woman said, “What is the matter with you? What are you doing there? It is our honeymoon.”The man said, “Shut up! When I was coming here, I asked my mother, ‘Any advice?’ She said, ‘This is the greatest night of your life. Don’t miss a single moment.’ So I am waiting and watching the night, the greatest night. Don’t distract me!”But this is bound to happen. And then the second thing that happens is a deep guilt feeling about sex: that it is sin. If you are carrying the idea that something is sin you cannot really enjoy it. Your sin will be holding you back; your guilt will be making you feel ashamed of yourself: “What are you doing?”So no man, no woman is prepared to make love in deep joy, in freedom. On the contrary, everybody is prepared against love. This is the reason why people don’t get rid of their sexuality at the age of forty-two. They will continue even if they live eighty years. Society spoils people in such a way – and perhaps they are also doing it absolutely unconsciously. They are taking away your home: the experience that was possible for you, but which happens only when sex drops on its own accord.Then freedom has a totally different meaning. You have not achieved it; it has been bestowed upon you from the beyond. Existence has accepted that now you are ready for greater mysteries, you are no longer clinging to your teddy bears; you can move on into ecstatic lands, into experiences of bliss that know only a beginning but no end. You can move toward finding the truth of your being and the truth of existence.It seems very strange that I am condemned for teaching sex to people. In fact, I am teaching them natural celibacy, but to bring about natural celibacy the sex also has to be natural. Sex is not the goal, but only a staircase. If it can be natural, without any guilt, without any poison, you will reach beyond it and you will be immensely surprised that only now you have become mature. Now the bodily pleasures don’t have any meaning because in comparison to your spiritual blessings, blissfulness, they all fade away.Sarjano, what is happening is perfectly good, but particularly for an Italian it is a little difficult to accept. But the moment you became my sannyasin, you dropped all boundaries and discriminations that make men different from each other. My sannyasins are simply the first world citizens. They don’t belong to any nation and they don’t belong to any church.The other day I received a letter from Australia. Just like other lands and other continents, Australia also has an Osho International Foundation, and we have thousands of sannyasins in Australia. The Theosophical Society of Australia was selling my books up to now, and those books were their best-sellers. This time, when the representative of the Australian Osho International Foundation went to the Theosophical Society, they said, “We have been ordered by our world headquarters that your books should not be sold.”The sannyasin saw that books that were written against me were being sold. He asked about it and the man said, “I love Osho myself, and his books were our best-sellers. I even wrote a letter saying that this is not right, but they overruled my letter and they said, ‘You have to do what you have been told. Books against Osho can be sold, but literature by Osho or any literature written in his favor is banned.’”It was not a surprise to me but it is very inconsistent with the Theosophical Society’s own philosophy. They pretend that they are synthesizing all religions, all philosophies, all approaches – just my standpoint is excluded! They are exposing themselves because this letter banning my books must have gone not only to Australia; it must have gone to Japan, it must have gone to America, it must have gone to other countries in Europe.What is their fear? Their fear is that they cannot manage my approach with all the other religions’ approaches. It stands aloof and apart and alone in its own majesty. And they cannot answer, and they are not ready to confront me publicly. So from the back door they try to destroy whatever I’m trying to do – to help humanity come out of the garbage that has been accumulating in you for centuries behind very good names.Sarjano, it is a festive moment if sex has dropped from you. And it must have dropped because the certificate is there from Prem Premal. Now you can move from ordinary animal life into authentic transformation. It is the same energy that is involved in sex. If sex drops you have so much energy for meditation, you have so much energy for friendliness, you have so much energy to be creative – and you are a creative person.Now with all this energy released you can manage so much creativity in your work that you may not have even dreamed about. And this creativity will bring to you your self-realization.Osho,I want so much to give you nothing in return, but I haven't found it yet. And the something I want to give you is already in your eyes.Thank you for singing my heart-song.The question you have asked is not just a question from your mind; it is the very heartbeat of your inner being. You are saying, “I want so much to give you nothing in return, but I have not found it yet. And the something I want to give you is already in your eyes. Thank you for singing my heart-song.”First, you will never find anything to give me in return because here we are not in a marketplace, here we are not selling God or selling love. Here we are simply rejoicing in and relishing what has happened to me and what is going to happen to you. It is not a business; it is authentic religiousness. But I can understand the desire: one feels like giving something, and the sadness that you can’t find anything to give. Just that you feel to give is enough. You have given it.And you say, “And the something I want to give you is already in your eyes.” From where has it come into my eyes? Without knowing, you all have given your love, your trust, which you see in my eyes. My eyes are more your eyes than mine. And a gift that is given without knowing is the real gift. What you see in my eyes is just the joy and the blissfulness of you all growing, of you all expanding in consciousness, of you all coming closer to satyam shivam sundaram.Just as a gardener becomes immensely happy when he sees thousands of flowers blossoming in his garden, I am also a gardener. You are my garden, and I would like every one of you to become a mystic rose, fully grown, utterly blissful. What you see in my eyes is your future.And you say, “Thank you for singing my heart-song.” There is no need to thank me. It is simply my joy to bring song and dance into your heart. It is not that I am doing it for any return. In fact, I should be thankful toward you, that you were courageous enough to open your heart and allow my dance and song and music to fill it. You could have remained closed.Nobody’s heart can be opened forcefully. It opens only when you are totally in love and relaxed, without any fear you allow me in. I should be thankful because I am the guest and you are the host.A great Zen master entered the hall where all the disciples had gathered for the evening meditation. “There is good news and bad news tonight,” he said. “First, the bad news: there is no good news. Now the good news: you don’t have to listen to the bad news.”Hamish MacTavish, the old Scottish gamekeeper, returned from taking the new minister on a grouse-shooting trip over the highland moors.As he sank wearily into his chair beside the fire, his wife Margaret approached with a cup of tea.“Here’s a cup of tea for you, Hamish,” said Maggie. “And is the new minister a good shot?”Hamish puffed on his pipe, staring into the fire and replied, “Aye, a fine shot he is. But it is marvelous indeed how the Lord protects the birds when he’s shooting.”I am not an archer, nor a shooter. But strangely enough my arrows reach to your heart and because God is dead, nobody can protect you.Just a joke for you. You need a good laugh. Last night you did great because I went on hearing your laughter for almost half an hour. I loved it so much that my people are starting to learn how to pray. Don’t be miserly as far as laughter is concerned. That is the only miserliness I hate.Solomon and Deborah won a contest. The first prize was a week’s stay at the Watergate Hotel in Washington.When they got to their suite, Debbie was acting nervously.“What is the matter, darling?” asked Solly.“This is the Watergate Hotel,” replied Debbie, “maybe the place is still bugged.”Solly looks behind the curtains, behind the light shade, picks up the carpet and sees a brass disc with four screws. He unscrews the disc and puts it in his pocket.The next morning, the manager knocks on the door.“Good morning,” he says, “how do you like the suite?”“Fantastic,” replies Solly.“How did you like the champagne and caviar we sent you? And the flowers?”“Just great,” replies Solly, “But why are you asking so many questions?”“Well,” replied the manager nervously, “we had a terrible accident last night in the honeymoon suite downstairs. The young couple were trapped together on their bed all night long after the chandelier fell on them.”

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 20 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The other day you were telling us the effects of radioactive matter on the body. But I am feeling and experiencing the radiation of a buddha – an enormous energy radiating from you which not only rejuvenates the body-mind continuously, but makes us laugh, dance and celebrate. Please comment.The question that you have asked has been asked for centuries. Perhaps it is one of the oldest questions mankind has raised whenever there was a man who has come to know himself. It has been felt around Gautam Buddha, it has been felt around Lao Tzu, it has been felt around Mahavira and thousands of others who were more blessed than ordinary humanity.But it has only been felt by those who were receptive, by those who were in deep love. It has not been felt by those who were closed. It has not been felt by those who had come just like spectators, by the curious; but only by the disciples, and more clearly by the devotees.So two things are involved in it. A man who has come to know himself – certainly all his darkness that was within him is no longer there. He has become purely a luminous phenomenon, and his luminosity is very delicate and very subtle. It is not like the radiation that comes from an atomic explosion. The radiation from an atomic explosion will affect all – whether you are open or closed doesn’t matter. The radiation from an atomic explosion is a violent aggression against anyone who comes across it. But the radiation of one who is awakened is a very delicate phenomenon. It is just like a fragrance. Only if you have the understanding and the courage to receive it will you be able to know it; otherwise, thousands of people passed by Gautam Buddha realizing nothing. They were puzzled: “Why are others feeling so much, why are others in tears of joy?”The radiation of the awakened, of the enlightened, is nonaggressive. That is one of the most significant things to be understood. In no way is it going to transgress your individuality unless you invite it, unless you are in a state of welcome, unless you are waiting for it. Unless you are ready to be a host it won’t knock on your doors.And naturally, if it does not knock on your doors you will feel that all these people who are experiencing radiation, light, joy, seem to be a little strange because the majority of humanity has not felt it. The majority of humanity is completely closed – not even a single window of the heart is open. It is almost the same as a blind man denying that there is sun and there is light. As far as he is concerned, he is right. He has never seen the sun and he has never seen the light.I have told you the most illuminating story about Gautam Buddha and a blind man. It contains so much that if you can comprehend it in its totality, it may help you to open your eyes, to open your heart.A blind man was brought to Gautam Buddha, and the people who had brought him told Buddha, “This man is not only blind, he is a genius in logic, in argumentation. We all know there is light. We all know there is the sun, there is the moon, there are the stars, but we cannot convince this man. He lives in our village and he argues so well against all of us that sometimes we start thinking that perhaps we are deluded.“His arguments are very strong. He says, ‘I am absolutely willing to accept your sun, your moon, your stars, your light, but just let me touch your light. I want to feel it. If touching it is difficult, let me smell it. If that too is difficult, beat it like a drum so I can hear the sound of your light. Or I am ready even to swallow it, to have some taste of it. But unless out of my four senses at least one sense is convinced, I can only say to you that you are in an illusion. And moreover, I feel that you want to humiliate me by declaring this stupid idea about light, so that you can claim you have eyes and I don’t have eyes. You simply want to insult me.’“Hearing that Gautam Buddha was passing by the nearby village, we rushed here. We thought that perhaps this would be the only moment, the only chance and opportunity to take this blind man to a man who is ultimately awakened and may be able to convince him about light. If he fails, then there is no hope.”Gautam Buddha laughed and he said, “As far as I am concerned, I absolutely agree with the blind man, because he confirms my attitude about truth. Unless you experience it, don’t believe it. And because he cannot experience light, it does not matter whether light exists or not. He is absolutely correct not to believe in it because every belief is far more dangerous than blindness because every belief is spiritual blindness.”The blind man could not believe that for the first time somebody of the status of Gautam Buddha would support him. Tears came from his blind eyes. Gautam Buddha said, “Don’t be worried. I have the best physician of the land with me.” A great king, Prasenjita, had offered Gautam Buddha his own personal physician because he was fragile, old, and he needed somebody to look after him.So Gautam Buddha said, “Don’t be worried. I will call the physician, he is just in another camp. Let him treat you. You don’t need an awakened man, you need a talented physician, a genius – because no other argument can convince you, and you should not be convinced by any other argument.”The blind man was taken to the physician, and Gautam Buddha said, “Stay in this village till you have cured his eyes.”It was not a difficult job. Within six months the man’s eyes were cured, and the moment he saw the light he rushed to the other village, far away, where Buddha was. Dancing, in utter joy, he fell at Gautam Buddha’s feet and told him, “If you had not met me I would have remained blind. In fact, with all my arguments I was defending my blindness. But you are a man of tremendous discrimination. You did not argue with me; you simply said, ‘I am not a physician and your problem can be solved only by a physician.’”This is the situation with the majority of humanity. That’s why it was so easy to crucify Jesus. The day he was crucified thousands of people had gathered to see the miracle of his resurrection, but none of them was seeing the man who was the real miracle. They were utterly blind and closed to the radiation of Jesus.There is certainly a radiation that is of the highest quality, but it is only available to those who can also raise their consciousness to that height – if not their consciousness at least their longing, their thirst, their openness. Then even a faraway star can be seen. But if you are standing with closed eyes and you insist on your eyes being closed, then it becomes almost impossible to help you.You are your greatest enemy. You can be your greatest friend too. You are your greatest friend when you make yourself available to higher realities, to higher layers of consciousness, to farther away stars.With the opening of your heart, your wings also start opening. With the understanding of the light radiating from the awakened one, a synchronicity happens. In the beginning, your heart starts trembling, then the trembling changes into a dancing, and a moment comes when the master’s heartbeat and your heartbeat become one. All division, all separation is dissolved.Perhaps science will never be able to understand this radiation of the illumined being because science needs something material that can be experimented upon. This is not something material; it is as immaterial as love, it is as immaterial as gratitude, it is as immaterial as poetry, as music. In life, all that is great is immaterial, and this is the greatest experience of immateriality.It all depends on you. There are people who may stand on the bank of a river and remain thirsty because they are keeping their back toward the river and they are adamant and stubborn. They may die of thirst, but they will not change their position. Man’s ego is such a barrier that it prevents everything that is a nourishment to his being and a push toward the heights.In one of his beautiful poems, an Indian mystic Kabir says: “Unless you bow down and make a cup of your hands to fill it with the water of the river, you are going to remain thirsty. You may be standing in the river, but if you are not ready to bow down a little, the river is helpless. It cannot jump to your lips, it cannot jump to quench your thirst.”The ego does not allow you the opening. The ego is very much afraid of anything of the beyond. Just a ray from the beyond and it is enough to kill your ego forever. So the ego lives in a dark cell; no light should enter in it. And the radiation of the enlightened one is so delicate and so respectful of your individuality and your dignity that it will not interfere. It will not enter without your invitation, without your receptivity.Even here, sometimes spectators arrive. Sometimes people who are just curious arrive: knowing nothing, not knowing that this is not the place for the curious, and this is not the place for the egoist. This is a place only for those who come with an open heart, who come with deep love and trust. The purpose of this place is not to convey more information and knowledge to you. The purpose is to raise your being to the heights that are its birthright.Just three days ago, one man wrote a letter. Because I said that these space visitors are just hallucinations, illusory, he must have become freaked out. Perhaps he has met some faraway visitor from another planet. He wrote a very angry letter. His handwriting and his spelling show that he must be an American because he has not signed his name – an utterly cowardly person. I never answer any question unless it is signed because the person should take the responsibility for asking it. To whom am I going to address my answer? I cannot say, “To whomsoever it may concern!”And his anger – which is just the other side of cowardliness – is so much that he has threatened that if I don’t answer his question, he will stand up and make trouble in the gathering of seekers. I have waited for three days, but the guy has not stood up. He is afraid that if sometime in the future it is discovered that life exists on other planets and visitors have been coming to the earth, then I will be proved wrong.His point is: can an enlightened man commit a mistake? As far as I am concerned, my first mistake was becoming enlightened! And my second mistake was to make people aware about my enlightenment; otherwise I would not have been tortured by all kinds of idiots and such fools.Remember one thing, I am the first enlightened man in the whole of history who accepts that there is every possibility of his committing mistakes. I don’t say I am infallible like the pope; I don’t say I am omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent like Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna because that creates problems. Christians claim these same qualities for God, and Mohammedans also for their God. But their God is in constant difficulty, and Krishna and Buddha and Mahavira are all in constant difficulty because they claim something that is not right.For example, there was no reason for Christianity, for the pope, to force Galileo to change in his book where he has written: “The common understanding is not right. People think that the sun goes around the earth, but my whole discovery, my whole life’s effort has made me aware that the situation is just vice versa. It is the earth that goes around the sun.”Now, the problem was that in the Bible it says that the sun goes around the earth. Galileo was sick, almost on his deathbed, in his old age – he was seventy-seven – and he was dragged to the court of the pope and the pope forced him to change the statement.Galileo, even at that age, must have had an immense sense of humor. He said, “There is no problem. Why are you so worried? You could have just sent me the message. But can I ask what is hurting you?”The pope said, “It is a question of God’s prestige. In the Bible it says that the sun goes around the earth, and if you contradict it, you are telling us that God and God’s son are not omniscient: they don’t know the future, what is going to happen, they don’t even know what is already happening. And God made the earth and God made the sun – and he does not know. You will spoil our whole religion.”Now, religion is not at all concerned with whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth, or both go anywhere! What concern is it for the religious? – let them go! But the problem is omniscience: the all-knowing God becomes fallible.Galileo said, “I will change it without making any difficulty, but one thing I want you to know: whether I change it or not, the earth will still continue to go around the sun. It is not in my hands. What can I do? I can change it in my book, but in the footnote I will make it clear that I cannot help it; it is simply beyond my capacity. I can write anything you want me to write, but in the footnote am I allowed to state the fact?”And in fact in his book he changed the statement, but in the footnote he said, “Whatever I say, don’t be bothered. It does not make any difference: the earth still continues to go around the sun. They don’t listen to me, what can I do?”In Jainism Mahavira is number one, because Jainism does not believe in any God so naturally the number two becomes number one. In Christianity, Jesus is only number two. In Jainism, because there is no God, Mahavira is number one – so he has the highest position and he says that the moon is the place where virtuous people go. This means that up to now only one or two Americans have been virtuous!For Mahavira it was good to say that the moon is paradise: it looks like paradise, so beautiful, and nobody could criticize him because nobody had gone there. But now the situation is different. Two virtuous people have visited the moon and they have not found anyone there, not even Mahavira. It is just absolute desert, unlivable because the oxygen is eight times less than on the earth so you cannot survive; you have to continuously keep yourself going with artificial oxygen.You cannot grow anything because there are no rains; the earth is absolutely dry. You cannot dig a well; there has never been any water. And because there is no water, that’s why there are no clouds. For the clouds to form, water is needed so that in the hot sun the water evaporates and becomes clouds. And when it becomes cool the vapor again turns into water and rains. There is no water; hence there is no possibility of clouds, no rain, and nothing grows on the whole moon. The moon has never known a single roseflower. But now Jainism and its followers are in difficulty…I was traveling in Gujarat and a Jaina monk was collecting millions of dollars to create a scientific lab to prove that all these people, Russians and Americans, are deceiving the world. They have not reached the moon; all that they are sending are simply photographic tricks.I asked him, “Why are you worried and why are you collecting so much money? What is your concern if they are sending photographic tricks? It is good entertainment for the whole world.”He said, “It is a question of Mahavira’s omniscience. Our whole religion is at stake. If these people are right, then Mahavira is wrong. And if he can be wrong in one thing, what is the certainty that he is not wrong in other things?”This is the fear, and this is why science has been continuously fighting against religion for progress and religion has been creating hindrances of all kinds – because every progress in science will prove the Bible wrong, and finally it proves God wrong. All these saviors and prophets and messengers have claimed the same three qualities: that they are all-powerful, omnipotent; all-knowing, omniscient; and present everywhere.I don’t belong to these people’s category. And whenever I see something that shows utter stupidity, I don’t care about the consequences. I say unto you, even the enlightened man has the right to commit mistakes because his enlightenment is concerned only with one thing: knowing oneself. It does not mean that he knows everything in the world: past, present, future. Knowing oneself does not mean that whatever I say about other things is bound to be right forever.But you don’t understand the ways of a master. I am perfectly aware that there are a few scientists who guess – it is not certain – that there may be life on other planets. But it is only a scientific guess. And I know that many people have seen flying saucers and six-inch-tall green people descending from these saucers. But one thing is very strange: all the people who have seen these things are either cuckoos, lunatics, whimsical, schizophrenic – not even a single intelligent person has come across any flying saucer. It is very strange. It seems that the people who are coming in flying saucers have a certain communication with the cuckoos.If the man who wrote the letter to me has some connection with these flying saucers and these green people, just tell them to land here and I will be the first to accept their existence. But I cannot trust lunatics. Not even a single person on the whole earth who has some credibility has encountered these things. Faraway farmers, drunks, people who have escaped from lunatic asylums – only they see them. They even communicate with them – in what language?If these people from other planets want to communicate with the earth, they should descend in Oxford, in Cambridge, in Harvard: somewhere where the geniuses, the intelligent, the cultured people are – with whom some connection can be created, and their acceptance will become the acceptance of the whole world. They should meet some scientists.What I was saying was that at this moment it is simply a cuckoo phenomenon. I am not saying that in the future there may not be some connection with other planets – who am I to predict about the future? And if the future finds my statements incorrect, that’s perfectly all right; that’s how humanity progresses. If I am entitled to find incorrect statements in Jesus, Buddha and Socrates, how can I be so illogical and irrational as to not allow the future to find incorrect statements from me? That is how humanity progresses.If everything has been written once and for all five thousand years ago in Rig Veda, then there is no possibility of progress. And all these people have been very insistent. For example, Jesus said, “I am the only begotten son of God.” Why this emphasis on only begotten son? There can be other cuckoos who can declare, “I am a cousin to Jesus,” “I am Jesus’ younger brother,” “I am his…” Neither does Jesus have any certificate, nor do these people have any certificate. What is the problem? How are you going to decide?Evolution means nobody is infallible. It is a misunderstanding that the enlightened man cannot commit mistakes because the enlightened man is not a chemist, is not a druggist, is not a doctor, is not a tailor, is not a shoemaker.What do you want the enlightened man to be – all knowing? I cannot even make a cup of tea! In my whole life I have never made one, just out of fear that it may prove I have committed a mistake! I don’t do anything, out of the consideration that if you don’t do anything, at least one thing is certain – you are infallible! The moment you do something, there is every possibility to commit a mistake because self-knowledge does not mean omniscience. To know oneself does not mean you know all the stars – the whole of astronomy – it does not mean you know the whole of physics, it does not mean you know nuclear weapons.I am the first man in the whole of history who is accepting authentically and sincerely that self-realization, or awakening, or enlightenment, or buddhahood, is confined to a certain sphere. It is confined to one’s own consciousness. All darkness disappears: one becomes a luminous being. One is utterly blissful, ecstatic; one’s life becomes a living poetry. And if people approach such a person with joy, with love, with openness…certainly enlightenment is contagious and there is no cure for it.Just to make you a little less serious because I hate seriousness… All these talks about enlightenment and awakened people are so desert-like that I have to plant some oases in a few places.Two rival poets met in a tea shop, and over a pot of tea each started boasting about the progress they had made in their careers.“You have no idea,” bragged one, “how many people read my poetry now. Why, my readers have doubled.”“Wonderful! Congratulations!” cried the other poet, enthusiastically, pumping his hand. “I had no idea you got married!”A playboy with a permanent leer on his face got into a crowded lift in the hotel where he was staying. The lift was operated by a very pretty young girl and as she let people off at each floor she was finally alone with the playboy. He came up close to her and said, “Sweetheart, I imagine you must be tired after a day of all these stops and starts?”“The stops and starts,” she replied, “don’t bother me. What I can’t stand is the jerks.”Osho,Why am I not in the front row?Before I answer your question, there is another question also which will make your question complete.Osho,Why am I sitting in the front row?A Lufthansa airliner had to make an emergency landing at sea. The captain assured the passengers that they would be picked up shortly and that the plane would remain afloat for at least thirty minutes.After twenty minutes had passed no rescue boats had arrived, and the captain announced, “Everybody who can swim, get on the left wing. And everybody who can’t swim get on the right wing. Now for the people on the left wing – when the water gets to your knees, start swimming. And for the people on the right wing – thank you for flying Lufthansa.”Those who are in the front row are the people who cannot swim, and those who are not in the front row are the people who can swim. Okay?Osho,Oftentimes, when I close my eyes and look inside, I get in touch with a deep longing in my heart, for nothing in particular, just a longing.Beloved master is this a hindrance on the path, or is this the fire that keeps me going?Prem Amiyo, it is one of the most beautiful experiences to have a pure longing, not knowing for what. The moment you know what the longing is for, the longing becomes a desire, and a desire is a hindrance, a bondage. But a pure longing, a heartache, not knowing at all for what; with no objective in the vision, no goal to reach, but just a pure fire – it burns all the hindrances, it burns all the rubbish that centuries have put around you.This is the fire that Zarathustra taught his disciples to worship. But as it has happened with every great master, the followers of Zarathustra are still worshipping fire. You will be surprised to know that even here in India, when the followers of Zarathustra escaped from Iran against the Mohammedan invasion and against the Mohammedans’ forceful conversion of people into their religion – because Mohammedanism knows only one argument, and that is the sword. Either be a Mohammedan or they will cut off your head. They don’t allow any other alternative.So now there are only very few people, but at one time the whole of Iran was full of the followers of Zarathustra. Now there are not any followers of Zarathustra; they have all been converted into Mohammedanism, but a few escaped and they landed in India. So a great religion has become confined to a small space, Mumbai.But they have not forgotten one thing: the fire. Still, after twenty-five centuries, that ancient fire continues to be burned in Zarathustran temples. They never allow it to go out. They go on putting new fuel, watching twenty-four hours that the fire should not go out because Zarathustra taught them that once the fire goes out you are dead.But Zarathustra was talking about the fire that Prem Amiyo is asking about. It is the fire of pure longing that burns in your heart and that burns everything that is not you. And out of this fire comes your twenty-four carat gold character: you in your authenticity.Don’t be puzzled about it. It is natural when for the first time you feel something like a longing but with no object; it is puzzling to the mind. Mind knows longing for money, longing for sex, longing for power, the longing for prestige. But longing without any object? It goes beyond mind.But it is the most beautiful experience to go through this fire. It is not hot. It is cool, it is calm, it is something magnificent. It makes you a temple. It will burn everything false and unauthentic in you. It will kill your hypocrite, it will destroy your divisions of being, your schizophrenic structure of mind. It will bring you into your utter purity and innocence. You will blossom in this fire: your mystic rose.So be happy, sing and dance. You are on the right path.Two old English gentlemen were sitting in their London club when one said, “Ah yes, my late wife was a most remarkable person, a very religious woman. She never missed a day in church and at home it was prayers and psalm singing from morning to night.”“Remarkable, “said his friend, “how did she come to die?”The first man puffed on his cigar and said, “I strangled her.”Prem Amiyo, don’t let others know about your fire. Don’t let others know the transformation that is going on within you because people become more antagonistic about your inner transformation than anything else. They can tolerate your having great power as a president, as a prime minister, or being the richest man in the world. This they can tolerate. But they cannot tolerate it if your essential being in its crystal-clear purity starts showing. This is a great insult to them because they feel that this was possible for them too, but they have been wasting their time in stupid games. Now you remind them of what they have missed. The only way to forget is to destroy you.All the great, illumined people have been killed, destroyed, poisoned – for the simple reason that the crowd could not tolerate it; it was too much. They were flying so high, it was hurting millions of people: “They belonged to us, they have been among us, and it is humiliating that they have attained such height and such flight and we are still crawling on the earth.” The only way to forget their humiliation is to destroy them. They don’t think of the other possibility.A few think of it, and those few go through the transformation. Those few are very blessed. Those few start looking at those who have reached the height as their pioneers, as glimpses of their own future and their potentiality. They start also moving in the same direction.But these people are very few. The majority take the easiest course and that is to destroy those who create unnecessary disturbance: disturbance in your business, disturbance in your love affairs, disturbance in everything.The greatest wound is in the ego: that you cannot reach to that height and somebody else has reached.And the last thing, for everybody:The US Navy was looking for recruits to fight in its latest war against Iran. Due to lack of interest, the draft was reintroduced and an unfortunate young student was called up. During his physical examination he pretended to have poor eyesight in order to be judged unfit to fight.But the doctor did not believe him, so he sent for a gorgeous young nurse and told her to take off her clothes. “Describe what you see, young man,” the doctor demanded.“All I see is a blur, doctor,” the student replied.“Well,” said the doctor, “your eyes may not be as good as they should be – but your missile is pointing straight at the gulf.”

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 21 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,For about six months I have been waking up every morning with a deep fear of death. I must be missing the most important experiences in my meditation to be so afraid of death in my sleep. Years ago, I woke up every morning with a smile and deep happiness that I had found you.Osho, I am still smiling, and the happiness to be with you has deepened even more – it's just that the mornings are a bit different. Can you please shine some light on them?There are a few important things to be understood. They will become the background and you will be able to understand your question.My work is not to answer you, but to help you to solve your questions. This is a totally different kind of work.Our whole education system is based on giving ready-made answers. Because of those ready-made answers you never develop your intelligence. There is no need – you ask the question and a computer-teacher answers them.I cannot do that tremendous harm to your intelligence, so my answers have to be looked at in a totally different way. I will give you the background, all the implications, and the question will be solved by you, not answered by me.Unless a question is solved by you yourself, your intelligence never becomes sharp, your consciousness never becomes alert. You go on accumulating ready-made answers in your mind, in your memory, which is simply a load, of no use. In any situation which is fresh and new you will be at a loss what to do because you don’t have the ready-made answer.I am working from a totally different angle. I want you to be capable, conscious, alert, intelligent, so whenever a new situation arises – and every day you are going to face a new situation – you are capable of responding with certainty on your own. It is a joy when you find an answer to any question yourself.This should be the fundamental of all educational systems. It is not. They have chosen the cheapest way, the shortcut: you ask the question and they will give you the answer.I don’t give you an answer while I am answering you; I am trying to put your whole situation before you. If you can become aware of the whole situation the answer will arise on its own, in your own intelligence. It will become a flame within you. And because it is yours, you will have a certainty, an indubitability, a tremendous trust in it.You can believe any answer given from outside, but you cannot trust it. You can manage, you can force yourself to believe it because the person who has given it seems to be the right person. But all these are guesses, and a belief is not a trust. Belief is always in somebody else; trust is something that arises in you as a fragrance of your being – as your intelligence sharpening, as your consciousness growing.The question is, “For about six months I have been waking up every morning with a deep fear of death. I must be missing the most important experiences in my meditation to be so afraid of death in myself.”The situation is just the contrary: because your meditation is deepening, that’s why your morning is filled with the fear of death, not vice versa.You say you used to wake up every morning “…with a smile and deep happiness that I had found you. Osho, I am still smiling, and the happiness to be with you has deepened even more – it is just that the mornings are a bit different.”Because your joyfulness, your blissfulness has deepened, because your meditation is going perfectly well, that’s why in the morning when you wake up there is a fear of death. It is not a bad sign. It is tremendously important for you to understand that it is absolutely beautiful.Why does it happen? – because meditation and death are almost synonymous. On the one hand, meditation brings you the realization of your being, on the other hand it kills your ego – and you have been attached, identified with the ego, not with the being. So the first experiences of deepening meditation feel like you are dying.And why only in the morning? – because as meditation deepens your sleep deepens. Your sleep becomes more silent, thoughtless; a tremendous serenity. While you are doing meditation with effort, the very effort does not allow it to go deeper, but once you have tasted something of meditation your sleep automatically moves in the direction of meditation. It is so delicious that when there is nothing to do you are relaxed, your consciousness starts slipping into deeper layers of meditation.In the morning when you wake up a fear arises of death because meditation is death of the ego. But the death of the ego is the beginning of your authentic life. Once this is understood, slowly, slowly the fear of death will disappear.Secondly, your being a woman, the fear of death is deeper than it is in man. These are the uniquenesses and differences between man and woman. The woman always wants to remain young, particularly the modern woman. Once she is thirty-five, to reach thirty-six takes almost six years! She does not want to grow older because she knows unconsciously that every growth is going to end up in death. Particularly for a woman, her youth is her life. And the modern stupidity has given it more emphasis – that a woman’s life is just while she is young; the moment she is old, she is a used cartridge, she is of no use.A young couple was sitting on the beach on a full-moon night and the woman as usual was insisting on getting married…Why are women so insistent on getting married? – because they know unconsciously that this beauty, this youth is very momentary, and after it is gone it will be very difficult to find anyone to be married to. It is even difficult when you are young and beautiful to get someone intelligent to marry you.The man looked at the woman and he said, “I will marry you sweetheart, just wait.”The woman said, “I cannot wait anymore. You have been telling me this for almost two years.”The man said, “If you insist we can get married today.”The woman asked one question, which perhaps is inside every woman: “You love me so much. Will you also love me when I am old?”The man was shocked with the very idea of her being old. He said, “You are putting me in a dilemma. Just one thing you have to tell me: when you are old will you look like your mother? If so, then I am finished. I don’t want to get married!”But every woman is naturally afraid when she becomes old. Man has reduced woman into a commodity. Fresh, young, juicy, she has a market value. As all these phenomenal, momentary things pass by, her price in the marketplace goes down. In her old age, unless she has attained some insight into her consciousness, which is always young and fresh and which need not be dependent on anybody else, death is really a great horror. The very word death is associated with something terrible.You need not be worried about death. Meditation is the cure, the cure from the fallacy that one dies.Nobody has ever died, ever. Death is simply the greatest fiction, which we go on believing because we always see somebody else dying; we never see ourselves dying. So knowingly or unknowingly we go on believing that it is always the other who dies.Obviously, when you die you will die to others. And in this continuous flow of millions of years, everybody has only seen somebody else dying. Nobody has seen himself dying except very exceptional people whose meditation has gone so deep that the moment they are separated from their body they know that the body was always dead, that it consisted of dead materials: the life that was showing in the body was just the inflow of eternal life that was reflected in the body.The constant river of eternal life flowing within you also makes your body look alive. The moment the eternal flow has moved, has changed its course, your body comes to its reality. But you never die. And the whole art of meditation is to make you aware and alert that you are not the body.This is a good symptom, very significant, that as your meditation is deepening, your joy is deepening, your happiness is deepening, a strange thing happens… Because logically you must have thought that when meditation deepens, happiness deepens, joy becomes greater; then every morning getting up with the fear of death seems to be absolutely illogical, irrelevant – because even before your meditations, before coming to me, you were getting up without the fear of death. There are millions of people who will get up every day, but they will not be at all afraid of death because their consciousness never goes to that depth where they can feel in their sleep that the ego is dying. But being a woman, naturally you are more afraid.Meditation will take that fear away and meditation will also take away the idea that one is man and one is woman because those things belong to the body. Consciousness is transcendental; it is neither male nor female.“There is only one thing I want,” she told him. “All I want is a solid gold boy scout knife.”He offered her yachts, cars, mink coats – but she insisted on a solid gold boy scout knife. The stunned suitor went away and had one especially made.A week later he brought it, and asked her, “Is this all you want to make you happy? What are you going to do with it?”She opened a huge chest and put the knife in among hundreds of other gold knives.“Why?” he asked.The girl replied, “Well right now I am very young and beautiful and everyone wants me. But some day I’m going to be old and ugly – and can you imagine what a boy scout will do for one of these?”This is the way people live – so unconsciously! The greatest unconsciousness is that which makes you believe that you are your appearance, your body. It does not allow you to know it is not your appearance that constitutes your inner witness. That witness can see the body as separate from itself, it can see the mind as separate from itself, it can see the ego and everything separate from itself.The moment the witness awakens in you – and meditation is nothing but nagging the witness to wake up. Meditation is a woman! She goes on nagging and finally the poor fellow, the witness, has to wake up!Once the witness has awakened you have come to a point of transformation. Now you will not be identified anymore with all that is mortal. Now you will know from your inner sources with absolute unconditional certainty your eternity, your immortality. And unless a man knows that he is deathless, the fear somehow lurks in his mind.You can try to forget it. It is easier to forget it when you are young because you can go on doing all kinds of foolish things when you are young. But when you are old and left alone – because the young fools are doing their own things, nobody takes care of you, nobody even bothers whether you exist or not – then one finds oneself in a deep depression. Except death, there is no future. Life has passed away; one cannot go back, and ahead, ahead is only death.Ronald Reagan was addressing a mass gathering of American farmers. He began by telling a couple of jokes to try and get the men of the land on his side.Realizing that this was not working he tried another approach. He drew himself up to his full height and began. “Fellow pioneers! I want you to know that when I became president, the country’s economy stood on the edge of an abyss. I am proud to tell you that since then we have made a brave step forward!”When you are old, there is no step forward, just an abyss, abysmal. Only the meditator knows there is no death. His certainty that there is no death is not based on scriptures, borrowed knowledge because such things cannot be based on scriptures and borrowed knowledge.Nothing helps except your own realization. And the old woman particularly becomes very frustrated. She was so much loved, so much appreciated. Now nobody looks at her; hence her fear of death becomes many times greater than man’s.Frank was talking to his wife Alice, while the little old lady sat in the living room, knitting.“Now look, Alice,” he whispered, “I don’t want to sound harsh, but your mother has been living with us for twenty years now. Isn’t it about time she got an apartment of her own?”“My mother?” gasped Alice. “I thought she was your mother.”They have not even bothered to inquire whose mother she is, and for twenty-five years… This shows a deep ignoring, tolerating.But this is not going to happen to you. You are already on the right path and the symptom of death arising in the morning is very indicative that your meditation is going deeper and making you aware that the ego is not you. Your sleep is perfectly good, your day is perfectly good – so why is it happening only in the morning?It is because the whole night you are enjoying a silent, meditative state, but as you wake up the old habit of getting identified with the ego grips you. A silent knowledge that this ego is going to die and “I am this ego” makes you afraid, worried, anxious.But the situation is very clear: If you understand what I am saying, you should rejoice that this fear of death is coming at the right moment. The morning is the right moment.In India for centuries we have a word sandhya, for prayer. Sandhya means twilight. In the evening when the day turns into night and in the morning, when the night turns into day, there is such a tremendous change that these are the two points chosen by India to be alert, conscious – because if you can be conscious in these two moments your meditation will become perfect very easily. Because of the shifting gears as the day moves into night, in the night you are no longer an ego.That’s why the night is so relaxing, that’s why it is so rejuvenating, that’s why you feel after a beautiful sleep that you have become again young and fresh. All tiredness is gone and you are again ready to work – because the ego was left when the sun was setting you were simply pure consciousness. And in the morning the reverse happens: from simple consciousness you again jump into the old bullock cart of your ego and for a moment, the fear.The modern, contemporary society is very confused because people go to sleep in the middle of the night, wake up at eleven o’clock in the morning. They have disturbed the whole harmony with nature. When there was no light, no electricity, no kerosene oil, as the sun was setting people were preparing their beds. There was nothing else to do. It was in a deep synchronicity with nature – nature is going to sleep, the trees are going to sleep, the birds are returning back to their trees and they are preparing to go to sleep. Everything is going to sleep, except man.There are a few men whose real life begins in the night but they are upsetting their balance with nature. Particularly the rich people who can afford to sleep the whole day and drink and eat and listen to music or see a dancer – their whole night is an Arabian night. Day seems to be a little stale. It is better to pass it by sleeping. But even those who are not very rich have forgotten that when the whole of nature is going to sleep it is better to follow it.Don’t be left out of nature’s harmony. And when the whole of nature is waking up, wake up. With the sunrise you should also rise up: with the birds singing and flowers opening and bees buzzing around the flowers and butterflies opening their wings and the birds moving again into the sunlight to distant places – this is the time for you too to wake up!These two moments… Sandhya means evening, and sandhya also means the meeting of day and night. So there are two sandhyas: one in the evening, one in the morning when the day and night separate. In those gaps you can enter very deeply into meditation, and it is meditation alone which can help your witnessing self to be completely unidentified with all that is ephemeral, dreamlike. One day it is there, another day it is gone. Only fools can go on playing with the ephemeral.A little intelligence is enough to make you aware that the real search is not for the ephemeral but for the eternal. And unless you have found the eternal your life was a wastage. It was a tremendous opportunity given by existence to you, but you did not use it.Your symptom is perfectly good, so rejoice in it. Go deeper in meditation, go deeper in your happiness, go deeper in your dance and the fear of death will disappear.And not only the fear – even death will disappear because death does not exist.Osho,Since I have been able to trust more and more in existence, everything is going so easily, so softly, so beautifully. I get everything I need, and even when something goes wrong, after a while I can see its sense. I feel so thankful that I can see that existence is always providing the right thing for me. It gives me so much trust. Would you please talk about it?The phenomenon of trust has to be understood a little more clearly. Then I can discuss your question.First, trust has to be unconditional – not that nature goes on fulfilling your needs, existence goes on giving you help, supports you. What about if it doesn’t support you? What about if it creates hindrances on your path? Your trust will disappear. This trust is not very authentic.And another thing to remember: the trust in existence can only be real if you trust in yourself because you are the closest experience of existence. Otherwise, when things are going right you will trust; when things are not going right the trust will start disappearing.Once a man came to me and he said, “I trust in God absolutely.”I said, “How have you found absolute trust in God? I have not even found God yet!”He said, “I have been married for seven years and no child was coming our way. Finally somebody suggested to me, “It is your irreligiousness. Trust God and you will have a child.’” And the man said, “I was suspicious, but I said what is the harm in trying? At the worst there may not be any child – and anyway it is not coming. So I started worshipping the elephant god, Ganesha, whose temple was just close to my house. Strangely enough, after nine months my wife gave birth to a beautiful child. I trust in God absolutely, particularly the elephant god.”I said, “As far as I know, you are a lecturer of science in a college.”He said, “That’s true.”I said, “Then a simple thing has to be understood: no scientific experiment is thought to be conclusive unless you make many experiments and always come to the same conclusion, without exception.”He said, “That’s true.”So I said, “Now start a few other things with your elephant god.” He was a little afraid. I said, “Don’t be afraid; absolute trust knows no fear! Now start asking the elephant god for a girl. You have got a boy; you need a girl too.”He said, “My wife also insists for a girl.”So I said, “Try it! It is only a question of nine months, and then I will give you another experiment.”Nine months passed, ten months passed, and the man did not turn up, so I had to go to his home. I knocked on his door saying, “What happened? What happened to your elephant god?”He said, “Forget all about this god. That was just accidental, just a coincidence because I have been praying and praying, morning and evening and ten months have passed, and my wife is not even pregnant!”I said, “Just one failure and your trust has disappeared?”When everything is going smoothly and beautifully, you can trust. But you are trusting somebody else: God, God’s only begotten son, any messenger of God, a prophet, a tirthankara or a Gautam Buddha. It does not matter. You are trusting somebody else and things can go wrong any moment. The basic trust has not to be in existence, it has to be within you.You should learn to become more conscious and alert to trust yourself. Do you trust yourself? If you trust yourself that will be unconditional trust because it cannot be for any particular reason. And out of that unconditional trust will grow many branches: you will become a huge tree with great foliage. You will trust love, you will trust the truth, you will trust godliness, you will trust beauty; you will simply trust because your heart is full of trust and there is not even a shadow of distrust. Even if you want to distrust, you cannot.Only when you cannot distrust, even if you want to, have you come to the very center of your being, from where arises the trust in existence, in life, in people, in trees.And that is not because of any conditions. Trust itself is such a blessing, such an ecstasy in itself. Once you have tasted it within yourself you would like to taste it in the whole cosmos. If it is so great just within you, how much greater it will be when you trust everything. It does not depend on any condition being fulfilled.You say, “Since I have been able to trust more and more in existence…” How do you manage to trust more and more in existence – on what grounds? Existence gives you birth, which is a pain; existence gives you a life, which is nothing but misery; existence gives you hopes which are never fulfilled; existence gives you promises and the goods are never delivered; and finally the existence makes you old, and then one step more – Ronald Reagan’s step forward – and you are finished!What has been able to create in you more and more trust in existence? And remember there are things that either you have or you don’t have. You cannot have them more or less.Love is another dimension of trust. Have you ever thought about it? People go on saying, “I love you more and more.” But love does not know any quantities. It is a quality; you cannot measure it less or more – one kilo or two kilos or three kilos. It is good that people don’t use that, that: “I love you two kilos, and it is growing. Don’t be worried! Soon you will see – I will be loving you three kilos.”It is not a quantity, it is not part of the world of quantities, it is not matter that it can be measured into more or less. Trust is the highest fragrance of love. You cannot say, “I have been able to trust more and more.” You are saying it because existence – perhaps just by coincidence – has been a great support to you, or perhaps you are imaginative enough that whatever existence brings to you, you start imagining, “This is what I always wanted.”In either case it is not trust. So first I would like you to see that trust is not a quantity but a quality. Either you have it in total or you don’t have it in total; either it is nil or it is one hundred percent. You cannot divide it into slices. It is indivisibly one, organically one.But I can understand why you say “more and more,” because every day you find everything is going so easily. But everything is not going so easily in Ethiopia. Everything is not going so easily for the millions of poor on the earth. Everything is not going so easily for the millions who are sick and ill and just on the waiting list of death.What is going easily? You cannot find a more insane world than that which surrounds you. There are millions of people behind bars in the jails – things are not going easily for them – and there are millions of people who cannot manage even a single meal in a day. Things are not going easily. And don’t be so egocentric: if they are going easily for you then you can trust existence – but what about the whole world? How many people are committing suicide? How many people are murdering each other? How many people are insane? Things are not going easily. If that is your criterion of trust, soon it will disappear. A small accident, a car crash, and things are no longer going easily.One of my old sannyasins and a man who has reached very close to enlightenment – any day he will explode into luminosity – is sitting here, Pungalia. He was the man who invited me to Pune twenty-five years ago. In these twenty-five years many have come and gone, but he has remained unwavering and is going deeper and deeper into meditation. Such a man can say that he trusts in himself because every moment and every day he is reaching closer to the light that has been searched for by all the seekers of the world.Because of his inner experience and the blissfulness and the peace and the silence, he can spread his wings toward existence, toward people, and can find trust. But it will not be more and more: it will come on its own accord the day the small distance that has remained is crossed.It often happens when the caravan reaches its destination after crossing miles and miles of desert and sand, tired and tattered, but with the hope of reaching the goal… But just as they come close to the goal, everybody wants to relax a little. Now that they have reached there is no hurry. They suddenly feel tired because now there is no question of hope keeping them together. The destiny has arrived. So just before they take the last few steps and enter into the temple, they sit outside the temple. They are so tired.This happens to every traveler in the inner world. Those few steps when you have reached seem to be the longest steps. But as you get relaxed and as you see the light radiating from the temple, as you hear the celestial music, as you hear some beautiful dance going inside, you cannot remain outside long. You will have to stand up and enter into the temple.The moment somebody enters in his own temple of being he knows there is no death, he knows there is no disease, he knows there is no problem. Then the trust arises: then the trust in the master who has helped for no other reason than simply that he loved and loved abundantly. Then love arises toward all those who have helped: the friends and the enemies both. And then a trust arises in the whole existence because it is the whole existence that has brought you in different ways to the highest peak of consciousness. There is nothing other than gratitude.You say, “Everything is going so easily, so softly, so beautifully.” It is good, but don’t depend on this. What is beautiful today may become ugly tomorrow, and what is smooth today may become very tough tomorrow, and what is so soft may become the greatest hindrance. One never knows about tomorrow.Rather than focusing your eyes on the trust in existence, first find your center because that is the only guarantee that the trust in existence will be unconditional: whatever happens, there is not going to be any change in your trust.You are saying, “I get everything I need. And even when something goes wrong, after a while I can see its sense. I feel so thankful that I can see that existence is always providing the right thing for me. It gives me so much trust. Would you please talk about it?”You are living in an illusion. You don’t mention any trust in yourself, and a man who has not experienced it in his own being can only imagine. And you have a tremendous capacity for imagination. If things are going well naturally anybody, howsoever stupid, will trust. When things go wrong your trust must be wavering a little but you wait: perhaps finally, in the end, what looked wrong is not wrong. Then again the trust settles more deeply, but this trust is not going to transform your being because this is a secondary trust, it is not the primary trust.You are making a castle of sand. Everything is going right; the castle is going up and you trust in existence that no disturbance… But you never know: just a strong wind may disturb your castle, destroy it; or just a small child, out of joy, may come and jump on your castle and it will be finished. There are a thousand and one possibilities of the castle being destroyed. Perhaps you will console yourself with “There must be something good for me in the destruction of the castle. Perhaps it is time to go back home. I’m feeling so hungry – that’s why existence destroyed the castle. ‘Go back home and eat something.’ Existence is taking so much care…”In this sense your trust is not very trustworthy. It may give you a few beautiful moments, but they are like a dream. I would like you to have a trust so solid that whatever changes it will remain with you without any change. But the beginning has to be from within. From within you can reach to the without, but not vice versa.It is good that you have been thinking of trust. It is good that the very idea of trust has been surrounding your mind and its atmosphere. Don’t feel hurt if I say to you that this is the time when you should turn your trust, the arrow, toward yourself. Do you trust in yourself? And you are the closest to existence. Existence penetrates you to your very being.You should begin from ABC, not from somewhere in the middle or somewhere at the end. You are beginning almost at the end: XYZ. This is not a right way of progression. There is danger because the whole alphabet is missing. Start from ABC and let it grow spontaneously to XYZ. It will grow, it certainly grows. Your being is an immense potential for growth but start from the being.All the religions of the world have been distracting man from himself. They say, “Pray to God, believe in God, trust in God. He will take care.” And we know that for thousands of years nobody has taken care of this world. If God was taking care then there would have been no need for Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and Nadirshah and Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and Ronald Reagan – no need at all. If this is what you think of as caring about existence then there would have been no Hiroshima, no Nagasaki.In three thousand years man has fought five thousand wars: certainly nobody is taking care. All kinds of diseases go on growing. When I was a child tuberculosis was the greatest disease; now it is just like the common cold. Nobody has much fear if you have tuberculosis – there are medicines available. But those medicines have not been given by any God; they have been given by science, they are man-made.Then came cancer, and now has come an utterly ugly disease, AIDS. Right now on the earth there are ten million people who are suffering from AIDS. And this is not the total survey of the whole earth; it is the survey only of the Western countries.Just to give you a total view, I can say that if the Eastern countries are also surveyed, where homosexuality has existed longer than in the West, then there may be at least twenty million people suffering from AIDS – which has no cure. Is existence taking care? Is God taking care? And these twenty million people are the courageous people who have allowed themselves to be examined. There may be many more who are hiding out of fear because the moment a man is found AIDS positive he becomes dangerous to everybody. Friends turn into enemies, lovers forget all about love, his own family closes their doors. He becomes an outcast. This is a double calamity: a certain death between six months and two years, and the people for whom he has lived – even his own children, his wife, his parents, his friends – have thrown him away: “Even to touch you is dangerous.”The AIDS virus can come from any infected liquid coming out of the body – even saliva, tears. Anything coming out of the body can carry the virus. And the virus seems to be immortal; no medicine kills it. It becomes immune to all kinds of treatment. Who is caring for this existence?So don’t just feel that if your life is going goody-goody you can trust existence. I’m not against trust, but it should grow roots within your being, and then it should spread its branches all around. Then perhaps you will have the perceptivity that existence is taking care. Even in a calamity like the disease AIDS perhaps existence is taking care to make man aware that no sexual perversion should be permitted. Existence is telling all the religions, “You are responsible for creating homosexuality.” Homosexuality was born in monasteries, in monks, in nuns because men and women were separated. That was unnatural.You may have the perception that existence is not against; it is simply trying to clean. So much crap has gathered in the human mind, in human beings, that it has to be taken out.But to have that perception you need a trust in yourself. And how will you find this trust? It is not a belief; it is not just a Christian sermon from any stupid missionary who knows nothing about religion at all, but has crammed beautiful phrases from the Bible and is telling you things that have created all the troubles in the world. More people have been killed by religious wars than by political wars. In the name of God, in the name of religion there have been so many crusades, jihads, religious wars, that one cannot believe that these people are going to bring a better humanity, a loving earth.If you have the perceptivity that arises out of trust within yourself, it is not a belief. The Christian missionary and all other missionaries of other religions only create belief. Belief is a fake trust.Trust cannot be created in you by anyone. You will have to dig deep through meditation to find the pure waters of trust within your being. It is going to be your own work on yourself. It is going to be your own creative exploration, adventure.Yes, buddhas can show you the path, but they cannot help you in any other way. I can tell you about meditations, but I cannot do meditations for you. Without meditation you will not be able to find trust in yourself. And the day of finding the trust in yourself is the greatest day in your eternal life. It changes all the vision, all perception, all judgment about existence and about other people. The trust goes on growing and spreading all around you. Only then will you have unconditional trust in existence.You are groping for the right thing, but in the wrong direction. Change your direction. Grope within. You will find it. If your longing and your thirst are strong enough, there is no reason why you cannot find it. It is just there, within your being, not far away.You don’t have to climb Everest; you have just to settle into your own center – unwavering, undistracted, in utter silence and peace – and the trust will grow out of it without any of your effort. Only that trust is trustworthy. Then no changes in the world, no changes in people are going to make even a dent in your trust. Otherwise just a small thing and all your so-called believing, trusting disappears.I remember the attorney-general in Madhya Pradesh came running to me one day and he said, “You are needed immediately. My father had a heart attack and he loves you so much.” His father was an all-India figure, Dada Dharmadhikari – a very intelligent person who had been in deep contact for almost forty years with J. Krishnamurti.Whenever he used to come to visit his son he would always come to me, and I would tell him, “All your J. Krishnamurti jargon is only intellectual. It won’t help you at the right time.”He said, “No, in forty years it has reached my bones, to my blood, to my marrow. There is no question that it can be shaken by anything.”I went to his home. They had arranged for him to relax in a dark room. I entered without making any noise because I heard somebody saying, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.”I said, “Dada Dharmadhikari cannot say that, and there is nobody else.” As my eyes became accustomed to the dark room I went close, without making any noise. Very silently he was whispering, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.”I shook him and I said, “Dada, what are you doing? This goes against your J. Krishnamurti completely. Have you joined the Hare Krishna, Hare Rama movement so suddenly? I saw you yesterday and you were a Krishnamurti-ite.”He said, “Don’t harass me at this moment. I know there is no God and I know this Hare Krishna, Hare Rama is just foolish. But in case – who knows if God exists? And what is the harm? I’m lying down and just repeating my childhood mantra that has been given to me by my traditional guru who said, ‘In any difficulty, repeat it and you will be helped.’ I’m dying. This is not the moment to discuss it.”I said, “This is the moment to discuss it because I have been telling you for almost twenty years that all your Krishnamurti jargon is intellectual. At the right moment it will disappear. Now this is the moment! Now say to me, ‘There is no God!’”He said, “At this moment I cannot say that. It is too risky. Just leave me alone because only a few minutes are left – and perhaps maybe not even a few minutes. Let me repeat my mantra. If he is, I will tell him, ‘I repeated the mantra. Forgive me for all my stupidity when I used to tell people that there is no God and things like that.’ If he is not, there is no problem. But I can’t take a chance.”But he didn’t die; it was only the first heart attack. People almost always die when the heart attack comes for the third time. He survived, and after four or five days I went to see him. He was sitting in the garden, in the sun.I said, “What about Hare Krishna, Hare Rama?”He said, “All that is nonsense.”I said, “Have you forgotten?”He said, “No, I have not forgotten, but in weakness, in helplessness one starts looking for some help from the beyond.”I said, “Then all your intellectual, philosophical argumentation is only superficial. If it can’t help you in your helplessness then it is of no use.”You can trust existence as an intellectual effort, and you can go on managing your intellectual effort, but in any helpless moment you will start forgetting about it all and you will come to your reality that you have been hiding. I would not like to put you in a mess such as Krishnamurti has put millions of people. I have come across many of them. Just their intellect is full of the answers that Krishnamurti has been repeating continuously almost for seventy years.Krishnamurti lived long, ninety years, and he started speaking when he was twenty. I think nobody else has ever conditioned people’s minds for seventy years – and he was against conditioning people’s minds. He conditioned them so much. And he was a great intellectual, a great rationalist: he could convince people very easily, and he convinced them. But all that conviction melted immediately when a person was dying. Dada Dharmadhikari was one of his very close friends.Never start from the secondary. Always remember as a fundamental rule to start from the primary. And the primary reality and existence is you.Hidden within you is satyam shivam sundaram – the truth, the godliness and the utter beauty of it. That is the seed. Take care of it, and you will soon have a vast tree arising in you, spreading its branches in all directions with millions of flowers.But the beginning is you, and unless you begin right from the interior of your being, all your beginnings are wrong.

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 22 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Sex seems to be dropping me. Is music next?Milarepa, sex is dropping so many people that the problem is not that sex is dropping you also, the problem is that many others may start picking it up! Dropping is okay. Avoid picking up.And I can understand your worry. You are asking, “Sex seems to be dropping me. Is music next?”Music is not something biological, it is not something concerned with your chemistry or physiology. Music is not even of the mind. Music is something – a space between mind and meditation. It is one of the most mysterious phenomena. To conceive it is almost impossible in intellectual terms, for the simple reason that it is beyond mind, but not yet meditation.It can become meditation. It has both possibilities. It can come down and become mind – then you are only a technician, not a musician. You may be playing perfectly on the instruments, without any faults, but still you are only a technician. You know the technique perfectly and entirely, but it is not your heart and it is not your being. It is just your knowledge.Music can go higher and further away from mind, and then it starts becoming closer and closer to peace and silence. One is a musician only when he understands the sound of silence, and one who understands the sound of silence is capable of creating sounds which are synonymous with silence. And that is the most miraculous thing. Then the musician has come to his full flowering. Beyond this music starts the world of meditation.In fact, as far as the East is concerned, the ancient-most sources about music say one thing definitively, and that is that it has been born out of meditation. People who went deep into meditation enjoyed the silence of it, loved the peace that seems to be unfathomable. They wanted to convey that you are far more than you think you are, far bigger than you think you are. You are as big as the whole universe – but how to say it? Words are very poor philosophical concepts – almost like beggars.The ancient meditators tried to find some way to convey their peace, their silence, their joy, and those were the people who discovered music. Music is a by-product of meditation.But you can go both ways: either from meditation you can come to music as an expression, a creative expression of your experience; or you can go from music to meditation – because music brings you closer and closer to meditation as music becomes immense silence, sounds merging into silence, sounds creating deeper silences than you have ever known. Then you are very close to the boundary of meditation.You need not be worried about music. Music is not in the same category as sex – although in the West the modern music has fallen so low that it has come very close to the category of sex. In the West only that music which provokes sexuality in you is appreciated. Sex is the lowest point of your life energy, and if music is used to provoke sexuality, then naturally it has to fall to the same category.Super-consciousness is the highest point of your life energy. When music reaches super-consciousness, it provokes unknown territories within you, unexplored skies. It can become a door to the divine. Just as it can become a door to the animal at the lowest, at the highest it can become the door to the divine.Man is only a bridge to be passed. Man is only a bridge between the animal and the divine. You should not make your house on the bridge. Bridges are not for making houses on. You have to pass on, from this shore to that further shore.Your fear that perhaps music is going to be the next to be dropped comes from your Western conditioning because in the West only music which is sexual is appreciated. The West has completely forgotten its own great musicians who have almost touched the super-conscious. But even the greatest musicians in the West could not go beyond life energies. They could not reach to the cosmic energies.I am reminded of two stories – both historical, both factual. One is about a man who wanted the emperor of China to declare him the greatest archer of the empire. Certainly he was, and the emperor was absolutely willing to send a message around the empire: “If there is anybody who thinks of being a competitor, he should reach to the capital by a certain date. If nobody comes, then this man is going to be declared the greatest archer in the whole empire.”Just then his old servant who was not just a servant because the emperor’s father had died when he was just a child and the father, before dying, gave the child to his very devoted servant and told him, “Now you take care of him. It is your responsibility to see that the empire is not taken over by anybody thinking that now only a child is left. As soon as he is of age, immediately declare him to be crowned as emperor.”The servant had served so well, so wisely, so cleverly, that he had saved the empire for the child for almost fifteen years. So he was not just a servant, he was almost a stepfather, and the emperor had great respect for him. That old man said to the emperor, “Wait! This man is a good technician as far as archery is concerned – I have seen him working – but he does not know what ultimate archery is. He is a good technician; his targets are never missed – one hundred percent perfect.”The emperor said, “If he never misses the target, if his archery is one hundred percent perfect, then why are you telling me that he is not a great archer?”The old man said, “I know an archer and I can compare. You don’t know… In the high mountains there lives an old man, older than me. Nobody knows how old he is. He himself has never bothered to count his years, but certainly he must be more than a hundred years old. And I have seen what archery can be at the highest.“So I would like to suggest to this young archer to go to the mountains. I will give him an introductory letter. He should be with the old man for a few days and he will forget all about being the greatest archer.”The archer could not believe it: “Who can be greater than me? What can be better than my art?”But the emperor said, “I cannot do what you are asking me to do. You will have to do what the old man has said. Go to the mountains with this letter and be with this old archer and watch and see the difference between the technician and the real master.”The archer also became interested, although he could not figure it out intellectually: “What can be better? He cannot be more than what I am.” But he had no idea.It took many days for him to reach the old man, who lived on a high mountain. He was so aged, his back was bent down and he could not stand straight. The archer could not see anything in the old man’s small cave which gave any indication of archery – not even a bow, no arrows. He said, “You are sure you are the man for whom I have come?”The old man said, “I am absolutely sure because except me nobody lives on this mountain. Looking at your letter – you think that you are a great archer. If you are a great archer then why are you carrying this bow with you and these arrows? These are good for the beginners, the learners, but not for the masters.”The archer said, “But without arrows, without a bow, what kind of archer will I be?”The old man came out. He took him to a cliff that went far away above the valley – a very thin cliff and underneath was a valley thousands of feet deep. Although his back was bent and he could not stand straight he went without any trembling, without any wobbling. He simply went to the very edge of the cliff. Half of his feet were off the cliff; and he was standing on only half of his feet, and he called the archer, “Come on!”The archer said, “My God! Just a little strong wind and you are gone; just a small mistake and you are gone – gone forever! Not even bits and pieces of your body will be found; the valley is so deep and so dangerous.” The old man was standing there as if he were standing in his own home.The archer tried, but he could go only one or two feet, and then out of fear he was trembling so much that he sat down. But that was not enough; then he lay down on the stone, clinging to the cliff and he said, “Help me!” and the old man was at least five or six feet further away.The old man said, “What kind of archer are you? If the archer cannot stand on this small cliff without trembling, how can he be called an archer? If your hands are trembling, people may not be able to know it – but you cannot deceive a master. Practice for a few days on this cliff: just coming to the very edge and standing there without any fear, without any nervousness.”The man said, “Even trying that is dangerous. Even the rehearsal may finish me. Is there not some other way to learn archery?”The old man said, “Then the other way is…” And the old man raised his head. Seven cranes were flying overhead and he looked at each crane and the crane fell immediately to the earth – seven cranes without any arrows. He said, “Unless your eyes become arrows you are not a master. So go home, learn to be a master. If I am alive, I will come myself when I think you may be ready. Or if I am not alive – look, my son is coming. I will give him all the instructions and send him. If he approves you, the emperor can declare you, without any contest, the greatest archer of the empire.”The man went home trembling. Even when he reached home the trembling was there. He had never thought that a man, just by looking at a bird, could shoot the bird. He had never thought that just eyes can function like arrows. Just the idea is enough, it needs the support of an absolutely steady, fearless heart, then just the idea “Come down!” is enough and the bird will come down.He started trying. Twenty years passed, and one day a young man came. He had completely forgotten. The young man asked him, “I don’t see your bow and arrows that I saw last time when you came to see my father. He is dead, but he has left instructions for me. The first question is: Where is your bow and where are your arrows?”The man remained silent for a moment and then he said, “I have heard these words. I remember there was a time when perhaps I used to have a bow and arrows. But since I saw your father, for the first time I understood the old Chinese proverb that when an archer becomes perfect, he throws away his bow and arrows. And when a musician becomes perfect, he forgets all about his instruments. He himself is music; his very being is music. I don’t know any more. But your father gave me, in a very strange way, the whole teaching.”He took the young man out, looked at a bird and the bird fell down. The young man said, “Now you can go with this letter that my father has left for you to the emperor.”He said, “Now who cares to be declared the master of archery by the emperor? I am! Forget all about it. Who can declare it? Who has the authority to examine me? If your father were alive – perhaps he had the authority to declare me, but nobody else. It has nothing to do with the emperor, it has nothing to do with the empire.“But you are the son of my master. Although he has only taught me very little, that little has grown into a huge mastery within me. The old man is not alive; I touch your feet instead because you come from his own blood. And when you go back, take these roses from my garden on my behalf and put them on the grave of your father. Although he will not be able to hear, tell him, ‘Your teaching has not gone in vain. The man has really become a master and he has no longer any desire to be declared the champion of the empire.’ All longing has disappeared, all desire has disappeared. I am feeling so fulfilled and so complete that I cannot conceive that anything more can be added in my being, and I owe everything to your old father.”Milarepa, when music becomes perfect it does not drop. You become music itself: your every gesture, your eyes, your hands, your feet, your whole being starts throbbing into a music which is in tune with the universal music. Don’t be worried about it.London fog was swirling over the River Thames as a young tramp settled himself for a night on the embankment. Suddenly he was awakened by the sound of a beautiful woman alighting from her Rolls Royce. “You poor man,” she said, “you must be terribly cold and wet. Let me drive you to my home and put you up for the night.”Of course the tramp climbed into the car beside her. After a short drive they came to her mansion. The door was opened by the butler. She instructed him to give the tramp a meal, a hot bath and a comfortable bed in the servant’s quarters.Some while later the woman slipped on her negligee and hurried along to the servants’ wing. Knocking on the door she entered the room and seeing that the light was on, asked the young man why he was not sleeping.“Surely you are not hungry?” she asked innocently.“No, your butler fed me royally,” he answered.“Then perhaps your bed is not comfortable?” she continued.“But it is,” he said, “it is soft and warm.”“Then you must need company,” she said, “move over a little.”The young man was overjoyed. He moved over and fell in the River Thames.So don’t be worried, Milarepa. All that is dream will drop, all that is real will remain.Osho,The other day I visited Sitama. I looked into her eyes and felt almost as if time had stopped and exploded. Completely overwhelmed, and with much reluctance, I came away laughing and crying. Can you talk about the moment when time stops: when I feel as if everything is rushing at me and at the same time away from me; all in a split second which also seems like a lifetime and leaves me feeling like a small child?The question about time and its stopping is immensely complex. For centuries philosophy has been trying to figure out what time is. And there have been many different standpoints, but none of them seems to be supported by logic and rationality.The ordinary idea of time is that it is like a river that is flowing by your side. That which has passed is the past; that which is passing is the present; that which is going to pass is the future – as if time is a flux, a movement, and you are standing and time goes on moving.But it is not true that you are standing still because once you were a child, now you are young, now you are old, now you are dead. You are not standing still; you are continuously changing. Because of this fact there have been philosophers who propounded a second theory: that time is static, it is always the same, what changes is you. You are the flux: from childhood to youth, from youth to old age, from old age to beyond. Because you cannot conceive your own changing process – it is so subtle and so quick – you project it on time.Nobody knows what time is, where time is. Nobody has ever seen it. Nobody has ever touched it. Nobody has ever come to grips with time and its existence.Then three hundred years ago science became interested in what time is because philosophy had not given any satisfactory answer. Science came to a point where it needed an answer about time. Without it, its many hypotheses remain simply hypotheses. It was a gap that had to be filled.Albert Einstein proposed something that has been temporarily accepted. In science, nothing is accepted permanently because one never knows, tomorrow somebody else may bring a better hypothesis. So science is always hypothetical. That is the beauty of science and that is the ugliness of religion – because religion goes on insisting that whatever is written in the holy scriptures is true, and true forever; no change is possible. How can there be any change when the holy scriptures of all the religions are written by God?Science has a more significant attitude. Everything is, at the moment, hypothetically right. Nobody can say anything about what will happen the next moment. That is the meaning of relativity: when we say something is true, it simply means that relatively it is true. In comparison to other hypotheses, this hypothesis is relatively true. But tomorrow somebody may introduce some new hypotheses, and in comparison to them it may no longer be true. Something new may become true, but that too will remain only hypothetically true. Science is very honest.Albert Einstein stated something very great about time: that it is only a dimension of space. We have always known that space has three dimensions; Einstein added the fourth dimension to space, and it fits very well with his physics and it fits very well with all that has been discovered, taking it as a hypothetical truth. So many things, so many discoveries, so many inventions and they all prove reflectively the truth of the hypothesis.If time is only a dimension of space… You never ask about space: whether it is moving or static. Nobody ever asks. Space is always there, the same. It is the same sky, it is the same space: things in it may change but space remains unchanging. And if time is also a dimension of space that means it does not change at all.You are saying that you felt in a moment as if time had stopped. Those moments when you experience that time has stopped are great, tremendously great. In fact, time is always in a state of being the same. It is not a flux; it is not a river – the old idea.Time is always present – never past, never future. Things go on passing, disappearing, new things go on coming, but time itself is only a dimension of space, absolutely static. So when time stops for you it is not time that stops. What stops is your mind.Your mind is in a constant flux: so many thoughts, so many ideas, so many imaginations and dreams and projections – and they have all stopped. Because your mind stops, suddenly you realize time has stopped.But in fact the stopping of the mind only reveals to you the reality of time: it is never moving, it is unmoving, it is just here, it is just now. It has never changed, and it will never change. Everything in it changes, but time itself remains absolutely unchanging.The moment your mind stops moving, suddenly you realize that time has stopped. So it is significant to understand that it is your mind that has stopped, not time.J. Krishnamurti used to say, again and again, that “Mind is time.” This is a strange statement, particularly for those who do not understand the state of no-mind because when the mind disappears, time also disappears – the time that you used to think of as a flux. The mind stopping is a revelation that appears to you as a stopping of time.But as you grow more and more meditative and your mind becomes more and more silent, you will become aware that as your silence, your peace, your mindlessness is growing, time is disappearing.When the mind is absolutely still, there is no time. That means there is nothing that you can think of as changing, nothing visible that you can conceive of as time. Hence, the ancient-most treatise on meditation says that those moments when time stops are the moments when you experience meditation. And those are the moments that have given an inclination, a vision, a glimpse of something beyond the mind. Looking at a sunset, you are so absorbed that the mind stops at the beauty of the sunset. Suddenly there is no time.Time is a reflection of your mind. You can watch it in many ways. When you are miserable, time passes very slowly. Strange – why should the time pass so slowly? And when you are happy and joyous, time passes fast.There is a statement in the Bible that those who are thrown in the darkness of hell will remain there forever. One of the great agnostic thinkers of our times, Bertrand Russell, has written a book, Why I Am Not A Christian, and he insists on that point very much. And logically – and he was a logician and a mathematician – you will be convinced when you look at his argument.Bertrand Russell accumulated all the facts that made him decide not to be a Christian. He was born a Christian, he belonged to a large family, and he himself had the title of earl – a very respectable man, a Nobel Prize winner. One of the points is that this is absolutely unjustified. Because Christians believe in only one life, in seventy years, how many sins can you commit? If you commit sins from the very first day you are born, without sleeping, without eating, without doing anything else – just committing sins and sins and sins to the very last breath – still, how many sins can you commit?In the first place it is not possible. You will need sleep – even sinners need sleep – you will have to eat food, you will have to earn your bread, you will have to take time for your bath, for changing your clothes, for shaving your beard. If you count, very little time is left in a seventy-year life when you can commit sins.Bertrand Russell himself says, “I have noted down how many sins I have committed, and I have also included the sins that I wanted to commit, but could not. Even if I am punished for those sins which I never committed but only thought about, then too the hardest and cruelest judge cannot send me to jail for more than four and a half years.”For such a small sentence an eternity of hellfire? God seems to be insane. There should be some judgment. And he has omitted the point that the same is true for virtue. How much virtue can you do? Eternal paradise for that small amount of virtue that you do? There has to be some limit – and neither are there sinners who need to be eternally in hellfire.Do you understand what is meant by eternity, unending, forever? Just think what it means – forever – and your mind will feel tired. Wherever you go: go on, go on! It never comes to an end. Hellfire just for the few small sins: that you eloped with somebody’s wife, that you picked somebody’s pocket – eternal hellfire? And just because you donated to Mother Teresa’s orphanage and you made a hospital for the poor and opened a school for the poor, you will have eternity in paradise of all pleasures, joys unending! Is there some measure? Is there some justification?The book was published nearabout seventy years ago, and in seventy years not a single Christian theologian has been able to answer Bertrand Russell. On all other points I agree with him; he is perfectly right. In fact not only he, nobody should be a Christian – but on this point I have a disagreement because it involves the concept of time.Perhaps he was not aware that he was talking about time, and he should take note about time. I think the Bible is right and closer to Albert Einstein than Bertrand Russell, particularly on this point because the fire in hell will appear as if it is eternal. Pain seems to make time longer. Time seems to be something like elastic, and very cunning. When you are in pain it goes on stretching longer and longer; and when you are blissful and happy, the moment you realize you are blissful it is gone.But this happens not because of time; this happens because of the mind. When the mind is feeling blissful, time stops. And because time stops you cannot count how many minutes, how many hours, how many days. But when you are in misery your mind is running – so many thoughts, so many worries, so many anguishes. Time becomes very long. In a certain way this means that miserable people live longer lives and happy people die sooner.Meditation is the way to stop the very idea of time as flux. Meditation is a total stillness. Nothing moves. That’s why you felt for a moment that time had stopped. It was just something else that had stopped – it was your mind.But this is our way of looking at things. You don’t even know your own face unless you look at it in a mirror.When you see that time has stopped, watch immediately what is happening within you. Has the mind stopped? I am giving you a clue: whenever time stops, immediately find out if your mind has stopped. In fact the mind stops first; then only do you discover that time has stopped.Now you have a key in your hands. Let your mind stop completely and time stops completely. You start living in a timelessness.For example, I don’t know what date today is. When Anando or Neelam come for some signature from me, they immediately tell me the date because I don’t know what date it is. What do I have to do with dates? I use my watch only when I come to talk to you because I am afraid I may continue for eternity! The whole day I don’t look at the watch. I don’t need to.I don’t know exactly… In the morning when I wake up it often happens that I forget whether it is morning because I have cut every day into two days. In the afternoon I sleep for three hours so when I wake up the problem arises again: is it morning or is it afternoon? From my inside no answer comes.For almost thirty-five years I have lived in absolute timelessness. I don’t know when the new year begins and ends. To me, the day my ego disappeared, my mind became silent, the whole existence has become silent and still, unmoving.And you are saying, “At the same time…it seems like a lifetime and leaves me feeling like a small child.”There are two things to be remembered about the experience of being a child. One is to be childlike, which is immensely beautiful. Jesus says, “Unless you are born again just like a child…”But remember, he is not exactly saying a child, but just like a child – something similar to the child’s consciousness. But that does not mean that you are as ignorant as a child. You are just innocent as a child, but not ignorant as a child.So childhood has two dimensions: one is ignorance, one is innocence. Both are mixed, but we have to make a clear-cut division. And we have two different words. When we say, “You should be born again like a child,” it is one thing, and when we want to condemn somebody then we say, “Don’t behave in a childish way.” That childish way is not the way of “just like a child”; that childish way takes only the ignorant part of the child, and “just like a child” takes only the innocent part of the child. We are dividing the child into two different dimensions.Always remember – because one can forget, listening again and again to “be just like a child.” You may start being childish. That is not the meaning.The little boy was putting his shoes on by himself for the first time, but he put his right shoe on his left foot and vice versa. When he had finished, he ran to his mother: “Look Mummy,” he said proudly, “I put them on all by myself.”“That’s very good,” said his mother, “but I am afraid you have put them on the wrong feet.”The little boy looked down, and then said confidently, “No, Mummy, these are definitely my feet.”A reporter asked Ronald Reagan, “Mr. President, with all the problems in the world today, how do you manage to sleep at night?”“I sleep like a baby,” replies Reagan. “I cry a little and I wet the bed.”I don’t want you to be that childish.Osho,I have always heard you say, “Stop doing. Watch.” Several times lately I've heard you say that the mind should be the servant instead of our master. It feels that there is nothing to do except watch. But the question still arises: Is there anything to do with this unruly servant but to watch?There is nothing else to do with this unruly servant but just to watch. Apparently it appears too simple a solution for too complex a problem, but these are part of the mysteries of existence. The problem may be too complex; the solution can be very simple.Watching, witnessing, being aware seem to be small words to solve the whole complexity of mind. Millions of years of heritage, tradition, conditioning, prejudice – how will they disappear just by watching?But they disappear because as Gautam Buddha used to say, “If the lights of the house are on, thieves don’t come close to that house knowing that the master is awake.” Because the light is showing from the windows, from the doors, you can see that the light is on. It is not the time to enter into the house. When the lights are off, thieves are attracted to the house. Darkness becomes an invitation. As Gautam Buddha used to say, the same is the situation about your thoughts, imaginations, dreams, anxieties – your whole mind.If the witness is there, the witness is almost like the light: these thieves start dispersing. And if these thieves find there is no witness, they start calling their brothers and cousins and everybody, “Come on!”It is as simple a phenomenon as the light. The moment you bring the light in, the darkness disappears. You don’t ask, “Is just light enough for darkness to disappear?” or, “When we have brought the light, will we have to do something more for the darkness to disappear?”No, just the presence of the light is the absence of the darkness, and the absence of the light is the presence of darkness. The presence of the witness is the absence of the mind, and the absence of the witness is the presence of the mind.The moment you start watching, slowly, slowly as your watcher becomes stronger your mind will become weaker. The moment it realizes that the watcher has come to maturity, the mind immediately submits as a beautiful servant. It is a mechanism. If the master has arrived, then the machine can be used. If the master is not there or is fast asleep, then the machine goes on working things – whatsoever it can – on its own. There is nobody to give orders; there is nobody to say, “No, stop! That thing has not to be done.”Then the mind is slowly convinced that it itself is the master. And for thousands of years it has remained your master, so when you try to be a witness it fights because it is a question of it having completely forgotten that it is only a servant. You have been so long absent that it does not recognize you; hence the struggle between the witness and the thoughts.But the final victory is going to be yours because both nature and existence want you to be the master and the mind to be the servant. Then things are in harmony. Then the mind cannot go wrong. Then everything is existentially relaxed, silent, flowing toward its destiny.You don’t have to do anything else but to watch.Paddy bought a parrot at an auction. He asked the auctioneer, “I have spent a great deal of money on this parrot – are you sure he can talk?”The auctioneer replied, “Of course I am sure. He was bidding against you.”Such is the unawareness of the mind, and such are the stupidities of the mind.I have heard that the Irish atheists, seeing that the theists have started a dial-a-prayer service, have also started one – although they are atheists. But the competitive mind… They have also started a dial-a-prayer service. When you phone them up, nobody answers.Two tramps were sitting by a campfire one night. One of them was very depressed. “You know Jim,” he mused, “the life of a tramp is not as great as it is made out to be. Nights on park benches – or in a cold barn – traveling on foot and always dodging the police, being kicked from one town to another, wondering where your next meal is coming from, being sneered at by your fellow man…” His voice trailed off and he sighed heavily.“Well,” said the other tramp, “if that is how you feel about it, why don’t you go and find yourself a job?”“What!” said the first tramp in amazement, “and admit that I’m a failure?”Mind has become accustomed to being a master. It will take a little time to bring it to its senses. Witnessing is enough. It is a very silent process, but the consequences are tremendously great. There is no other method that can be better than witnessing as far as dispersing the darkness of the mind is concerned.In fact, there are one hundred and twelve methods of meditation. I have gone through all those methods – and not intellectually. It took me years to go through each method and to find out its very essence. And after going through one hundred and twelve methods I was amazed that the essence is witnessing. The methods’ non-essentials are different, but the center of each method is witnessing.Hence I can say to you, there is only one meditation in the whole world and that is the art of witnessing. It will do everything – the whole transformation of your being and it will open the doors of satyam shivam sundaram: the truth, the godliness and the beauty of it all.

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 23 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why such an enormous fear of allowing myself to be really alive?The fear of allowing oneself to be really alive is not the fear of life; it is a very camouflaged fear about death. If you are alive you will die. Death is the culmination of life. The fear of life is not basically fear of life; it is basically fear of what life will bring ultimately to you, and that is death.But mind is very clever at camouflaging things and giving you directions that are not right. They take you away from the actuality of your inner subjective experience. How can one be afraid of life? For what?All that we have got is life. All the music, all the dance and all the songs and all the beauty and all the search for truth belong to a man who is fully alive. What fear can there be about life?Life has to be lived so totally and so intensely that you can squeeze each minute’s juice without leaving a single drop behind. Only such a life is authentic, great. Only such a life does not come to an end in death. Such a life comes to the door of the divine at the moment of death.Death is a complex experience – just as life is. Perhaps more complex because life is spread over seventy or eighty years and death is condensed into a single moment, a split second. Because of its condensed nature, it is a miracle that those who have not lived only experience death and those who have lived fully experience an eternal release into the universal consciousness. For them death becomes a friend.But begin with life because life is the beginning, and death is the end. If you are afraid from the very beginning you will not give nourishment to the rosebush, you will not give water, you will not care about it, you will not come close to it, you will not shower your love on it. The rosebush is going to shrink, and without roses it is going to die without ever having experienced any beautiful moment of blissfulness or ecstasy. It will simply shrink; it will never know that it had the possibility of tremendous beauty and the fragrance of roses. Naturally the state of such a rosebush is very depressive. It will die in anguish without knowing what life was. It will know only death.This is a simple logic to be remembered. If you don’t live life fully you will have to experience death, which is just a fiction, but you will feel it almost more than your actual life – because you have never lived life, it has been just a faint, faraway echo. At the most it consists of the same stuff that dreams are made of – but you have never lived actually, you have never loved actually, you have never danced actually, you have always remained apart. Wherever there was a life source to rejuvenate you, you did not allow yourself the rejuvenation. You did not allow life to visit you and to be your guest, although you seemed to be alive. But that life was only medical.You were breathing, you were talking, you were sleeping, you were waking up, you were working… These are the symptoms for medical science of a man who is alive, but the mystics know much, much more than medical science. They know that these are only symptoms, but they are not life – and that life can exist without the symptoms, or the symptoms can exist without life.I am reminded of one Indian mystic, Brahma Yogi. For almost thirty years he was learning a single thing, because he himself was a doctor and he wanted to prove to medical science that your symptoms are not synonymous with life. It is a strange world. He exhibited it in Oxford, in Cambridge, in Harvard, in Tokyo, in Kolkata.What he used to do was sit in deep meditation and slowly his breathing would stop, the pulse would go away, the heartbeat would not be there and the doctors would check – the best doctors of those universities – and a dozen doctors would write a death certificate for him. All the symptoms that medical science thinks of as death were totally fulfilled in the man. There was no possibility of his being alive.And this was his condition: that when they found him dead they should immediately sign the death certificate. After ten minutes, slowly he would start breathing again, the pulse would come back, the heartbeat would come back, and slowly he would open his eyes and smile at the doctors. He collected these death certificates so many times, in so many medical colleges, in so many universities that it became a great puzzle. The doctors could not believe it. All the symptoms were absolutely clear. What was his secret?His secret has been known for centuries in the East. Even you can feel it on a smaller basis because I don’t want you to waste thirty years just to prove it. That is useless. But on a smaller basis you can experience it while you meditate. As meditation deepens, your breathing becomes slower, silent.You know perfectly well that when you are angry, humiliated, your breathing becomes faster; your heartbeat becomes faster. When suddenly you hear some good news, that you have won a lottery, your heart beats so loudly that even the neighbors can hear it!You know your heartbeat, your breathing changes with your emotions. In meditation you are going beyond emotions, beyond thoughts. Naturally, breathing becomes so silent that unless you try to hear it very closely, it is very difficult.In Zen, when a meditator goes very deep, the only way to find whether he is alive or dead is to bring a mirror in front of his nose. You cannot hear his breathing, but on the mirror the breathing leaves a little vapor. That remains the only sign that he is alive.The heart starts going into a subtler rhythm, the pulse becomes so slow…almost invisible. Before quartz watches with batteries came into existence, I was in difficulty. Automatic watches function perfectly, but they depend on your pulse. Your pulse goes on giving them movement, and the movement of your hands. The moment you put them away, within two or three hours they stop.I have tried almost all the best watches in the world that are automatic, but on my hand they don’t go even for three hours. From the moment I put them on my hand, within five or ten minutes they stop because everything is so silent. And unless I have to move my hands – and that is only when I am speaking to you – otherwise my hands are in complete relaxation with my body.Finally they said that no automatic watch is going to work on me so I have to use either a winding watch, which is an older version, or a quartz watch which runs on a battery.Brahma Yogi proved beyond doubt to almost all the experts of the world that symptoms of life are only outer. The life source can remain so still inside that you don’t have any way to find it from the outside. Only the person who is alive knows its beauty, its luminosity, its blissfulness. But those are not the things that any stethoscope will be able to catch – blessings, blissfulness, ecstasy. There is no instrument to find them.If life can be dissociated from symptoms – Brahma Yogi never said this, I am saying it – then the other possibility also becomes a reality. It may be that millions of people are only suffering from symptoms of life; inside there is nothing. Just like a robot, they have a physiology, a biology, a chemistry, a brain which has an inbuilt program to go on running for seventy years. It will go on running.You will be surprised to know that even in the grave, hair goes on growing, nails go on growing because their inbuilt process is such that it does not need life at all. If you dig up a grave, you are going to be amazed: the man’s hair has become very long, his nails have become very long. You may freak out: “Is this man really dead or has he befooled us?”But the world is full of corpses going all around – corpses because they are afraid of life. And why are they afraid of life? They are afraid because if they enter the stream of life, finally they will have to face death. But their logic is absolutely absurd.The experience of all those in the whole history of mankind who have lived totally and intensely, who have burned their life’s torch from both the ends together, is that they never came across death. They were so alive that a great transformation happens at the moment of death. They don’t die, they don’t become unconscious. They simply move either in a new form of life, or if they have become so awakened that there is no need for any other form, they move into the formless universe. The whole universe becomes their body and their being. That is the ultimate peak that you are capable of. But if you are afraid of life, then it is very difficult.In India there is a plant, a very beautiful plant. Its name is also very beautiful; its name is chhuimui. It means “very touchy.” Just touch one leaf of the plant and the whole plant immediately closes. All its leaves close; the whole plant looks as if it is completely dead. Just one leaf! It has a small number of leaves, two leaves, and if you just touch one leaf both leaves will close and the whole plant will immediately go into an emergency situation – some danger! And it takes at least fifteen minutes for it to wait and see whether the danger is gone. Then slowly, slowly it opens its leaves again.If you are chhuimui – so touchy that the moment life comes close to you, you immediately close up – then for what are you living? You are already dead. People are dead to different degrees: a few are a hundred percent dead, a few are fifty percent, a few are thirty percent. The more religious, the more virtuous, the more moralistic, the more puritan – they don’t have more than five percent life, or even less. The great saints have even shrunk more. They live only one percent because they can still breathe. Except for that, there is no sign of life.The fear of death takes you away from life but the reality is that unless you live a hundred percent – or if you can manage it, a little more too – then death is not going to happen to you. You will never experience any death, but only a change of house. Everybody will know that you are dead, but what have you to do with everybody else? You will know that you are alive, and more alive than you ever were because the body is a hindrance, a cage, an imprisonment.Mind is so heavy and loaded with garbage. You don’t see that your consciousness is carrying almost a Himalayan load of thousands of years; its back is bent. The moment your consciousness is freed from the body, it comes into the open, into the clearance, under the sky, under the stars. And this freedom is the freedom from all past because all the past is carried in the body, in the brain. Consciousness is always new.But because you are identified with the body, you think that some time you are young, and then you are old and then one day you die. It is your identification with the body that is creating the trouble.You will have to learn from ABC about life, love, laughter. You have got such a small time span; don’t waste it in fear. Jump into life’s deepest waters. Only life can redeem you from death. What ordinarily seems to be the end of life is not the end of life for those who are awakened. It is the beginning of a totally new life, far greater, far bigger, far more luminous.Start falling in love: at least you may become ten percent alive. Start enjoying food: you will become a little more alive. Start enjoying the beauty that surrounds the world and you will become more alive.Keep yourself free from all bondages such as marriage because I don’t know anything else which comes so very close to death as marriage. Two persons, both are alive, and both are sitting by each other’s side, dead – completely dead. I can say from far away, seeing a couple walking, whether they are husband and wife. If you see their faces, long, saintly, they are husband and wife. If you see them laughing, enjoying, joking, then the wife belongs to someone else – or it may be vice versa: the husband belongs to somebody else.If you really want to be more and more alive, then come closer in every area of life with intensity and totality.Life is a blessing it is not a sin. Life is a gift it is not guilt. Life is the greatest thing that existence has given to you – for nothing! Just because you have not paid for it, you don’t recognize its value. Don’t lose a single moment. When there is a chance to dance, don’t sit in the corner and be just an onlooker. Participate. When people are laughing, don’t participate just not to look stupid.Laugh with your whole heart. Don’t be worried whether anybody else is laughing or not. You should always look at my sannyasin, Sardar. He does not care whether anybody else is laughing or not. When he feels like laughing, he laughs. He is always there at the beginning. Then others follow, slowly, slowly, thinking that everybody is laughing so it is okay, there is nothing wrong here.Meditation will help you to come closer to life. Love will help to bring you closer to life. Creativity will bring you closer to life. Enjoying small things that have been condemned by your stupid so-called saints will bring you closer to life.In Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram, even tea was banned. Now, tea is not much of a sin: just a little caffeine in it, but no sin at all. No religious scripture says that tea is a sin. And to destroy people’s taste, Gandhi invented a new chutney, a new sauce. You have seen the neem trees here? Just taste one of the leaves and you will never forget it! It is the bitterest tree in the world. And he used to make everybody in the ashram…he used to sit with everybody to eat and he checked whether the neem chutney was given to everybody or not. That was a strategy to destroy your taste.One American writer was preparing to write his biography, and he was allowed to stay in Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram for a few weeks. He remembers that the most difficult thing was that neem chutney, twice a day: “The first day I could not believe it – am I being poisoned or what? Then he explained to me the greatness of this chutney…”In ayurveda, neem is thought to be the most valuable plant in the world. It has great qualities, it purifies the blood. Just its taste is hell.So when Mahatma Gandhi explained it to him, being a newcomer he took a small taste and said, “My God!” So he thought it was better not to destroy the whole meal: “I should gulp it all at one time and drink water so that I can enjoy the food.”When he gulped it, Gandhi called the cook and said, “I told you he would love it. Bring him another chutney!”The biographer said, “My God, so now I cannot even gulp it!”Neem chutney was virtuous because one of the fundamentals in his ashram was taken from Jainism; that is, tastelessness. Now these are the people who are against life. You should not taste food, you should not enjoy beautiful clothes, you should not enjoy the ordinary things of life – a good comfortable bed, a small beautiful house with a beautiful garden and flowers.Do you know that in Gandhi’s ashram all the flowerpots used to grow only wheat? He was against roses: roses are very luxurious and they represent the capitalists, and what India needs is wheat! And how much wheat will he give? Nine hundred million people and his two or three pots are growing wheat.But it was symbolic of his mind and it was symbolic of the mind of all so-called saints – self-torture. And the only way to torture yourself is to deprive yourself of anything living, loving, beautiful.Just try to understand that my whole approach is life-affirmative. To me, anything that denies life is irreligious; and up to now all the religions have been irreligious in that sense. They have been denying life any affirmation, and naturally, the more you shrink away from life, the more you already feel dead. You drag yourself from your cradle to the grave. The only thing that you can enjoy is an ego-fulfillment because people think you are a saint.Farmer Giles decided to write his will. He called his three sons and gave each one a duck, with the instructions that whoever sold their duck for the most would inherit the farm.The first son went to market and sold his duck for ten dollars.The second son sold his duck to the neighboring farmer for fifteen dollars.The third son, who was a bit of a dreamer, was carrying his duck to town when a village girl approached him and offered to make love with him if he gave her the duck.It turned out that they had such a good time together, she wanted to give him back the duck if he would make love with her again.Weak at the knees from his experience, and wandering along the country lane with his duck, the young man was knocked over by a car and the duck was killed.The motorist jumped from his car and pushed a twenty dollar note into the young man’s hand, apologizing all the while for his careless driving. The young man dusted himself off and arrived home, tired and tattered.Farmer Giles asked him how he had got on.“Well,” said the boy, “I got fucked for a duck, I got a duck for a fuck, and twenty dollars for a fucked up duck.”Just look at the lighter side of life and enjoy it to its fullest, and all fear will disappear. Only experience of life and love and laughter will dispel the darkness of fear.I have offered to the Jews in Israel… They have been deceived by the American and British politicians who gave them the land of Israel. Perhaps it was the most cunning thing that has happened in this century. The Jews thought it was great, but they could not understand the conspiracy.The conspiracy was that Israel is a small place and the Jews are surrounded on all sides by Mohammedans, bloodthirsty Mohammedans. And the land that is now Israel had been in their hands for centuries. The Mohammedans used to live there and they cannot accept the idea that their land should go back to the Jews who had lost it centuries ago. For centuries the Jews have been homeless, with no land.The Jews could not see that with an ocean of Mohammedans all around they would be tortured continuously, terrorized, bombed. Their life is not going to be a life, but a continuous struggle to survive, and finally they will either have to disappear or to leave Israel again.And when I say this, both England and America are Christian countries. If their intentions were really good, then the Vatican pope should have given recognition to Israel. He has not given recognition to Israel. For him, Israel does not exist as a sovereign country. That shows the reality of the Christian mind.And on the other hand, after the Second World War, American and British politicians happened to possess the land. It should have been given to Palestine – which has been a Mohammedan country for centuries – but America and Britain forced things because they had great armies there and the land was occupied. They gave the land to the Jews. This is the ugliest thing that anybody could have done.The Jews have been tortured for two thousand years because they crucified Jesus, and now this is a crucifixion for all the Jews – Israel. They have poured their money into it, they have come from faraway lands, they have been working hard because it is a desert; and alongside there is continuous harassment from the Mohammedans who are not going to accept that Israel is not theirs. On their maps they still show Palestine, not Israel.And the trouble has increased more and more just now – in a way in which the Jews were not even aware would happen. There are outside enemies all around, and now there are inside enemies.Firstly, the Mohammedans who have been living in the land for centuries are still there. They function as informers to the Mohammedans because their devotion is to Mohammedanism. And something new, inconceivable, is happening because some Jews have come from Europe, and a few Jews have been living in Palestine for centuries. They are the most orthodox; because they have not seen the world, they don’t know what is contemporary. The Jews from Europe are far more advanced, and then the Jews from America are almost not Jews. Now they are fighting; now these three sections of Jews are fighting continuously because the orthodox want to rule over all the Jews. The Americans have enjoyed freedom; they don’t follow the old orthodox concepts. And the same to a lesser degree is true about the European Jews – so now they are killing each other.I said that since America has illegally and criminally taken over the commune land, I offer it to the Jews of Jerusalem to make it a new Jerusalem, a new Israel. And ask the American government – if they are so helpful, then why not give them the whole state of Oregon? Anyway, half the land of Oregon belongs to the federal government of America; it is very easy to give Oregon.As a beginning, as a token of my love and my understanding, I give my commune’s land where we have wasted three hundred million dollars. And it is not a small place; it is one hundred and twenty-six square miles. My idea was to make the commune at least one hundred thousand sannyasins – and they would not have been crowded, it was so big, vast.Just now I have received the latest joke about Jews moving to Rancho Rajneesh.Finally, the very last Jew moved with all his belongings to the former Rancho Rajneesh.With all their energy the new inhabitants threw themselves into working on the fields and the creeks, on reopening the shops and hotel, and on making a kosher kitchen from the former “Magdalena.”Since they had to leave their mourning wall in Jerusalem… They have a long ancient wall in Jerusalem, just to mourn, cry, weep. The louder you cry, the more tears come from your eyes, the more religious you are. Every day you can see this circus: hundreds of people standing by the old wall, crying, weeping. I cannot conceive what kind of religiousness this is.So the only problem in Rancho Rajneesh was that since they had to leave their mourning wall in Jerusalem, the rabbis decided to build a huge new one at the east side of Rajneesh Mandir.When the wall was finally built, all the Jews went there to mourn and to pray to God. When one of the rabbis returned to the synagogue, the rabbi who had stayed behind asked him how it was at the new mourning wall.“Not very good,” the other replied. “I could not stop them from dancing and singing.”Naturally, in my place mourning is not possible. I may not be present there, but I have left enough of my vibration there. My people have left enough dance and enough music there in the air. The rabbi was very much shocked that instead of mourning, they were dancing and singing.To me, dancing and singing can be an intrinsic part of a religious life, but not mourning. Mourning you should leave to the dead; it does not suit the living.Osho,Since you have come out again, I'm melting away in the discourses. It feels as if fighting has stopped or become less.Is it awareness that will help me stay in that melting space of yes, trust and acceptance; or is it natural to move through all different kinds of cycles? If I fall back into fighting, “no” and tension, is it due to unawareness?The more awareness you have, the more you will find your heart filled with “yes.” The less awareness and you will find your heart filled with “no.” “Yes” brings joy, love, blissfulness. “No” makes you a desert where nothing grows, but only despair, anguish, angst.You are asking me: should you remain alert and aware to keep your peace, your silence, your trust, or go in circles – sometimes yes, sometimes no?The question arises from your old habit. This “yes” is so new to you, although it is blissful, the old friends, misery and fighting and “no” and anguish, suffering, will try in every way to pull you back into their company. And to come out of this vicious circle is one of the absolute necessities of being a sannyasin. Unless your “yes” is so pure that there is no shadow of “no” in it, you will not be able to progress on the path of enlightenment. The old friends will pull you backward.Be courageous and be strong and don’t be impressed and influenced by the old gang which has always been around you. But if you like tension, if you like suffering, if you like miserableness, then it is a different matter. I don’t want to interfere in your freedom of choice.There are people who love their misery; in fact they magnify it, exaggerate it. They only talk about misery, nothing else, and if you don’t listen to their misery they become antagonistic to you. The psychology behind these miserable people, who are in the majority in the world, is that when they are miserable people give sympathy to them. It is obviously a very subtle human ego. When you see somebody in misery you sympathize because deep down you are feeling happy that you are not in this stupid fellow’s position. And secondly, to sympathize makes you higher: you are not in a position that somebody else should sympathize with you.The miserable person misunderstands your sympathy as love. Sympathy is not love; it is just a poor plastic substitute. Love is a real authentic living phenomenon. Misery is just asking for love – but nobody loves a miserable person; at the most you can manage to sympathize and run away.What are you going to gain by being tense and unaware? You are only going to lose. For the first time you are out of the clouds and the sun is clear and you are asking me, “Should I go again behind the black clouds?” I cannot suggest that, but I cannot impose on you any order that you should not.If you want to move in circles and if it is your joy, you can do it. But remember, those who move in circles never progress. Progress has to be on a straight line, not in circles.There is one spider in Africa – a certain species of spider. They are very religious people in the old sense of the word: they always follow the leader. Wherever he goes, they go behind. One scientist was working on these spiders and their strange behavior. Thousands of spiders will be going, they don’t know who is ahead of them, who is the leader. But somebody must be.He managed a small experiment that will be helpful to you. He brought a big round plate and put the spiders on that round plate. They started moving, but because the plate was round, they soon made a circle. Everybody found somebody else was ahead, so that must be the leader. Even the leader thought, “Somebody is ahead, so there must be a bigger leader than me.”You will not believe the result of the experiment. For three days continuously they moved on. They were not going anywhere, but they could not stop either. Somebody was ahead, somebody was behind. They only stopped when they started dying. By and by, other spiders threw those who died in the middle of the plate and continued their journey, their great pilgrimage. Finally they all died, but even the last one remained true to the tradition. Without eating anything, without drinking anything, the poor fellow just following an old ritual.But you are not a species of spider. You are human beings with intelligence. There is no need to go in circles of “yes” and “no.” It will never lead you anywhere. Whatever you gain with “yes,” “no” will cancel. Whatever misery, tension, suffering you gain with “no,” “yes” will destroy. But nothing will be in your hands – ever.Unless you learn to move in a straight line like an arrow toward the goal, you will never reach anywhere. Don’t be stupid, that’s all I can say to you.You are a beautiful person because I hear Milarepa has fallen in love with you, and Milarepa is a very choosy fellow! Why not be beautiful inside also? – because the inside beauty is a thousandfold deeper than the outer beauty, and the outer beauty fades one day. And whether it fades or not, Milarepa is going to fade away because he is not a monogamist. He does not believe in monotony. He believes in new pastures, adventures – it does not matter with whom!But only your inner beauty can only bring you close to me. Just beware of your mind dragging you into unawareness.Yussel Rabinowitz and his wife Bessie were hiding from the Nazis in a secluded Berlin basement. One day Yussel decided to get a breath of fresh air, but while out walking he came face to face with Adolf Hitler himself. The German leader pulled out a gun and pointed to a pile of horseshit in the street. “All right, Jew!” he shouted, “Eat that or I’ll kill you.”Trembling, Yussel did as he was ordered. Hitler began laughing so hard that he dropped his gun. Yussel grabbed it and said, “Now you eat, or I will shoot!”The Fuhrer got down on his hands and knees and began eating. While he was occupied, Yussel sneaked away and ran back to his basement. He slammed the door shut, bolted and locked it securely.“Bessie, Bessie!” he shouted. “Guess who I had lunch with today!”

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 24 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When I hear you say that you are only here for us, I feel such an urgency arising in me, such an urge to move deep inside beyond all my little piddly trips and limitations. And yet inside, realizing such a deep helplessness… Is there any secret or short cut, so I don't miss?The path that leads to your innermost being makes you feel more and more a tremendous urgency as you come closer to the center of your being. The farther away you are from yourself, the less is the magnetic pull of your being. It is a simple scientific fact.As you come closer to the magnetic field, you become more and more aware of a tremendous urgency. Something is going to happen, something that is going to transform you completely, something for which you have been waiting for many, many lives, something that…you are not even aware what to call it. This is one part of the feeling of urgency.The second part is that the closer you are to realization…a deep fear arises: will you be able to make it? When you were far away there was no question of missing. You were certain that you had missed it, there was a certain certainty. But as you come closer to the peak, a human fear arises: are you going to make it in such a short time, with this such small energy of yours?And as you see the peak, you also can see that your problems are so trivial, your pleasures are also very trivial, your whole life is childish. Your fights, your friendships, your love affairs seem to be so small and so stupid that you want to get out of them as quickly as possible.Before, you were never in such an urgency to get out of them because you had never realized what your potential is, to what heights you are entitled, so you went on playing with toys. But now that a vision has arisen and is becoming more and more clear, you can see all your involvements, commitments, relationships – everything is so small compared to your inner consciousness.And those small things have been clinging to you for many lives. They are parasites; they are not going to leave you easily because to leave you means certain death. It is your blood they thrive on. And the moment you realize that these small things are preventing you – such small things that I am reminded of a beautiful story that Gautam Buddha used to tell his disciples. It is a strange story and perhaps no Buddhist has ever commented on it because only a buddha can comment on it, not a Buddhist; only a man of absolute awareness can see what Buddha was trying to say through this small story.He said that a man who is blind is lost in a big palace that has one thousand doors, but nine hundred and ninety-nine are closed; only one door is open. The man is blind: he has to grope and find the door. Nine hundred and ninety-nine doors, he goes on searching; some door may be open. And finally he comes to the door that is open – but then suddenly he feels a strong desire to scratch his head. He starts scratching his head and passes the door. Again nine hundred and ninety-nine doors, and who knows what will happen next time when he comes to the one thousandth door? Just a stupid desire to scratch the head…What Buddha was trying to say is that your problems are not very big. You are far bigger than your problems! Your intrinsic capacities are immense, incalculable. Your problems are utter trivia, but you are so much involved in those small problems that you cannot see beyond them.But when you come closer to yourself you stand between two things. On one side is your whole past, which is nothing but a long, long history of stupidities; and your future, which is so close, so luminous, such a splendor that naturally a great urgency arises: how to get rid of this whole past? How to get rid of this mind? How to get rid of all these problems that have been torturing you, all these nightmares that you have been suffering, and take a quantum leap to reach to your very center, where no problem has ever entered, where no thought has ever arisen, where nothing is small and trivial, where everything is satyam shivam sundaram, where everything is nothing but pure truth and pure divineness and pure beauty.And when you see it so close, another urgency also arises. Hearing me say that I am here only for you, there is a trembling fear. On the one hand, perhaps you may not be able to make it before I have to leave my body, and on the other hand, the feeling of urgency is not only for you, but for the whole of humanity too: are we going to spread the fragrance of enlightenment? Have we the capacity? Have we the courage to fight against the enormous ignorance all around?You have as much power and as much capacity as any Jesus, any Socrates, any Gautam Buddha because essentially we come from the same source, essentially we have the same potential.But I can understand your feeling of urgency. My only suggestion is to avoid making this urgency a problem, otherwise this will be another trivia. Just be absolutely contented that you have come so close. Be contented that you can see what is trivia and what is significant. Be content that I am still with you and the phenomenon of transformation can happen in a split second.Be content that if I can stand alone against the world, with all kinds of prejudices, you are also capable. You have to stand alone just to represent me. The day you will be able to stand alone against superstitions, prejudices, religions, politicians – that day will be a day of celebration for you because you have represented me with your total being.It is perfectly good to feel the urgency, but don’t try to find any shortcut or any secret because there is none. If there were some secrets I would have given them to you. I am in a deeper urgency than you are. If there were any shortcuts, do you think I am miserly – that I would not give them to you and that I will unnecessarily torture you on long, arduous paths when a shortcut is available?I have heard about a man who was driving. He stopped his car and asked an old farmer who was smoking, sitting by the side of a tree, very relaxed, “How far is New Delhi?”The farmer asked, “Are you going the way your car is facing?”The man said, “You are strange. I am asking how far Delhi is.”The farmer said, “Without knowing, I cannot answer. First answer my question: Are you going in the direction your car is facing? Then Delhi is really too far. I don’t think you will be able to make it.”The man said, “I thought you were a simple farmer, but you seem to be a philosopher.”He said, “I am a simple farmer. You have left Delhi almost fifty miles behind. If you turn your car back, Delhi is very close, but if you go in this direction then you will have to go around the whole earth, and then too there is no certainty that you will reach Delhi. There are a thousand and one ways one can go astray.”Gautam Buddha is passing through a forest. It is fall and the whole forest is full of dry leaves and naked trees are standing against the evening sun looking so beautiful.Ananda, his close disciple, asked him, “I wanted to ask it many times, but other people were present. Now fortunately a few disciples have gone ahead, a few are coming behind, and this is a moment I am alone with you and I can ask a question.” And his question was: “Have you told us everything that you know or are there some secrets that you are holding back?”Gautam Buddha bent down, filled his hand with dry leaves, showed him those dry leaves in his hand and said, “Whatever I have told you is just like these few dry leaves. What I have not told you is just like the whole forest full of dry leaves; but it is not because I am a miser, it is not because I wanted to hold it back from you. Even to say these few leaves has been such a difficult task. I have wasted my whole life in conveying something about these few leaves, but these few leaves are enough as far as understanding all the leaves of the forest are concerned. If you can understand these few leaves – just a handful – you have understood all the leaves of all the forests.”It is a question of understanding. You do not have to know all the oceans to come to the conclusion that ocean water is salty. From anywhere, just a little taste of the ocean will give you the taste of all the oceans – which you may never visit.Whatever was necessary, whatever was essential I have been telling you. Whatever is left untold is left untold because there is no way to tell it. If you can understand what I have told you, you will come to a situation, a position, a consciousness, a perceptivity, where you can know all that which I have not been able to tell you. But I am not holding anything back from you.This is a moment that you should be contented that you have come so close. Your urgency must not turn into a discontent; otherwise you will be thrown back far away.Your urgency should be transformed into a deep contentment and a rejoicing that you have been able to be a fellow-traveler of one who is fully awakened, and you have been a fellow traveler of many who are also searching and seeking with tremendous intensity – something which the whole world is unaware of. If this contentment settles in you, perhaps the quantum leap will happen on its own accord.Nathan Nussbaum met his old friend, Benjamin Rosenblatt, in the street one day.“How are things?” asked Benjamin.“Good,” replied Nathan.“Good?” says Benjamin. “You seem to have plenty of troubles.”“No, no” said Nathan nonchalantly, “it is always good. In summer I am good and hot. In winter I am good and cold. My roof leaks, so when it rains I get good and wet. Also that nag of a wife always makes me good and mad. And when I am at home, I feel good and worried. Believe me, I am good and tired of it all!”I am not asking for such contentment. Your contentment should be a song, a dance, a rejoicing, a love, a sharing. Your contentment should not be dead. It should be alive and dancing.Osho,Being here and meditating, I feel I am drowning inside myself more and more, and although I relate with people, they seem far away on my periphery. At the same time, I am receiving so much: you keep pouring and pouring your love over me.Why am I so miserly in giving to others, when I am receiving so much from you?I am happy to know that your meditation is going deeper, becoming more alive, and you are feeling as if you are drowning inside yourself more and more. It is one of the great blessings that happen to all meditators.The meditator is the most blessed person in the whole universe. He is the very cream of the universal evolution.And I can also understand your problem. You say, “…and although I relate with people, they seem far away on my periphery.” They don’t seem, they are. The moment you are at your center, everything is on the periphery. You had not realized it before because you were also on the periphery, so people looked very close. You were in the crowd. But as you move inward, nobody can go with you. You have to go alone.The moment you are drowning within yourself you are going farther and farther away from your own periphery and everybody else is out of that periphery; they are not even on that periphery.This is the beauty that existence has bestowed upon you as individuals: nobody can enter your individuality; nobody can interfere. You can be killed, you can be crucified, but your freedom, your soul, your consciousness remains untouched even by your death.Alexander the Great was going back from India, and at the very frontiers of India he remembered that his teacher, Aristotle, the father of Western logic, had asked him, “When you come back from India bring just one thing as a gift for me – you will be bringing gifts for everybody.”Alexander said, “Just say, and it will be brought to you.”He said, “I want to see a sannyasin. I have heard so much from travelers about sannyasins. It seems they are a different species of humanity; it seems they are far above us. If you can bring a sannyasin I will be immensely happy.”Alexander said, “This is a small thing. If you had asked me to bring the Himalayas I could have dragged it back to Greece. A sannyasin? – no problem.”He remembered. He had collected so much garbage but at the last moment he remembered, “My God, I have forgotten a sannyasin!” But he was still on the frontiers of India, so he inquired of people, “Can I find a sannyasin nearby?”They said, “It is a little difficult if you really want an authentic sannyasin; otherwise, this country is full of sannyasins.”Alexander said, “I want an absolutely authentic sannyasin because I cannot offer to my teacher a phony fellow. Wherever you tell us I will go.”They said, “You don’t have to go too far. Just a few miles back you may have passed by the side of a river where an old sage lives. He lives naked, and as far as we know in this part of the country there is no one who has a higher consciousness, more blissfulness, than this old sage.”Alexander sent two of his generals first because he thought it was below his dignity to go and ask the sannyasin. Those two generals went, and the sannyasin was standing naked by the side of the river. They told him, “Alexander the Great wants you to be the royal guest. Everything you need, all the luxuries possible will be made available to you for your whole life, but you have to come with us to Greece.”The sannyasin looked at them and said, “You seem to be utter idiots! A man who calls himself Alexander the Great must be just an egoist, and a sannyasin cannot accept the invitation of any egoist. I can come running to somebody who is humble, even without invitation. Just go back and tell your Alexander the Great what I have told you.”Although they were great generals of Alexander, they started shaking, became nervous. The old man was so strong; his voice just pierced like arrows in their hearts. They came back and they told Alexander that that man was difficult.Alexander said, “How difficult? I have never met any difficulty in my life. I am the world conqueror. I will see for myself. I am coming – just lead the way!”On the way those two generals persuaded him: “It is better to leave this man. He seems to be very strange. He says that the person who calls himself “the great” is simply ignorant, does not know anything, and he says, ‘I would have come to anyone uninvited if there was simplicity, innocence, love, humbleness – but power cannot move me a single inch.’”Alexander said, “Don’t be worried. He does not know me and he does not know my sword.” He pulled out his sword as he reached the sannyasin, just to make him afraid. He was thinking the sannyasin will become afraid, but he started laughing.Alexander looked very embarrassed. What to do? The sannyasin said, “Yes, that’s perfectly okay. You can cut off my head. Cut it! I am ordering you!”Alexander said, “Nobody orders me!”The old man said, “You are strange. What do you want of me?”Alexander said, “I want you to come with me to Greece. You will be my royal guest.”He said, “I used to be a king myself. I dropped my kingdom, I dropped all my possessions in search of something that is immortal, and I have found it. That’s why I ordered you to cut off my head. Why are you feeling so shaky? You are a world conqueror; I am a poor sannyasin with nothing.”Alexander said, “Don’t make me mad by your statements. I am a dangerous man! I can really cut off your head.”He said, “I am more dangerous than you. When the head falls on the ground, you will be seeing it from the outside. I will be seeing it from the inside. You cannot kill me. I have reached the point where there is no birth and no death. That’s why I say you cannot move me a single inch. All your power is just impotent.”Against a single sannyasin the power of a world conqueror is absolutely impotent, for the simple reason that the man of meditation knows that he is not the body. And everything else that he used to be identified with – the wife, the children, the money, the power, the prestige – are all left far away. Just a pure consciousness, just a flame of light has remained within him, which is indestructible.Krishna says, in one of his beautiful statements: Nainam chhindanti shastrani – “you cannot cut me with weapons” nainam dahati pavakah – “and you cannot burn me with fire. You are absolutely powerless as far as I am concerned.”Your experience is perfectly right: just a little change, which will come automatically. As you are drowning more and more into yourself, a moment is bound to come when you will see it does not just appear that people are appearing on the faraway periphery – they really are there. From your very innermost center you cannot call them, you cannot communicate with them. Your innermost center is so transcendental to their ordinary, ignorant, unconscious selves that there is no bridge possible.You are also saying, “At the same time, I am receiving so much: you keep pouring and pouring your love over me. Why am I so miserly in giving to others?” Just wait a little more. Soon you will be overflowing, all miserliness will be gone.Why are people miserly? You have to understand their psychology. What is the psychology of miserliness. It is strange that even the greatest psychoanalysts, psychologists, don’t think of fundamental problems. Now, miserliness is one of the fundamental problems. Nobody wants to give; everybody wants to get.The psychology is simple. The miserliness arises because you are empty and you want to fill it with something – anything. You are always a beggar waiting for somebody to give something to you.But your inner emptiness is vast. It cannot be filled by money, power, prestige, respectability. You may have all and still you will feel the same emptiness. In fact, the more you have the more you will become aware of the emptiness, and then arises a tremendous anguish: “I have done everything to fill the emptiness and that has all disappeared into the dark hole and I am as empty as ever. My whole life has been a sheer wastage.”But if your meditation is going deep and you are feeling my love showering on you… It can shower only on a meditator. It is not in my hands. I go on overflowing to everybody, but the non-meditators are keeping their umbrellas open. From wherever I want to reach them they move their umbrellas. They are hiding behind their umbrellas. They think this love is something like rain – you have to protect yourself.But because you are not keeping your umbrella open to protect yourself, soon you will be overfilled. Only love in a meditative consciousness gives you the feeling of fullness, and after fullness comes overflowing, and that overflowing takes away all your miserliness.It is the emptiness that creates miserliness; it is overflowing love that takes it away. The miserliness is only a symptom of emptiness. It won’t last much longer because you are aware of receiving and you are grateful for receiving; you are opening up and becoming more and more available. You need not be worried about miserliness. Soon you will find you are overflowing, sharing yourself with others.The only real sharing is the sharing of your being: not your money, not your house, not anything else, but only of your being because only that belongs to you. Everything else is not authentically yours.You were born only with your being: that is yours. And then you accumulate many things, but they are never yours and the day you die you cannot take them with you. You lived in an illusion that they are your possessions. The fact is that they possessed you; they were not your possessions.Your only possession is your being, and when the being radiates, those radiations are your love, your compassion, your fragrance, your celebration. Out of sheer necessity you are bound to share them because the more you share them, the bigger your bliss becomes.So sharing is not an economic loss; sharing is the way of getting more and more from your innermost core. Deep down at the very bottom you are joined with the universal energy. You cannot exhaust it.You are just like a well: go on taking the water out and new water goes on running in. If you stop – and that’s what the miserly person does. He is afraid that if this water is taken by all the neighbors, “Who knows? The rains may come late, or may not come, and I will be suffering from water loss.” He covers and locks his well. That is the mind of the miserly person. But he does not know that his well’s water will die, it will become poisonous. The longer it is kept locked, the deadlier it will be. This is not wisdom. This is utter ignorance.The wise man invites the neighbors to take as much water as they can because the more water is taken out – your small well is joined with the vast oceans underneath the ground. It has its currents that go on bringing fresh water.If you want yourself to remain continuously fresh – share. That is the only way of remaining continuously fresh, continuously alive, continuously young. Even in your old age your eyes will show that you are young or even perhaps that you are just like a child.But our minds are managed according to all kinds of wrong psychologies. Somebody is a Hindu, somebody is a Mohammedan, somebody is a Christian; it is very difficult to find somebody who is simply a man. Other than my sannyasins, you cannot find simple human beings.I have not voted in my whole life for the simple reason that on the form that has to be filled at the census time, there is a column to be filled in asking your religion. The officers used to come around and I told them that I have come without a religion: “As far as I remember I have not brought any certificate saying to which religion I belong.”They looked at each other and said, “You must be born to some family…”I said, “Yes, the family has its religion, but that is not my religion. If my father is a doctor, do you think I will be a doctor? If my father is a murderer, do think I will be a murderer? And if he is a Catholic, why should I be a Catholic? There seems to be no connection.”They said, “Then it is very difficult because our officers ask us that every piece of information should be filled in.”I said, “I am not much interested in being counted. You can take your form. And neither am I interested in voting because it will be such a trouble to choose who is the bigger idiot between two idiots. I don’t want to get into unnecessary trouble. There are enough troubles already.”I am not on the census list of India. And I don’t want any of my sannyasins to be Hindu or Mohammedan or Christian; to be German or to be American or to be Japanese or to be Indian. These are small cages that don’t allow you to grow into your fullest capacity. They keep you starved as far as consciousness is concerned; they keep you starved as far as love is concerned. They keep you empty, and then necessarily miserliness is bound to be there.I want you to be full. But the only way to be full is to be meditative – there is no other way. If by chance you can meet a master, then don’t protect yourself, don’t defend yourself. Just open yourself completely.Perhaps the master functions almost like a rain cloud. He showers on you and everything becomes green in you and flowers start blossoming in you, and then you cannot prevent the fragrance of the flowers going into all directions, sharing the joy and the dance that have happened to your being.But our minds are made really in such primitive, unintelligent, inhuman ways that it is unbelievable that even in the twentieth century we are not living in the twentieth century. Everybody is living in different centuries! I have never come across contemporaries. Somebody is still hanging on to ten thousand years ago, somebody five thousand years ago, somebody two thousand years ago. It is very rare, at least I have not come across a single human being who is my contemporary – and perhaps in this life I can’t hope to meet anyone.And this is my last life, you can understand my trouble. I will never meet a single contemporary. I am trying hard to make you my contemporaries, and perhaps it may happen. It all depends on you: how intelligently you can get rid of past conditionings.Moishe Finkelstein, having been shipwrecked on a desert island for three years, is finally reached by rescuers. Proudly he shows them around the island pointing out the irrigation system, the pastures and orchards, the barn, the house and all his other constructions.At the end of the island are two small buildings.“And those,” he announces “are the synagogues.”“Two of them?” he is asked. “But you are alone here.”“Well,” he says, “this is the one I go to and this is the one I would not even be seen dead in.”Two different sects of Jews: one belongs to him and the other belongs to the enemies – but he has built both because without the enemy, without any fighting and quarreling, there is no joy. Although he is alone, even this much is enough consolation: that no one goes in that synagogue. He has made it, but looking at that synagogue, it brings tremendous contentment to him that nobody goes there. Such is the situation of almost all human beings.In India there are the Jainas: a small minority religion but with tremendous literature and great heritage. Philosophically, religiously, they have penetrated very deeply into human psychology. But on the surface that does not matter. Who looks into the scriptures? Who has the time? They have two major sects, there are smaller sects also, but two major sects that worship the same masters, that believe in the same scriptures. But they make their temples separately.The only difference, and you will not be able to believe it, is that one sect – the Digambaras – believe that Mahavira, their great master, meditated with closed eyes. The Svetambaras, the second great sect, believe that Mahavira meditated with open eyes. This is the only difference, but it is enough for them to fight with each other. Riots happen, they burn each other’s temples, without even bothering that the other temple also is the temple of Mahavira.I was passing once through a small city in Madhya Pradesh and I saw a Jaina temple. I stopped my car because I saw three locks on the temple’s door. Those three locks made me stop and inquire what was the matter. One lock is perfectly okay – but even one lock is not needed because a stone statue cannot escape. One lock can be allowed, but why three locks?People gathered around my car and I inquired about it. They said, “It is a very sad story. The Jainas to whom this temple belongs are very few in this village. We are so few that we could not manage to have two temples. Finally we decided that we should make one temple because after all we are all followers of Mahavira. The only difference is of open and closed eyes. So we would use a device: half the day it will belong to one sect – the stone statue is made with closed eyes, so half the day, from the middle of the night up to twelve o’clock in the day, it will belong to the Digambaras. They can do whatsoever they want. The other half of the day it will belong to the Svetambaras. And they have made false eyes, open eyes, that they put on the stone statue just like you put on glasses. It looks very idiotic but it fulfills their conditioning, and then they worship…”But it used to happen often because religious people are more or less fanatical types. I don’t see how anybody who is not a fanatical type can be part of any religion. A non-fanatical person is bound to be out of all these stupid ideas because he can see that this is nonsense. He cannot belong to any nonsense. And fanatical people are always ready to fight. They are looking, searching, for any excuse to have a good fight.Although they had made the temple together, they had purchased the statue of Mahavira together, every day there was trouble and the trouble was created by the most fanatically religious people. For example, the Digambaras will be worshipping and they will go on worshipping after twelve. Now the Svetambaras are waiting outside the door. After twelve they cannot tolerate it, and they will rush in and start putting the eyes on Mahavira. And the Digambaras will take those eyes off saying, “Wait! Don’t disturb our worship!” And that worship is prolonged only for the fight.And they could have waited because there was no hurry. They worship ten or fifteen minutes more – let them worship, there is no harm. You can worship afterward. But they could not tolerate it; it was a question of prestige. It was happening so often: they would beat each other and they would send each other to the hospital with fractures.Finally, the police were getting reports every day. One day the police came. They drove them out and put the second lock on the door. And they had a police case in the court. Because the case was in the court, the court decided to put a lock on the temple: till the decision, nobody can touch that sealed lock. That’s why there were three locks.And almost twenty years have passed. Now what judgment can the poor magistrate give? On what grounds can he say whether Mahavira was meditating with open eyes or closed eyes, or whether in the first place Mahavira ever existed or not? Even that is not certain. And he himself, not being a Jaina, was not interested at all, and there was no argument in favor or against.I had to delay my journey to where I was going. I informed them that I would come one day late: I had to meet the magistrate. I went to see him and I asked him, “This is strange. Many magistrates have changed, and you have not been able to decide a simple thing?”He said, “You say ‘a simple thing’? Now, how to decide? The one party says open eyes, the other party says closed eyes, and both have their scriptures. Now, whom to believe? Who is true?”I said, “There is no problem. Take my authority! I say to you that he meditated with half-closed eyes.”He said, “My God! I never thought about it.”“In fact, that is easier. If you meditate with closed eyes the possibility is that you may fall asleep. If you meditate with open eyes, you cannot meditate. Some woman passes and everything is disturbed! And you cannot prevent it: you can close your eyes but you cannot prevent it. All kinds of things are moving all around. So to avoid the outside world and to avoid sleep, the real meditator meditates with half-open eyes. Half-open eyes means he looks only four feet ahead; so just find a place where within four feet nobody will move. That’s why meditators have been going to the mountains and faraway places.”He said, “That’s absolutely right! Tomorrow I am going to give the decision, but how to make the eyes half open?”I said, “It is easy. If they can make fully open eyes artificially, you can order them to make half open eyes. And only then will those three locks be removed.”That is the only place in the whole of India where Mahavira is sitting with half open eyes. No time to sleep, no time to enjoy women, flowers, rivers, mountains – nothing! Just half open eyes: day in, day out. But both the parties agreed, seeing the point that twenty years had passed. Now it is better to settle, and this seems to be a perfect compromise.So that is a very unique temple in the whole of India. Otherwise Svetambaras have their temples – they keep the eyes open. There is no need for anything artificial; they just tell the sculptors to make the eyes open. And Digambaras tell the sculptors to keep the eyes closed.It was a strange case: both together had contributed to the building of the temple – but such is the mind, everywhere. It is not that one person is so illogical; it is the whole of humanity.This is a lesson in logic…The professor said, “If the show starts at nine and dinner is at six and my son has the measles and my brother drives a Cadillac, how old am I?”“You are forty-four,” said a student promptly.“Right!” said the professor. “Now tell the rest of the class how you arrived at the correct answer.”“It was easy,” the student said. “I have got an uncle who is twenty-two and he is only half nuts.”

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 25 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Inside, there is something that I cannot look at: I can only be it. And then I am at the center of experiencing my mind, my body, and what comes to my senses.This feels ecstatic, yet is very subtle, and easily disappears when I again identify with what is experienced. Is this my mind entering by a back door, or am I going in the right direction?The experience that you are going through happens to everyone when he first comes into contact with his being. Our whole experience of the past is of identification. When you are full of anger, you don’t say, “I see anger in my mind,” you say “I am angry.” In fact you are not angry; you are just a watcher. The anger is on the screen of the mind.But identification is the greatest spiritual disease. We get very easily identified because for centuries that has been our habit. So when for the first time you get out of identification, you become centered, naturally you cannot see your being, just as you cannot see your eyes.To see your eyes you need a mirror and to see your being you need a master, or someone who is already totally centered. In his presence you may be able to see reflected – just as in a mirror things are reflected – your being. But you cannot see your being directly.I have been telling you many functions of the master. This is one of the most subtle and perhaps the last function. The master is already settled. You are wavering, one moment you are at the center: then you can see your body and your mind and your thoughts and feelings. There is a gap between you and your body-mind system. But the gap is very small and very fresh, and the habit of being identified is very old and very strong.So one moment you feel you are the being, but the very desire to see the being disturbs the whole thing. You cannot see it. You need a mirror to see it – and no ordinary mirror will do. You need a mirror of consciousness. And then too you will not be seeing your being, just the reflection of it. In a completely settled and silent lake of consciousness, of somebody, you may be able to have a reflection of your being.But to try to see your being alone is not possible. It is just not in the nature of things. You can be the being – you are the being. You can experience the ecstasy of there, at the very center; you can feel immense joy, fulfillment, contentment. But the moment the desire to see it arises, you have already slipped out of it. You have come back into the mind, and because the gap is very small you will not even be aware when you are slipping.But it is a tremendously significant experience that you are going through. If the gap is small today, tomorrow it may be bigger. If the gap has already happened, the day is not far away when the desire to see yourself will disappear. You will simply be yourself, full of ecstasy. And as you become centered, everything else – your body, your mind, your thoughts – go on becoming farther away from you. Just a little patience, and just a little awareness.You say, “It is very subtle and easily disappears when I again identify with what is experienced.” Being is never experienced. Experienced means a memory: it is already past. Being is always a process of experiencing.Perhaps the word experiencing does not exist in the dictionaries, but that’s exactly the existential situation. It is always a process that goes on deepening. You can never come to a moment when you can say, “I have experienced.” That moment will be that you have fallen out of the flow of experiencing.“Is this my mind,” you are asking, “entering by a back door, or am I going in the right direction?” Both are true. When you are centered within yourself and feeling ecstatic you are going in the right direction. And the moment you start thinking about it – what this experience is, how to see it – the mind is coming from the back door.You have to avoid the mind completely. Except mind, there is no enemy in the whole world as far as one is concerned. Mind is your enemy for the simple reason that your whole experience of past is accumulated there. And you have always experienced identification. You say, “I am thirsty, I am hungry,” without ever thinking what you are saying. Just look at the process: are you really hungry, or are you aware that there is hunger in your body? Are you really thirsty, or can you experience the thirst in your throat, in your body? But because of language, which has been made up by people who are not enlightened…There exists no enlightened language in the world yet, and perhaps there never will exist – for the simple reason that language is needed for communication.There are only three possibilities of communication.Two ignorant persons can communicate very easily: they are in the same boat, they are surrounded by the same darkness, their identifications are same.The second communication is a little difficult but can happen: it is between an enlightened person and one who is ignorant. The difficulty is created by the ignorant person because he knows the language of ignorance but he does not know the language of enlightenment; so constant misunderstanding. But the enlightened people of the world have tried their hardest somehow to reach you. They have succeeded in reaching only a few people. The task seems to be immensely difficult.And there is a third possibility: two enlightened people – but they will sit in silence. That is their communication.So I don’t see any possibility that there will ever be an enlightened language. And the language that we have created is basically faulty. For example, when you say “the tree,” you make a noun of a process. The tree is not static; it is treeing, it is growing. Even when you see with your own eyes a river flowing, you don’t use the word rivering, you use the word river. River makes it something static. It never is – not even for a single moment. It is constantly flowing. That is its intrinsic nature.The same is true about everything that we have made static. You are growing, even this very moment. When you came this morning to see me you were younger; now you are a little older. By the time you are going, you will be very much older.Existence consists not of nouns and pronouns; existence consists only of processes. Hence, we cannot use the word experience; we can only use the word experiencing. We cannot use the word love; we can only use the word loving. We cannot use the word friendship; we can only use the word friendliness.But then talking with people will become impossible: “I am coming from rivering. On the way I saw many people becoming old.” People will think you have gone cuckoo. In fact, you are stating the actual facticity, the very existential nature of things, beings. Everything is always in constant movement. Howsoever slow, the movement is there.Learn something very basic: in the inward world, please don’t use the wrong language. Because the wrong language is not only a mistaken language, it becomes your mind also – and your mind is full of all wrong identifications of the past.And you are entering into a totally new territory of your being. This territory belongs to no language; it belongs only to silence. So when it happens remain utterly silent and relish it, rejoice in it, feel it, taste it – but don’t try to see it, don’t try to figure out what is happening, don’t bring your logic in and don’t bring your old intellectual acumen to understand something which is beyond intellect.And soon the gaps will become bigger, and a day finally comes when you are settled and nothing can distract you from your being. You will see your mind and you will see your body, but on the periphery. And even when they are taken away, killed and destroyed, you will not be affected because you are no longer identified. It is the identification that has to be understood.A man had a very beautiful house that even the king wanted to purchase. He had made it with such love. He himself was an architect and the king was jealous because even his palace was not so beautiful. All the rich people had made an offer – whatever money he wanted he could have – but the man always refused. The palace that he had made was a small palace hidden in a thick garden with bushes and roses.One day he went out. When he came home there was a vast crowd: his house was on fire. It may have been either the conspiracy of the king or the conspiracy of other people who were very jealous of his house. He was an old man but tears started flowing from his eyes. It was not just a house for him; it was his very creativity. He was so identified with it – as if the house was not burning but he was. Such a deep attachment.And then his son came running and told him, “Father, you need not cry for that house. Last night I sold it to the king. He was offering any price we wanted and there was no question of any negotiation, so I asked for three times the price. We can make a house three times bigger, and then the king will know… It is already old and you have so many new ideas. It is a good opportunity.”The moment he heard that the house was sold, his tears disappeared, in fact he started laughing: “This is a great coincidence!” He started talking with his son and with his neighbors, “Perhaps I may purchase the land back because what is the king going to do with the land? And I will make a palace that is three times more beautiful and big.” He already started dreaming about the future, and the palace was burning.His second son came running and he told him, “Yes, my elder brother is right. We had agreed to sell, but it was only verbal. Neither had the money been given to us, nor had even a sales deed been written. We were waiting for you.”Again the tears came because now the king is not going to purchase it, he is not going to give the money. He forgot all about a palace that will be three times bigger and he was again crying like a small child.What happened?The attachment, the identification… The moment you are unidentified with your body, even if the body is on the funeral pyre there will be no problem for you. It is as if somebody else is being burned. You can also stand by the side in the crowd and nobody will see you.To be in the being one has to learn more and more disidentification with everything. Use everything but don’t get attached. I have been telling you to be in the world but don’t be of the world. Be in the world, but don’t let the world enter in you. I have been saying the same thing in other words: Don’t be identified. Use this whole existence, but don’t be possessive. Remain aloof, aware and silently watching.A man had been bitten by a dog, but did not give it much thought until he noticed that the wound was taking a remarkably long time to heal. Finally he consulted a doctor who took one look at the wound and ordered that the dog be brought in.Just as the doctor suspected, the dog had rabies. Since it was too late to give the patient a serum the doctor felt he had to prepare him for the worst.The poor man sat down at the doctor’s desk and began to write. The physician tried to comfort him.“Perhaps it won’t be so bad,” he said. “You needn’t make out your will right now.”“I’m not making out my will or anything,” replied the man. “I’m just writing out a list of people I’m going to bite.”This is awareness! Even in such a bad situation he is not identified with the body or death or anything. He is calm and cool and writing a list of all the people in the city. Before dying at least he will bite all of them: a very alert mind, a very centered being!Osho,Relaxation has always been one of the most valuable states of being for me. Watchfulness seems to be possible only then, or at least so much easier. Would you like to comment on how relaxation is connected to awareness?They are not only connected with each other, they are almost two sides of the same coin. You cannot separate them. Either you can begin with awareness and then you will find yourself relaxing because what is your tension? – your identification with all kinds of thoughts, fears, death, bankruptcy, the dollar going down! All kinds of fears are there. These are your tensions. They also affect your body. Your body also becomes tense because body and mind are not two separate entities. Body-mind is a single system, so when the mind becomes tense, the body becomes tense.You can start with awareness; then awareness takes you away from the mind and the identifications with the mind. Naturally, the body starts relaxing; you are no longer attached. Tensions cannot exist in the light of awareness.You can start from the other end also. Just relax, let all tensions drop, and as you relax you will be surprised that a certain awareness is arising in you. They are inseparable. But to start from awareness is easier; to start with relaxation is a little difficult because even the effort to relax creates a certain tension.There is an American book – and if you want to find all kinds of stupid books, America is the place. The moment I saw the title of the book, I could not believe it. The title is You Must Relax. Now if the must is there, how can you relax? The must will make you tense; the very word immediately creates tension. Must comes like a commandment from God. Perhaps the person who is writing the book knows nothing about relaxation and knows nothing about the complexities of relaxation.Hence, in the East we have never started meditation from relaxation; we have started meditation from awareness. Then relaxation comes on its own accord, you don’t have to bring it – because if you have to bring it there will be a certain tension. It should come on its own; then only will it be pure relaxation. And it comes…But if you want to try, you can try from relaxation – but not according to American advisors! As far as experiencing the inner world is concerned, America is the most childish place on the earth. Europe is a little older, but the East has lived for thousands of years in search of its inner self.America is only three hundred years old. In the life of a nation, three hundred years are nothing; hence America is the greatest danger to the world – nuclear weapons in the hands of children. Russia will behave more rationally: it is an old and ancient land and has all the experiences of a long history. In America there is no history. Everybody knows his father’s name, forefather’s name and that’s all. There your family tree ends.In India, it is very different. One of the scholars of this very city, Lokmanya Tilak, proved – and his proof has not yet been disproved by any argument by other scholars. Now, almost the whole century has passed, but his evidence is such that it cannot be disproved.The Western scholars used to argue that Rig Veda, the most ancient book in the world, is five thousand years old. There was a difficulty because according to Christianity, God created the world four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ – so now it is only six thousand years old. Now they have to put everything, fit everything into six thousand years. Beyond that they cannot go. Going beyond means going against Christianity, against the Bible, against Jesus Christ – and it is too risky.Lokmanya Tilak proved with intrinsic logic that in Rig Veda there is a description of a certain constellation of stars, which astronomers are absolutely certain happened ninety thousand years ago. And there is no way to describe it unless these people had been the observers of that constellation, and it has not happened since then.Lokmanya Tilak proved that Rig Veda may not be older than ninety thousand years old, but it is certainly ninety thousand years old. And one thing brings in another thing. In Rig Veda, the founder of Jainism, Adinatha, is mentioned with great respect. That means that if Hinduism is ninety thousand years old, Jainism must be even older because nobody talks with such respect about contemporaries, particularly contemporaries who are not willing to agree with you.Adinatha did not agree on any point with Hinduism; that makes it certain that he was not a contemporary. Perhaps by the time the Rig Veda was written, he had been dead for a thousand years. People have a certain tendency to be respectful about the dead, and the longer they are dead, the more respectful they become. So I am giving you a recipe: if you want to become respectable, be dead, and everybody will be respectful to you.Have you watched that when somebody dies, nobody speaks anything against him? It is simply etiquette and manners.In one small town a man died. The tradition there was that before a man is lowered down into his grave somebody should say some good things about him. Everybody looked at each other, but because he was such a rascal they could not find a single word. He had tortured almost everybody in the town. He was such a harassment that deep down everybody was very happy that finally he had died: “Now we can relax a little.”So nobody was ready to say something good about the man because everybody knew that people would laugh if they said something good.Finally one man stood up and said, “Compared to his other four brothers he was an angel. His other four brothers are still alive; you should not forget that fact.” And it was true; those other four brothers were even more nasty, more dangerous. But he managed to say something good about the man: “Compared to his other four brothers he was an angel.”Rig Veda mentioning Adinatha with deep respect can mean only one thing: that Adinatha was dead long before. About contemporaries, it is very difficult, it hurts your ego, and particularly for those who are not in agreement with you. Not only that, their arguments are far superior to yours, and you cannot even answer them. Then it becomes very difficult to respect them, and condemnation comes on them from all sides. But Rig Veda has a whole passage just making Adinatha almost a god, with not a single word of criticism.On this point Jainism can be said to be even older than ninety thousand years. Now, these people have a history. America is just a baby – or not even a baby – just in pregnancy! Compared to ninety thousand years, maybe it has just been conceived. It is dangerous to give these people nuclear weapons.There are political, there are religious, there are sociological, there are economical problems – all torturing you. To begin with relaxation is difficult; hence in the East we have never started from relaxation. But if you want to, I have a certain idea how you should start because I have been working with my Western sannyasins and I have become aware of the fact that they don’t belong to the East and they don’t know the Eastern current of consciousness. They are coming from a different tradition which has never known any awareness.For the Western sannyasins especially, I have created meditations like Dynamic Meditation. While I was taking camps of meditators I used a gibberish meditation and the Kundalini Meditation. If you want to start from relaxation, then these meditations have to be done first. They will take all tensions out of your mind and body, and then relaxation is very easy. You don’t know how much you are holding in, and that is the cause of tension.When I was allowing gibberish meditation in the camps in the mountains… It is difficult to allow it here because the neighbors start going mad. They start phoning the police and the commissioner, saying, “Our whole life is being destroyed!” And they don’t know that if they could participate in their own houses, their lives would come out of the insanity in which they are living. But they are not even aware of their insanity.The gibberish meditation was that everybody was allowed to say loudly whatever comes into his mind. And it was such a joy to hear what people were saying because I was the only witness. No relevance, absurd… People were doing all kinds of things. There was only one condition: you should not touch anybody else. You could do anything, whatever you wanted. Somebody was standing on his head; somebody had thrown off his clothes and become naked, running all around for the whole hour.One man used to sit in front me every day – he must have been a broker or something – and as the meditation would begin, first he would smile just at the idea of what he was going to do. And then he would take up his phone, “Hello, hello…” And from the corner of his eyes he would go on looking at me. I would avoid looking at him so as not to disturb his meditation. He was selling his shares, purchasing…the whole hour he was on the phone.Everybody was doing strange things that they had all been holding back, and when the meditation ended, then there were ten minutes for relaxation. And you could see that in those ten minutes, people fell down… Not with any effort: they were utterly tired. And all the rubbish had been thrown out, so they had a certain cleanliness, and they relaxed. Thousands of people, and you could not even think that there were a thousand people.People used to come to me and say, “Prolong those ten minutes because in our whole life we have never seen such relaxation, such joy. We had never thought we would ever understand what awareness is, but we felt it was coming.” So if you want to start with relaxation, first you have to go through a cathartic process: Dynamic Meditation, latihan, Kundalini or gibberish.You may not know from where this word gibberish comes from. It comes from a Sufi mystic whose name was Jabbar – and that was his only meditation. Whoever would come, he would say, “Sit down and start!” and people knew what he meant. He never talked; he never gave any discourses. He simply taught people gibberish. Once in a while he would give an example: for half an hour he would talk all kinds of nonsense, in nobody knows what language. It was not a language. He would go on and teach people just whatever was coming to his mind. That was his only teaching. And to those who had understood it he would simply say, “Sit down and start!”But Jabbar helped many people to become utterly silent. How long can you go on? The mind becomes empty: slowly, slowly a deep nothingness, and in that nothingness a flame of awareness. It is always present, surrounded by your gibberish. The gibberish has to be taken out; that is your poison.The same is true about the body. Your body has tensions. Just start making any movements that the body wants to make. You should not manipulate it. It wants to dance, it wants to jog, it wants to run, it wants to roll down on the ground. You should not do it; you should simply allow it. Tell the body, “You are free, do whatever you want!” And you will be surprised: “My God! The body wanted to do all these things but I was holding, and that was the tension.”So there are two kinds of tension: the body tensions and the mind tensions. Both have to be released before you can start relaxation which will bring you to awareness.But beginning from awareness is far easier, and particularly for those who can understand the process of awareness, which is very simple. The whole day you are using it about things: cars in the traffic, even in the Pune traffic you survive! It is absolutely mad.Just a few days ago I read about Athens. Athens is even worse than Pune. The government made a special seven-day competition for the taxi drivers and they had put up golden trophies for three people – those who were the best, the second, and the third best at following traffic rules. But they could not find a single person in Athens! The police were getting worried. The days were ending: anyhow on the last day they wanted to find three. They may not be perfect, but those prizes had to be distributed.They found one man who was following the traffic rules exactly, so they were very happy. They rushed toward him with the trophy, but seeing the police coming toward him the man rushed through a red light. Who wants to get into trouble unnecessarily? The police were shouting, “Wait!” He did not listen, he was immediately gone, against the light. They tried with two other people, but seeing the police nobody would stop.So after seven days’ effort, those three prizes are still sitting in the headquarters of the police, and Athens is going on as rejoicingly as ever.You can have a little taste in Pune, but still you survive because you remain alert, aware. Perhaps the worst traffic situation is in Italy. That’s why I was telling you the other day that the people who sell cars have come to the conclusion that if the man tries to look at the engine of the car first he is a German. If the man looks at the beautiful lines and curves of the car first he is French. But if the man first looks at the horn, whether it works or not, he is an Italian – because the real thing is the horn, otherwise you cannot survive.You are using awareness without being aware of it, but only about outside things. It is the same awareness that has to be used for the inside traffic. When you close your eyes there is a traffic of thoughts, emotions, dreams, imaginations – all kinds of things start flashing by.What you have been doing with the outside world, do exactly the same with the inside world and you will become a witness. And once tasted, the joy of being a witness is so great, so otherworldly, that you would like to go more and more in. Whenever you find time you would like to go more and more in.And it is not a question of any posture; it is not a question of any temple, of any church or synagogue. Sitting in a public bus or in a railway train, when you have nothing to do, just close your eyes. It will save your eyes being tired from looking outside, and it will give you time enough to watch yourself. Those moments will become moments of the most beautiful experiences.And slowly, slowly, as awareness grows your whole personality starts changing. From unawareness to awareness is the greatest quantum leap.Hymie Goldberg was on holiday in Ireland, driving his new Mercedes. He came to a small farm where the road went right through a large puddle. Paddy was standing next to it, so Hymie leaned out and asked if the puddle was shallow.Paddy said, “Yes,” so Hymie drove on, only to have his car sink slowly out of sight.Spluttering with rage and dripping wet, Hymie shouted at Paddy, “You idiot! Why the hell did you tell me it was shallow enough to drive through?”Paddy scratched his head and said, “I don’t understand it. The water only came half way up my ducks.”Just learn to be aware in all situations. Make a point of using every situation for awareness.A man rushed into “The Pig and Whistle” pub in great agitation.“Does anyone own a great big black cat with a white collar?” he said in a nervous voice. There was no reply.“Well, does anyone know of a large black cat with a white collar?” asked the man again, raising his voice above the general noise of the bar. But still there was no answer.“Oh dear!” muttered the man, “I think I have just run over the priest.”The difference between a politician and an English lady…When a politician says yes, he means maybe. When he says maybe, he means no. If he says no, he’s no politician.When an English lady says no, she means maybe. When she says maybe, she means yes. If she says yes, she’s no lady.

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 26 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,This morning the top of my head flew off to greet you. Like a lidless pot I sat drinking you in. Suddenly a question popped up: all the historical rebellions have a huge “no” at their source. Your rebellion of the soul is centered in the mystery of “yes.” Will you please speak to us on the alchemy of yes?There are a few very fundamental things to be understood.First, there has never been a rebellion in the past, only revolutions. And the distinction between a revolution and a rebellion is so vast that unless you understand the difference you will not be able to figure the way out of the puzzle of your question. Once you understand the difference…Revolution is a crowd, a mob phenomenon. Revolution is a struggle for power: one class of people who are in power are thrown out by the other class of people who have been oppressed, exploited to such a point that now even death does not matter. They don’t have anything. Revolution is a struggle between the haves and the have-nots.I am reminded of the last statement in The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. It is tremendously beautiful, and with a little change I can use it for my own purposes.First, his exact statement: he says, “Proletariat…” his word for have-nots “Proletariat of the world unite” – and don’t be afraid because – “you have nothing to lose except your chains.”Moments come in history when a small group of cunning, clever, people start exploiting the whole society. All the money goes on gathering on one side and all the poverty and starvation on the other. Naturally this state cannot be continued forever. Sooner or later those who have nothing are going to overthrow those who have all.Revolution is a class action; it is a class struggle. It is basically political; it has nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with spirituality. And it is also violent because those who have power are not going to lose their vested interest easily. It is going to be a bloody, violent struggle in which thousands, sometimes millions of people will die.Thirty million people were killed just in the Russian Revolution. The czar’s whole family, he was the king of Russia before the revolution, was killed so brutally by the revolutionaries that it is inconceivable. Even a six-month-old girl was killed. Now, she was absolutely innocent, she had done no harm to anybody; but just because she belonged to the royal family… The whole royal family had to be destroyed completely. Seventeen people were killed, and not just killed but cut into pieces. It is bound to happen in a revolution. Centuries of anger ultimately turn into blind violence.And the last thing to remember: revolution changes nothing. It is a wheel: one class comes into power, others become powerless, but sooner or later the powerless are going to become the majority because the powerful don’t want to share their power; they want to have it in as few hands as possible.Now, you cannot conceive it: in this country there are nine hundred million people, but half the capital of the country is just in Mumbai. Nine hundred million people in the whole country, and half the capital of the whole country is just in a small city. How long can it be tolerated? Naturally, it comes automatically. Revolution is something blind and mechanical, part of evolution, and when the powerful become the smaller group, the majority throws them away and another power group starts doing the same.That’s why I say revolution has never changed anything, or in other words, all the revolutions of history have failed. They promised much, but nothing came out of it. Even after seventy years, people are still not getting enough nourishment in Russia. Yes, there are no longer the old czars and counts and countesses and princesses and princes, but in a vast ocean of poverty, even if you remove those who have power and riches, it is not going to make the society rich. It is just trying to make the ocean sweet by dropping teaspoonfuls of sugar in it.All that has happened is a very strange phenomenon that nobody takes any notice of. Only poverty has been distributed equally. Now in Russia everybody is equally poor – but what kind of revolution is this? The hope was that everybody would be equally rich. But you cannot become rich just by hoping.Richness needs a totally different ideology, of which mankind is absolutely unaware. For centuries it has praised poverty and condemned richness, comfort, luxury. Even if the poor revolt and come into power, they don’t have any idea what to do with this power – how to generate energy to create more richness, comfort and luxury for people – because deep down in their minds there is a guilty feeling about richness, about luxury, about comfort.So they are in a tremendous anguish, although they have come to power and this is the moment they could change the whole structure of the society, its whole productive idea. They could bring more technology, they could drop stupid kinds of wastage.Every country is wasting almost ten percent of its income on the army. Even the poorest country, even this country, is doing the same idiotic thing. Fifty percent of the people in this country are on the boundary of becoming an Ethiopia any day – a bigger Ethiopia. In Ethiopia one thousand people were dying per day. The day India starts becoming another Ethiopia – and it is not far away – then one thousand will not do; it will be many thousands of people dying every day.And by the end of this century the population of India will be the biggest in the whole world. It has never been so; it has always been China who was leading, ahead. By the end of the century – and there are not many years left, just within twelve years we will be reaching the end – India will have one billion people. And five hundred million people are bound to die because there is not enough food for so many people.But still the politicians, those who are in power, are not concerned at all about what happens to humanity. Their concern is whether their power remains in their hands or not. They can sacrifice half of the country to death, but they will go on making efforts to have atomic weapons, nuclear missiles.It is a very insane kind of society that we have created in thousands of years. Its insanity has now become a high peak. There is no going back. It seems we are all sitting on a volcano that can explode any moment.Revolutions in the past have happened all around the world but no revolution has succeeded in doing what it promised. It promised equality without understanding the psychology of human individuality: that each human individual is so unique that to force equality is not going to make people happy, but utterly miserable.I also love the idea of equality but in a totally different way. My idea of equality is equal opportunity to all to be unequal; equal opportunity to all to be unique and themselves. Certainly, they will be different from each other – and a society which does not have variety and differences is a very poor society. Variety brings beauty, richness, color.But it has not yet dawned on the millions around the world that revolution has not helped, and they still go on thinking in terms of revolution. They have not understood anything from the history of man.It is said that history repeats itself. I say it is not history that repeats itself. It seems to repeat itself because man is absolutely unconscious: he goes on doing the same thing again and again without learning anything, without becoming mature, alert and aware.When all the revolutions have failed some new door should be opened. There is no point in changing the powerful into the powerless and the powerless into the powerful again and again. This is a circle that goes on moving.I don’t preach revolution. I am utterly against revolution. I say unto you that my word for the future, and for those who are intelligent enough in the present, is rebellion. What is the difference?Rebellion is individual action; it has nothing to do with the crowd. Rebellion has nothing to do with politics, power, violence. Rebellion has something to do with changing your consciousness, your silence, your being. It is a spiritual metamorphosis.And each individual passing through a rebellion is not fighting with anybody else, but is only fighting with his own darkness. Swords are not needed, bombs are not needed. What is needed is more alertness, more meditativeness, more love, more prayerfulness, more gratitude. Surrounded by all these qualities you are born anew.This new man, this rebellion that can become the womb for the new man, I teach. We have tried collective efforts and they have failed. Now let us try individual efforts. And if one man becomes aflame with consciousness, joy and blissfulness, he will become contagious to many more.Rebellion is a very silent phenomenon that will go on spreading without making any noise and without even leaving any footprints behind. It will move from heart to heart in deep silences. And the day it has reached millions of people without any bloodshed…just the understanding of those millions of people will change our old primitive animalistic ways. It will change our greed. And the day greed is gone there is no question of accumulating money.No revolution has been able to destroy greed, so those who come into power become greedy. We have passed through a revolution just now in this country, and it is a very significant example to understand. The people who were leading the revolution in this country against the British rule were followers of Mahatma Gandhi, who preached poverty, who preached non-possessiveness. And the moment all his disciples came into power, they started living in palaces that were made for viceroys. All his disciples who had been thinking their whole lives that they are servants of the people became masters of the people.There is more corruption in this country than anywhere else. This is very strange: this is Gandhian corruption, very religious, very pious, and the people who are doing it were trained, disciplined to be servants of the people. But power has a tremendous capacity to change. The moment you have power you are immediately a different person. You start behaving exactly like any of the other powerful people who have gone before.I was very young when India became independent, so I have been watching this independence for forty years. My whole family was involved in the freedom struggle, and when freedom came there was so much celebration all over the country. But each year the celebration has become less and less, and sadness started settling.I used to tease my father, my uncles, who had all been to jail, suffered as much as possible. And because all the elders were in jail we suffered too because there was nobody to look after the children. There were only women and children left, and Indian women cannot be of much help. They cannot even come out into the society; they are not capable of earning money.I know how difficult it was when all the elders of the family were thrown into jail. After the freedom I used to tease them, “Is this the freedom? You destroyed your family, you destroyed yourself, you suffered and you made us suffer. Is this the freedom?”And my father used to say, “Don’t say such things. We know this is not the freedom that we have been fighting for. We were thinking that when the country becomes free, everybody will enjoy freedom.”But nothing has changed. Only the British are gone, and in their place a single party has been ruling for forty years – not a single party, but a single family. It has become a dynasty. And the exploitation continues and the poverty continues. It has grown at least a hundred times more since the British Empire has gone.Everything has deteriorated: the morality, the character, the integrity. Everything has become a commodity. You can purchase anybody: all that you need is money. There is not a single individual in the whole country who is not a commodity in the marketplace: all that you need is money. Everybody is purchasable. Judges are purchasable, police commissioners are purchasable, politicians are purchasable. Even under British rule this country has never known such corruption.What has the country gained? The rulers have changed, but what does that signify? Unless there is a rebelliousness spreading from individual to individual; unless we can create an atmosphere of enlightenment around the world where greed will fall down on its own accord, where anger will not be possible, where violence will become impossible, where love will be just the way you live, where life should be respected, where the body should be loved, appreciated, where comfort should not be condemned – it is natural to ask for comfort…Even the trees… In Africa, trees grow very high. The same trees in India don’t grow that high. I was puzzled. What happens? I was trying…they should grow to the same height but they don’t, and the reason I found was that unless there is a density of trees, trees won’t grow high because even at a smaller height the sun is available, and that is their comfort, that is their life, that is their joy. In Africa the jungles are so thick that every tree tries in every way to grow as high as possible because only then can it have the joy of the sun, the joy of the rain, the joy of the wind. Only then can it dance; otherwise there is nothing but death.The whole of nature wants comfort, the whole of nature wants all the luxury that is possible. But our religions have been teaching us against luxury, against comfort, against riches.A man of enlightenment looks with clarity. It is unnatural to demand from people, “You should be content with your poverty, you should be content with your sicknesses, you should be content with all kinds of exploitation, you should be content and you should not try to rise higher, to reach to the sun and the rain and the wind.” This is absolutely unnatural conditioning, that we are all carrying. Only a rebellion in your being can bring you to this clarity.You say that in history all the rebellions were based on “no.” Those were not rebellions. Change the word. All the revolutions were based on “no.” They were negative, they were against something, they were destructive, they were revengeful and violent.Certainly, my rebellion is based on “yes” – yes to existence, yes to nature, yes to yourself. Whatever the religions may be saying and whatever the ancient traditions may be saying, they are all saying no to yourself, no to nature, no to existence. They are all life-negative.My rebellion is life-affirmative. I want you to dance and sing and love and live as intensely as possible and as totally as possible. In this total affirmation of life, in this absolute yes to nature, we can bring a totally new earth and a totally new humanity into being.The past was “no.” The future has to be “yes.”We have lived enough with the no, we have suffered enough and there has been nothing but misery. I want people to be as joyful as birds singing in the morning, as colorful as flowers, as free as the bird on the wing with no bondages, with no conditioning, with no past – just an open future, an open sky and you can fly to the stars.Because I am saying yes to life, all the no-sayers all over the world are against me – because my yes-saying goes against all the religions and against all the ideologies that have been forced upon man. My yes is my rebellion. The day you will also be able to say yes it will be your rebellion.We can have rebellious people functioning together, but each will be an independent individual, not belonging to a political party or to a religious organization. Just out of freedom and out of love and out of the same beautiful “yes” we will meet. Our meeting will not be a contract, our meeting will not be in any way a surrender; our meeting will make every individual more individual. Supported by everybody else, our meeting will not take away freedom, will not enslave you; our freedom will give you more freedom, more support, so that you can be stronger in your freedom. Long has been the slavery, and long has been our burden. We have become weak because of the thousands of years of darkness that have been poured on us.The people who love to say yes, who understand the meaning of rebellion, will not be alone. They will be individuals, but the people who are on the same path – fellow-travelers, friends – will be supporting each other in their meditativeness, in their joy, in their dance, in their music. They will become a spiritual orchestra, where so many people are playing instruments but creating one music. So many people can be together and yet they may be creating the same consciousness, the same light, the same joy, the same fragrance.It is a long way: “no” seems to be a shortcut. That’s why it has not been tried up to now. Whenever I have discussed it with people, they have said, “Perhaps you are right, but when will it be possible that the whole earth will say yes?”I say, “Anyway we have been on this earth for millions of years and you have been saying no – and what is your achievement? It is time. Give a chance to ‘yes’ too.”And my feeling is that “no” is a quality of death. “Yes” is the very center of life. “No” had to fail. Death cannot succeed, cannot be victorious over life. If we give a chance to yes-based rebelliousness, it is bound to become a wildfire because deep down everybody wants it to happen. I have not found a single person in my life who does not want to live a natural, relaxed, peaceful, silent life. But that life is possible only if everybody else is also living the same kind of life.I can understand the fear of people that individual rebellion may take a long time, but there is no problem in it. In fact, each individual who passes through this rebellious fire becomes a bliss and an ecstasy for himself at least, and there is every possibility that he will sow the seeds around him. But he has not failed: he has conquered, he has reached the very peak of his potential, he has blossomed, there is nothing more that he can think of. The whole existence is his.So as far as that individual is concerned the rebellion is complete and he will be able to sow seeds all around. And there is no hurry; eternity is available. Slowly, slowly more and more people will become more and more conscious, more alert. Enlightenment will become a common phenomenon.It should not be that once in a while there is a Gautam Buddha, once in a while there is a Jesus, once in a while there is a Socrates – the names can be counted on only ten fingers. This is simply unbelievable. It is as if your garden is full of rosebushes, thousands of rosebushes, and once in a while one rosebush blossoms and gives you roses – and the remaining thousands remain without flowers?Unless a rosebush comes to blossom it cannot dance – for what? It cannot share; it has nothing to share. It remains poor, empty, meaningless. Whether it was or not makes no difference. The only difference is when it blossoms and offers its songs and its flowers and its fragrance to existence and to anybody who is willing to receive. The rosebush is fulfilled. Its life has not been just a meaningless drag; it has become a beautiful dance full of songs; a deep fulfillment that goes to the very roots.I am not worried about time. If the concept is understood, time is available; enough time is available.In the East we have a beautiful proverb: “If the man who loses his path in the morning returns home by the evening he should not be called lost.”What does it matter? In the morning he went astray – just little adventures here and there – and by the evening he is back home. A few people may have come a little earlier; he has come a little late, but he is not necessarily poorer than those who have come earlier. It may be just vice versa: he may be more experienced. He has known more because he has wandered more. He has known more because he has committed more mistakes. He is much more mature and experienced because he has gone wandering so far astray. And then coming back again, falling and getting up…he is not necessarily a loser.So time is not at all a consideration for me.My rebellion is absolutely individual and it will spread from individual to individual. Sometime this whole planet is bound to become enlightened. Idiots may try to wait and see what happens to others, but they also finally have to join the caravan.The very idea of enlightenment is so new, although it is nothing that has not been known before. There have been enlightened people, but they never brought enlightenment as a rebellion. That is what is new about it. They became enlightened, they became contented, they became fulfilled – and a great fallacy happened. I have to point it out, although I feel not to show any mistakes of the enlightened ones. I feel sad about it, but my responsibility is not for the dead. My responsibility is for those who are alive and for those who will be coming.So I have to make it clear: Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Adinatha, Lao Tzu, Kabir; all these people who became enlightened attained tremendous beauty, to great joy, to utter ecstasy – what I have been calling satyam shivam sundaram, the truth, the godliness of the truth and the beauty of that godliness – but because they had become enlightened they started teaching people to be contented: “Remain peaceful, remain silent.” This is the fallacy. They attained contentment after a long search. It was a conclusion, not a beginning. It was the very end product of their enlightenment, but they started telling people that you can be contented right now: “Be fulfilled, be silent.”That’s how they became anti-rebellious – without knowing perhaps that if a poor man remains contented with his poverty it is dangerous, if a slave remains contented with his slavery, that is dangerous.So all the enlightened people of the past attained the great height, about which there is no doubt. But there is a fallacy, a mistake that they all committed without exception. The fallacy is that they started telling people to start with that which comes in the end. The flower comes only in the end; one has to start with the roots, with the seed. And if you start telling people to start with the roses, then the only way is for people to purchase roses of plastic. The only way to be contented without meditation is to be a hypocrite because deep down you are angry, deep down you are furious, deep down you want to freak out, and on the surface you are showing immense peace. This peace has been like a cancer to humanity.You can see it happening in this country more clearly than anywhere else because this country was fortunate, blessed by more enlightened people than any other country. But unfortunately, because so many enlightened people committed the same fallacy, this country remained continuously enslaved for twenty centuries. And for centuries this country has remained poor, hungry, starving. No science has developed, no technology has developed. Who is responsible for all this?Because these people were loved and respected, and they deserve to be loved and respected, when they committed fallacies, naturally nobody could figure it out that they could make mistakes. And this was their greatest mistake: to teach people things that come only in the end. If you try to bring them in the beginning you will simply become a hypocrite, a pretender; you will start having a mask. On the surface you will be one person, inside you will be just the opposite – and a house divided cannot stand for long.Man is divided into false personality and authentic individuality. Every man on the earth who is not in deep meditation is schizophrenic; there is no need for any other symptoms. It is just the natural, almost natural, condition because for thousands of years you have been told to be hypocrites.The alchemy of “yes” can make you one single integrated individual. It can bring you back your lost dignity; it can bring you back the capacity to stand alone in absolute blissfulness: not needing anybody, not being dependent on anything. It will take away all your spiritual diseases – greed and jealousy and violence and lust – and it will bring a tremendous showering of all that is great, incalculably great, so great that you cannot say, “I have got it,” you can only say, “Existence has given it to me.” It is always a gift from the beyond: your ecstasy, your blessing, your truth, your benediction – they simply shower on you.But you will have to learn to say yes in absolute totality to nature and to existence. Your hypocrisy will not do: that you can say yes with your personality and deep down your individuality is saying no. What is deep down is more authentic than what shows on the surface. The surface is always make-up.A very tight-haloed English vicar was preaching his sermon in a very snobbish English church when he kept being interrupted by a black American in the congregation.“The Lord says…” began the preacher.“Far out man!” came a cry from the back.“The rich shall perish…”“Hey man, right on!” the American called.“And the mighty shall…”“Hallelujah!” came the response from the back.The vicar managed to get to the end of his sermon, but at the end went up to the American and said, “Excuse me. I’m afraid in this country we like to keep a bit of decorum. We try to keep a stiff upper lip. It is the Queen’s own country, this is a place of God, and I frankly found your behavior rather disconcerting.”“Hey man! I’m sorry. You are right on. I just loved the quaint way you gave us all that great shit about Moses and the Ten Commandments and I thought I would throw a few thousand greenbacks in your direction for this great thing going on here.”“Cool man!” said the preacher.It does not take much to find out what is deep inside. All decorum, all culture is so superficial; it will be a tremendous joy to see people in their authenticity, in their reality – without any decorum, without any make-up, just as they are. The world will be tremendously benefited if all this falseness disappears.The alchemy of “yes” and the rebellion based on “yes” are capable of destroying all that is false and can discover all that is real and has been covered for centuries, layer upon layer by every generation, so that even you yourself have forgotten who you are.If suddenly somebody wakes you up in the middle of the night and asks you, “Who are you?” it will take a little time to remember who you used to be before, in the night when you went to bed.It happened that George Bernard Shaw was going to deliver a lecture some distance away from London. On the way in the train came the ticket-checker. Bernard Shaw looked in every pocket, opened all his suitcases, but the ticket was not there. Finally, he was perspiring and the ticket-checker said, “Don’t be worried. I know who you are: the whole country knows, the whole world knows. The ticket must be somewhere, don’t be worried. And even if it is lost, I am here to help you get out at the station, wherever you want to get out.”George Bernard Shaw said, “Shut up! I am already in confusion and you are making me more confused. I am trying to remember where I am going! That ticket was the only thing that told me. I am not searching for the ticket for you, you idiot! I don’t care about you. Get lost! But bring me my ticket!”The man said, “But where can I find your ticket?”George Bernard Shaw said, “Then what am I supposed to do? Where should I get down? Because unless I know the name of the station…”It is almost the same situation with everybody. You don’t know who you are. Your name is just a label that has been put upon you. It is not your being. Where are you going? You don’t have any ticket to show you where you are going to get down, and you are just hoping that somebody may push you somewhere, or maybe somewhere the terminus comes and the train stops and it does not go anywhere else…just hoping.But why are you traveling in the first place? In fact, for all these fundamental questions you have only one answer: “I don’t know.” In this state of unawareness your revolutions cannot succeed. In this state of unawareness your desire for freedom is just a dream. You cannot understand what freedom is. For whom are you asking freedom?My idea of a rebellion based on “yes” means a rebellion based on meditation, for the first time in the history of man. And because each individual has to work upon himself, there is no question of any fight, there is no question of any organization, there is no question of any conspiracy, there is no question of planting bombs and hijacking airplanes.Some idiot at Pune airport has put on the computer, “Beware the sannyasins of Osho! They can hijack airplanes!” It is really a very insane world. One of my sannyasins who often has to go to Mumbai and come back says, “Every time I see that computer I start trembling inside. They may catch hold of me and ask, ‘Why do you come again and again? Are you intending to hijack an Indian Airlines airplane? It is enough that you come once – but why do you come and go at least three times in the week?’”He was saying, “What to do? By road, it seems you are going to hell, and on the airplane they have that computer. Every time I am there, immediately the computer says, ‘Beware of sannyasins.’”I am not interested in hijacking airplanes, neither am I interested in destroying any governments. But that will be the final result of my individual rebellion based on meditation: governments will disappear. They have to disappear; they have been nothing but a nuisance on the earth. Nations have to disappear; there is no need of any nations. The whole earth belongs to the whole of humanity. There is no need for any passports, there is no need for any visas.This earth is ours – and what kind of freedom is there if we cannot even move? Everywhere there are barriers; every nation is a big imprisonment. Just because you cannot see the boundaries you think you are free. Just try to pass through the boundary and immediately you will be faced with a loaded gun: “Go back inside the prison! You belong to this prison. You cannot enter into another prison without permission.” These are your nations!Certainly, a rebellion of my vision will take away all this garbage of nations and discriminations between white and black, and give the whole of humanity a natural, relaxed, comfortable life. And this is possible because science has given us everything that we need to make this whole earth, even if the population of the earth is three times more than it is today. Just a little intelligence is needed – which will be released by meditation – and we can have a beautiful earth with beautiful people and a multidimensional freedom: not just a word in the dead constitution books but a living reality.One thing finally to be remembered: the days of revolution are past. We have tried them enough, many times – and every time the same story is repeated. Now something new is urgently needed. And except this idea that I am giving to you of an individual rebellion based on meditativeness, there is no other alternative proposed anywhere in the world.I am not a philosopher. I am absolutely pragmatic and practical. I am not only talking about meditative rebellion, I am preparing people for it. Whether they know it or not doesn’t matter. Whoever comes close to me is going to become a rebellious individual, and wherever he will go he will spread this contagious health. It will make people alert to their dignity, it will make people alert to their potentiality, it will make people alert to what they can become, what they are, and why they are stuck.My sannyasins’ function is not to be missionaries, but to be so loving, compassionate; such fragrant individuals… It is not a question of converting people from one ideology to another ideology. It is a far deeper transformation – from the whole past to a totally new and unknown future. It is the greatest adventure that one can think of.You are fortunate to be part of this great adventure.Osho,During your discourse the other morning, an old question arose which is disturbing my contentment. The question is: What do I do when I find that what I am looking for is what is doing the looking?Your contentment is not much of a contentment! A contentment that can be disturbed by a small thought cannot be valued very much. This is the contentment I have been talking about that has been created by the enlightened people in the past – a superficial layer. And your thought was more significant than your contentment, so it is better it is disturbed.The question that arose in you is more significant: “What do I do when I find that what I am looking for is what is doing the looking?” This is the ancient-most question, always asked by meditators in some way or other.And this is the time when the master tells you, “Don’t do anything.” There is no need to do anything if you understand your question.I will repeat it again: “What do I do when I find that what I am looking for is what is doing the looking?” No question of doing: you have got the point. It is not a question; it is a revelation.Nancy Reagan had been looking over every paper fan in the pushcart, feeling them, holding them, waving them back and forth. Finally she bought the cheapest – a one-dollar fan.The next day she returned holding the fan which was ripped down the middle.“Look what happened,” she said to the shopkeeper. “I want my money back.”The shopkeeper said, “I am not a rich man, madam. How much did I charge you for this fan?”“A dollar,” she answered.“And what did you do with it?” asked the shopkeeper.“I am not silly: I waved it back and forth in front of my face.”“Well,” said the shopkeeper, “that is your problem. That’s what you do with a five-dollar fan. With a one-dollar fan you hold the fan still and you wave your head!”With your small contentment you should not raise such five-dollar questions!You don’t have to do anything. Just put the fan aside because you don’t know the whole story, and I think nobody here knows the story’s end. But I think that if you wave the fan from side to side you will destroy the fan; if you wave your head from side to side you will destroy your head. It is better not to wave anything. Put the fan back and sit still just like a buddha, doing nothing.If you have felt the question arising in you, that “what I am looking for is really the one who is looking,” this is a tremendously beautiful understanding and revelation. Now don’t ask to do anything. Just sit silently, at ease with the energy that was involved in looking. You are it!This is for all, particularly for Ronald Reagan so that he does not feel bad that I talked about Nancy Reagan. People are very disturbed if you talk about their wives and don’t talk about them.Ronald Reagan is sitting in the barber’s chair having a haircut, when the barber casually says to him, “Hey, Ronnie, the newspapers reported today that Osho told a great joke about you.”“Yeah? What did he say?” asks Reagan.“It was about how you became the president of the United States after a surgeon grafted a smile onto a donkey!”Reagan, who shows no sign of discomfort, mumbles to the barber, “Yeah, very funny. Just finish my haircut, and I will have a shave as soon as you are finished.”“Hey, Ronnie,” continues the barber, “and did you hear what Osho said about you being worse than Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, and Ivan the Terrible put together?”Ronald Reagan’s face turns bright red but he does not say a word.The barber continues, “And did you hear what Osho said about…?”Ronald Reagan interrupts the barber, saying, “Will you just get on with the haircut. Why are you always so interested in Osho, anyway?”“Well,” replies the barber, “besides the fact that he is a very far out guy, every time I mention the name Osho, your hair stands on end and it makes it a lot easier to cut!”

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 27 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Sitting with you, there are two parts of me operating, one opposing the other. One part loves and trusts you more than any man I've ever met. The other is just plain afraid of you: afraid of your unwavering truth and the authority that it gives you, afraid of how vulnerable I feel in front of you, afraid that you could hurt me. Yet deep inside, I know that you could never hurt me. Would you talk about the disciple's trust in, and fear of, the master?It is a pure misunderstanding that you have two parts: one loves me and one is afraid of me. You are dividing yourself into two persons, a split personality, just because you don’t understand the deep relationship between love and fear. The psychological background has to be understood.Love is almost like a death. When you die your physical body dies and you don’t experience it because most of the time you die after you have gone into unconsciousness, so you don’t feel your death. Only people whose meditation has become complete can see their death because they don’t go into unconsciousness.The fear is… If you replace the word love with death it will not create the split in you. Love is a conscious death – not of the body but of the ego, and the ego has been dominating you for many births, for many lives. Its domination has become almost permanent. Love is the only experience that can dethrone it.If you cannot lose your ego in love, then you can never lose it. And you are not the ego, remember: it is a false idea of yourself, accepted and acquired in ignorance. In love you need humbleness, in love a trust arises on its own. You can expose yourself to the person you love in total vulnerability. But you don’t know that with love this shadow is always there: that it is a kind of death, and particularly your personality feels immensely troubled that you are in such deep love.So as far as I can see there is no division in you. You just don’t understand the relationship between love and fear. It is absolutely natural for every person who loves to feel fear because he does not know that love is nothing but a graveyard for your ego. And because you are identified with the ego you think, “It is going to be my death.”All this may not be on the conscious level; it may be going on underneath, in the darkness, in the unconscious part of your psychology. So on the conscious level perhaps you think that you are split into two opposing camps. They are not opposing camps: they are two branches of the same tree, but the tree is hidden in the unconscious and you see only the branches in the conscious. Naturally, they look like two separate things.So the first thing is: understand exactly that love is the death of the ego, the personality, the false. There is no way to have both love and ego. Either you can have the ego or you can have love – but make it a conscious thing.Just a few days ago, one of the most intellectual and experienced journalists of India, M. V. Kamath, wrote a review of two of my books: The Rebellious Spirit and The New Man. In his review he said a few things that perhaps he himself was not aware of – the unconscious is very deep, and nine times bigger than your conscious. He said that I am the greatest intellectual giant of the second part of the twentieth century. And at the same time, in the next sentence he said that if I were not always surrounded by controversy I would have more admirers in the world than I have today.My secretary has written to him saying, “Can you give a single name of any intellectual giant in the whole history of man who was not surrounded by all kinds of controversies while he was alive?” He sees a little part, which comes to his conscious mind, but something unconscious erupts. Secondly, he has said in his statement that I do not have to be heard or seen: I am a master of words, just reading me is enough. And he was thinking that he was praising me, calling me a master of words, telling his readers, “There are so many statements in his writings which are quotable, and I feel a little jealous and think I would like to have written them.”My secretary wrote to him, “You have never seen Osho, you have never heard him. You seem to be an intelligent person: on what grounds are you saying that just reading him is enough? I have listened to him, I have listened to him speaking, and I can assure you that the spoken word has a life of its own. It is still warm, and the printed word is dead. If you are so much influenced by the printed word, come at least once, at our invitation, and see the difference between the spoken word and the written word. Mumbai is not far away from here, just a fifteen-minute flight.”You can also hear the spoken word on the radio or from the tape recorder, but if you see me speaking then something more is added to it. Then your two senses are working, your ears and your eyes – and ears are not that sensitive. Eyes have eighty percent of the sensitivity, and the remaining four senses have only twenty percent. To see is a totally different thing.Seeing a master means feeling his presence, looking into his eyes, watching his grace. That is not possible from the written word. And if you are so influenced by the written word that you declare the man to be the greatest intellectual giant, it seems to be absolutely necessary that you should listen to him, that you should at least see him once.Yesterday his letter came, a very strange letter. He does not answer any question raised by my secretary. He cannot; he knows he has committed mistakes unconsciously.Another question was also raised by my secretary: “A man of truth does not bother about admirers. From where did you get this idea? Was Gautam Buddha interested in admirers? Was Jesus Christ interested in admirers? It would not have been difficult to get admirers; even stupid politicians manage it. It is a simple strategy: just say the things that they want to hear and you will get admirers.“And Osho is neither a politician, nor an actor, nor a showman. He is not at all interested in getting your admiration. He is a non-compromising man. He will only say what he feels to be true. Even if the whole world condemns him, crucifies him, it won’t make any difference; he will go on saying what he feels is right and true.”A crowd of admirers cannot make a lie into truth, neither does being alone against the world mean that your truth has become a lie. Truth has always been spoken by single individuals, and they were always condemned by the masses, by the crowds – for the simple reason that every truth destroys your prejudices, destroys your so-called knowledge, makes you realize that you are utterly ignorant and you don’t know anything.But he has not answered anything, although he has written a letter. On the contrary, in the letter he writes, “I will not come to listen to or to see Osho. I would not have gone to listen to and see Gautam Buddha, or Socrates, or Jesus Christ.” And he himself sees the point: “Perhaps you may think that I am an egoist. Certainly I am.” This is the answer, the whole answer.But it seems he feels that to be an egoist is nothing to feel ashamed of. This is the modern education, which has given one of the most idiotic ideas to the whole educated world. The whole structure of education is based on the childish psychology of the West, which says that every person should have a strong ego, otherwise he cannot survive in the struggle of life. And the function of education is to strengthen your ego. That’s why, without feeling any shame or embarrassment, M. V. Kamath says, “Perhaps you will think that I am an egoist. I am.”But I cannot conceive of a man saying that he would not have gone to listen to Gautam Buddha, or to Jesus Christ, or to Socrates. Just an ordinary journalist, with such an ego… People are so much accustomed to the ego that they don’t see it. It is so close to their eyes that it keeps them blind.You are moving in a different direction from the ego. You are moving toward love, trust; you are moving toward truth, being. The ego has to be left. It has to be completely left, and you can leave it only if you are conscious of it.The second thing: you say, “…the other is just plain afraid of you.” Everybody is afraid of love; that’s why even lovers keep a little distance, and even lovers go on fighting so that the distance remains. They never come too close, where they can become one because becoming one means you have lost yourself, and that is your ego influencing you. Unless love is big enough so that you can become one with the beloved, your love will remain absolutely incomplete, and you will remain in this split between love and fear.What have you got to lose? Why should you be afraid? Sometimes it puzzles me: you don’t have anything to lose. What have you gained through your ego? What has been the benefit of it? Perhaps fights, struggles, conflict. Being very touchy, just a small thing will insult you. If somebody who used to say hello to you just passes you by one day without saying hello, that’s enough to keep you awake the whole night! “I am going to show that son-of-a-bitch! He did not say hello to me.”You don’t have anything to lose – just a fear of which you have not been able to be aware. But this is the time to be aware of it.You are saying, “…afraid of how vulnerable I feel in front of you, afraid that you could hurt me.” I am going to hurt you: there is no need to be afraid! That’s my whole function here: to hurt you so much that finally you drop the ego because that is what gets hurt. Nobody can hurt, nobody can humiliate, nobody can insult your authentic being. It is the phony part that starts getting enraged, feeling wounded by small things.But as far as I am concerned, I promise you I will hurt you. So at least you can be at ease; there is no need to hang in a limbo: “Perhaps he may hurt me.” No, I am certainly going to hurt you. Unless I hurt you, I cannot change you. But I don’t hurt you, I hurt only what is false in you.You wanted some other kind of promise. You say, “Yet deep inside, I know that you could never hurt me.” You are wrong! You cannot persuade me not to hurt you – I cannot lose my whole profession!And finally you say, “Would you talk about the disciple’s trust in, and fear of, the master?” Both are absolutely together: one. When you trust the master, the trust comes from your real being. Ego cannot trust anybody, and the fear comes from the ego. Now, if your fear is too much, then you will turn against the master and will start condemning him, saying lies about him just to protect yourself from people who will say that you are betraying your master.It is strange that people have lived with me for ten, twelve years, worked…and when their ego was hurt in some way, they left me. Even after ten or twelve years being here with me they could not understand. How can I help if I don’t operate on your ego and separate it from you?Gautam Buddha used to say, “I am a physician.” Twenty-five centuries later, I cannot say that I am only a physician; I am a surgeon! After twenty-five centuries some evolution is needed.These people lived twelve years with me but they never wrote a single word about me, they never brought a single person to me. But the moment they left me they started writing books against me. Suddenly they became great writers. And it is simply a defense mechanism. They are trying to tell the whole world why they have left me – because I am not what they used to think. Still they are unaware that it is not my problem that they have left. It does not matter to me: thousands of people have come and gone. I don’t even know their names. While they are here on my surgery table I do whatever I can do, but a few idiots escape while the surgery is only half done.I have heard about a politician. He had gone to a great surgeon, a brain surgeon. The politician was very important and he was contesting for the presidency of the country, so the brain surgeon had called all his colleagues and told them to be very careful. But they saw so much crap in his brain that they finally thought that it was better to put him in a coma and take out the whole brain and give it a dry cleaning.While they were cleaning his brain in another room, the man became a little conscious, and at that very moment a man came in and said, “What are you doing lying here? You have been chosen as the president of the country!”So he jumped off the table. The surgeons saw that he was jumping off the table and they could not believe it. They said, “Wait! Your brain is being washed!”The politician said, “For five years at least I will not need it. You can keep it and clean it completely. I have become the president of the country. What do I need the brain for?”Shiva used to be sitting by my side every evening in darshan. He was a guard – not my bodyguard, just one of the guards – and his function here was that when people in darshan sometimes fell down, if they felt such an upsurge of energy that they could not manage to sit, his function was to take them back to their seats or take them and make them lie down by the side.I had never seen anything that could be called intelligent in him. He never wrote a single word, he never wrote any book about his experiences here. Perhaps he was so insensitive that although he was in the midst of tremendous experiences, his insensitivity did not allow him to be aware of it.But the day I left for America he followed me. Certainly in America there was a different arrangement. The whole commune was a different kind of functioning organization, and he was not chosen to be a guard. He came twice. I was in silence and isolation so he could not approach me and the others who were in the office said, “We don’t need you as a guard because we have been confirmed by the American government as a city. So now guards are not needed: we have a police department.”Of course we did not allow any non-sannyasin to be in the police department. We sent our own people for the training. Our own people were the policemen, so there was no need for guards. Those policemen were functioning under the chief of police of Oregon.Shiva was so hurt that his power had been taken away that he wrote a book, Bhagwan, The God That Failed. If he had been authentic and true he should have written, Shiva, The Guard That Failed. But nobody looks at himself; people always project on others.At least you are aware of the split. Just go a little deeper in your meditation and the split will disappear. It is simply a confusion because you don’t know that love is followed by fear as a shadow and unless that shadow disappears, love is never complete and flowering.But words are sometimes very dangerous. No dictionary exists in which you will find love in any way associated with fear. But the truth is, it is always following love to the very end when the master simply takes out his sword and finishes it completely. So I cannot promise you not to hurt you, but it will be a healing wound. It will bring you to more health and to more togetherness; to your authenticity and your being.Don’t be deceived by words because words have not been coined by enlightened people.The suave, impeccably dressed gentleman approached the menswear counter and was greeted by a beautiful, shapely, young attendant.“Good afternoon,” she murmured huskily, “and what is your desire?”“My desire,” he said, after giving her a long appreciative look, “is to take you in my arms, rush you to my apartment, open a magnum of champagne, put on some romantic music, and make hot love to you. However, what I need now is new shirts.”The word desire created the whole trouble. He had only come to purchase shirts. If the girl had asked, “What is your need? What is your requirement?” things would have been different. Words play such a tremendously meaningful and sometimes dangerous role in our lives. Just a single word and your ego immediately picks it up, and your whole consciousness becomes clouded and dark.It is good that you have exposed yourself. That shows that your love is greater than your fear. Now move your energy more toward love and leave the fear without any energy. It will die by itself. It is only a shadow.Osho,Is it possible that instead of watching the thinking, I am thinking of watching?It is not only possible, it is absolutely certain that instead of watching the thinking you are thinking of watching. But if you have become aware of it, the change is possible. If you can think of watching, why can’t you watch thinking? Just try. It is not a difficult process; it is simple.But most people do that. They are thinking of watching and are deceived by themselves and start feeling that great things are happening: “The watcher has come in and soon all these thoughts will disappear and the no-mind is not very far away.”When people say to me that meditation is going very well, I am a little suspicious because if the meditation is going very well, you don’t have to say it to me – I can see it. It will change your eyes, it will change your posture, it will change your walk, it will change your speaking, it will make you more and more silent – a pool of peace without any ripples of thoughts.But human mind is very cunning. It tries to the very end to deceive you. And you are very naïve; you go on being deceived.Sadie Moskovitz took her old grandmother to the movies. It was an epic about the Roman Empire. In one scene a lot of unarmed prisoners were thrown to the lions. The old grandmother broke out into loud wails, crying out, “Ah, those poor people!”Sadie was very embarrassed and whispered fiercely, “Don’t scream like that, Grandma. Those are Christians.”Choked, Grandma said, “I see.” She was quiet at once, but then began wailing louder than before.“Grandma,” demanded Sadie, “what is it now?”“Over there,” said Grandma, pointing, “that poor little lion at the back. He’s not getting any Christians.”Beware of your mind more than anything else in the world. It is the greatest deceiving device, which has been created by your body, physiology, chemistry, biology. It keeps you tethered to the body and does not allow you to open your eyes to your consciousness. It keeps you engaged; it does not even give you a little holiday. The danger is that if you are given a little holiday you may become aware of your inner grandeur: the beauty of your being and the enormous truth and the glory of it. And once you have seen that splendor you are not going to be deceived anymore.Now change: instead of thinking of watching, start watching the thinking. Even if the thinking is about watching, watch. It does not matter what the object of thinking is. It can be watching. Don’t get at all disturbed. Go on watching even thinking about watching, and the watching that you will be doing will reveal secrets and mysteries of your being. And as they are revealed, mind disappears. Mind is only there while you are utterly unconscious and ignorant. When more light is brought by meditation, watching, mind disappears like darkness. It is not a strong enemy; it is just that you have never tried to go beyond it.Watching is simply a process of going beyond the mind – far away – looking at the mind, watching what is going on. Whatever the mind is doing, simply see it: don’t appreciate, don’t condemn, don’t judge because all these things are part of thinking.Watching knows no judgment, no condemnation, no justification, no appreciation. Watching is simply like a mirror. Standing before the mirror you may have a beautiful face but the mirror does not smile at you. You may have an ugly face; the mirror does not feel disgusted. You may have no face at all; the mirror is unconcerned.Watching is simply, exactly, like a mirror reflecting the mind. Whatever is going on, the mirror reflects but makes no comments. This is the secret to getting beyond the mind, farther and farther away from it. Soon you will see that your mind is just a faraway echo – you can’t even figure out what it is muttering – and then it disappears.The attachment with the mind is through your condemnation or appreciation. Even when the mind disappears, don’t say to yourself, “Aha! This is it!” The mind has come back from the secret door that it knows.Just remain silent. There is no need to say “Aha!” There is no need to say, “This is it!” Relish and enjoy the silence that has come around you. Where mind was just a marketplace, you have entered into the silences of the heart. Enjoy, dance, but don’t say a single word.Osho,The other morning you looked so young in my eyes. I love you.Mukta, perhaps the other morning you became aware of my eyes and became aware of your love. But as far as I am concerned, you are the only sannyasin among millions who has loved me from the very first day you entered into my room some twenty years ago.Mukta is one of those unwavering people that have become very rare in the world. She had not come for me; she had come just to accompany another sannyasin. That other sannyasin disappeared long ago. She used to come to India at least two or three times a year to see me. She was American, very rich, and was constantly thinking about when her father dies because that old fellow was holding all the money in his hands.Then I went to America, but she never came to the commune. The old man had died. Now she was holding all the money. She was afraid if she comes to the commune and sees me it would be difficult. She used to tell me again and again, “Osho, don’t be worried, he cannot live forever. Once he is gone, our commune is not going to have any trouble about money.”I said, “This is very ugly. The very idea is ugly and poisonous.”But he died and she became one of the richest women in America. She never came to see me while I was in America for five years, and the last thing she did when she found that the American government was trying to destroy the commune or in some way deport me…The US Attorney General had said, “Our main purpose is to silence Osho absolutely.” One journalist asked him, “What do you mean? Do you want to assassinate him?” He said, “No, we have more sophisticated means to silence him.”She became afraid that if the American government found out that she was my sannyasin… She sent a letter from her attorney. This is a strange world and gives tremendously hilarious moments. When I saw the letter I could not stop laughing. The letter said, “I have never been connected with Osho and I am not at all interested what happens to him or to the commune. I have never been to the commune. This is from my attorney to inform you that I have never been associated with you.” She must have become afraid.It is very difficult when you are passing through dark nights. Even your own shadows leave you. But Mukta is made of a different mettle. She had come with that sannyasin just to see India. She had no conscious intention even to meet me. She came to see me just accidentally because that woman was coming to see me. And miracles happen in the world. That woman is lost: Mukta has never left me for a single moment – here, in America, going around the world. She has left her home, she has left her husband, she has left her children, she has left all the inheritance that her old father left for her. She never went there to get the inheritance; her other sister has swallowed the whole thing.She has never complained about anything. She was never, for a single moment, differing in her mind. She has passed from disciplehood to the state of devotee long ago.So it may have been, Mukta, that: “The other morning you looked so young in my eyes. I love you” – but I have been loving you for twenty years. And I can remember the first day you entered into my room in Mumbai. Sitting on the sofa, I had a very clear perception that you had not come with Pratima, that sannyasin, but that Pratima had come with you, my future sannyasin. And the same day Mukta became a sannyasin.Such unwavering trust and love is the only miracle worth calling a miracle. Jesus walking on water is not a miracle.The Mother Superior was passing through customs and the customs officer asked her if she had anything to declare.“Nothing at all,” she said.“What’s in the bottle?” asked the suspicious inspector.“Only holy water,” declared the Mother Superior.The inspector pulled the cork. “Aha! It is whiskey!”“Glory to God,” cried the Mother Superior, “it is a miracle!”And this is for you all.The morning after.Italian girl: Now you will-a hate me!Brazilian girl: You call that a samba?Russian girl: My body has belonged to you, but my soul will always remain free.American girl: Who are you? I must have been drunk.German girl: After we rest awhile, maybe we go to the beer garden, ja?Swedish girl: I think I go home now.French girl: For this I get a new dress, oui?Jewish girl: I should have held out for a new mink coat.Japanese girl: Now you know it is not so.English girl: There, dear, do you feel better now?And finally, a sannyasin girl: My God, you really want to go to Dynamic Meditation?

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 28 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,More and more it happens that I'm alone, and I am beginning to love and enjoy this silent space. But a fear is coming up: I am afraid that in this way I will lose contact with others and I will become a stranger.I feel a longing that brings me toward you, but a passion and desire to fall in love with someone seems to be no longer there.Can you please tell me what is happening? Am I right or am I going astray?The question you have asked raises many significant questions that will be useful for everybody. You are asking, “More and more it happens that I am alone, and I am beginning to love and enjoy this silent space. But a fear is coming up: I am afraid that in this way I will lose contact with others and I will become a stranger.”To be a sannyasin is to be a stranger. To be a sannyasin is to be an outsider. You do not belong anymore to the crowd. You have chosen the path of a lion, to be alone, rather than the path of a sheep, to be always in the crowd. And now that it is happening to you, that you are beginning to love your aloneness, a fear is also arising that you may become a stranger; you may lose contact with others.Have you ever thought what you have gained from the contact with others? What is the end result of being in the crowd except misery, anxiety? Except agony, what has been the contribution of the crowd to you? Yes, it has given you greed, it has given you violence, it has given you ambitions which are all ugly, it has given you self-hatred, it has given you a constant desiring for the future; but that is a strategy to take you away from the present. And remember, your longing for the future is never going to be fulfilled. All fulfillment is in the present.The only people who have attained anything worthwhile are the people who had the courage to be strangers. There is certainly a fear in the beginning because the more you become a stranger, the more you are condemned; the more you become a stranger, the more you feel yourself without any support. You were always supported and you have forgotten that you can stand on your own; there is no need of any support. In fact all supports have made you crippled. If from the very beginning a child is supported, carried, he will never learn to walk on his own.To be an outsider means you have dropped all that has been given by the past as heritage – and that heritage has nothing beautiful in it. It is full of bloodshed, wars, hatred. There is not a single thing that comes to you as a heritage that can be rejoiced in. If you are alert, and your aloneness is bound to make you very alert, you will be able to see that you have been carrying all kinds of garbage given to you by the older generation. There is not anything of any value because anything of any value has to be discovered by yourself, it cannot be given to you by anyone else.And in the crowd, the idea is very strong that you can gain knowledge from others, that you can become wise from others’ advice, that you can become religious by believing in others, that you can become spiritual if you are obedient to the commandments of God. But it is always others you have to look up to: you yourself are absolutely worthless. Anything of value is going to happen to you only through others. This idea has been propagated and everybody has been poisoned by this idea. That is the fear when you start moving on a small footpath, leaving the superhighway.They say – or they used to say in the past, but it is no longer relevant – that all roads lead to Rome. But not all footpaths! Every footpath moves on its own, to its own destiny. Now even the roads are revolting; they have forgotten Rome completely. It is very rare that any old rotten road may be going to the Vatican.The fear is natural, but it has to be dropped. To be carried away by the fear will be very unintelligent.Secondly, experience shows that in the beginning, by being alone in your own silent spaces of the heart, you feel you are losing contact with others. But don’t you see me? Can you find a man who is more an outsider and a stranger in the whole world? Yes, I have lost contact with all kinds of idiots. Now I only have contact with those who are thirsty and those who are understanding and those who want to evolve into spiritual beings. Now this commune of friends and fellow travelers has a totally different meaning than being in the crowd.The crowd crushes individuality, destroys your freedom, humiliates you to such a point that you start hating yourself instead of loving yourself. The society has been dominated by a very wrong psychology. It looks logical but it is not psychological. And logic is something man-made; psychology is not something man-made.The logic behind humiliating each individual to such a point that he cannot love himself is that if you love yourself, how are you going to love others? And the society and the family and the nation and the religion – everyone is interested in your loving others. Love your wife, love your children, love your parents, love your teachers – love everybody except yourself. It is a simple logic: if you love yourself you will not care much about the wife or the husband or the children or the parents or the priests.This fear has dominated humanity for thousands of years. But this fear was absolutely wrong because it has not created what they were thinking of. It is a simple psychological fact that a man who cannot love himself cannot love anybody else; but that is not logical, that is a psychological truth.If you cannot love yourself you don’t know even the taste – what love means. So you can pretend: you love your children, you love your wife, you love your husband, you love your parents; but it is all pretension. If so many people in the world were loving, where does war come from? From where are all kinds of violence continuously coming? From where is hatred arising if everybody is so loving?You have to love your children, you have to love your wife, you have to love your husband, you have to love your parents, you have to love your priests, elders, neighbors… There are even teachers like Jesus who say you have to love your enemies too! Just don’t love yourself. This strange logic has destroyed your very roots of loving.I say unto you: first and foremost, love yourself. And if you can love yourself, others will start getting your love very naturally, without any pretensions, very spontaneously. A man full of love soon starts overflowing. You cannot contain your love into the small space you have within you. Your love is far greater than you are. Your love can fill the whole earth. A single man’s love can fill the whole universe. It is so vast that you can go on sharing with everybody.But if your very source remains closed, then all that is left is to pretend. Everybody is pretending: that’s why there is so much talk about love, so much poetry, so much literature. And if you go around you don’t find love anywhere, you never encounter it.I want the whole universe to be a loving, rejoicing universe. But I see where humanity has failed; where its teachers, messengers of God and saviors have taken a wrong route. They listened to logic and they forgot that logic is absolutely man-made; it has nothing to do with your nature. Nature has no obligation to fulfill logical conclusions. If your nature has to be heard, it will become a simple thing to understand.Love yourself so that all your loving sources become open, all blocks are removed. And if you can love yourself – with all your frailties, with all your weaknesses, with all your errors – you can love anybody in the world. You will have tremendous compassion and understanding because you commit the same mistakes; your errors are the same, your frailties are the same.The people who have never loved themselves have never come in contact with themselves. Yes, they are in contact with others, but it is a very strange situation. You are not in contact with yourself – how can you be in contact with others? Who is going to be in contact with others? Who are you?At that point you simply don’t know. You know that you have a contact with your friend, you have a contact with your children, you have a contact with your mother; but who are you? And the same is the situation of your mother, your friend, your children: they don’t know who they are. Nobody knows who he is and everybody is in contact with everybody else. Can you think of anything more insane than this situation?Once you become an outsider, settled, confirmed, you will be surprised that now authentic contacts start happening. Because you are now in contact with your own being you will have such a magnetic pull that those who are seeking, those who are searching, those who are longing for something to happen in their life, those who don’t want to live an empty and meaningless life, will start coming in contact with you.And this contact will have a great significance. You will be fulfilling each other without destroying each other. You will be loving but not possessive. You will help but you will not enslave. You will support, but not to exploit – just out of your love, friendliness; out of your understanding whatever happens will be right.Of course, you will not be part of the big world of retarded people whose mental age is not more than fourteen. This is enough for being a postman or a stationmaster or a president – any trivia. I don’t see any difference between a stationmaster and a president of a country. Both are small fries pretending to be something great. You will not be in contact with these psychologically retarded people, but you will come in contact with real, authentic, intelligent, loving human beings who have understanding, who have compassion. And because they can love themselves, they can also love you.My experience is very different. The moment my blindness disappeared, the moment I found my own being, I could not believe how people started coming to me: I had not advertised myself in any newspaper! Suddenly, walking on the streets, somebody would stop me. Feeling a little embarrassed that he is stopping an absolute stranger, he would say, “Something in you makes me feel to be friendly with you.”I would say, “How many friends can I manage?”One of the friends arranged a bungalow for me. It was big enough, but soon it was continuously full of guests coming from faraway places. I told the friend, “Something has to be done because we don’t have space.” I have suffered with space my whole life, and I am still suffering. A few sannyasins are continuously searching for more space because more people are coming, threatening that they are coming!I have never found myself a stranger. On the contrary, I have found people who are on the same wavelength. I have found people who are filled with the same music. Slowly, slowly people started coming from outside India. Now perhaps this is the only gathering in the world that has its brothers, its sisters, in every country – and yet there is no church, no dogma, no belief system.What is holding all these people together? I am not promising you any heaven or paradise, and neither am I threatening you with any hell: that if you don’t believe in me, “Beware of eternal darkness and hellfire!” Neither am I making you afraid, nor making you greedy for pleasures in heaven. I am not promising you anything – in fact, I am taking away all the promises that others have given to you.Why has this small commune of friends become an international commune?I don’t feel you will remain a stranger or an outsider for a long time if you authentically enjoy your aloneness and the beauty that showers when you are a pure silence and nothing else, and the flowers that blossom in that spring of aloneness. You will find for the first time those people to whom you belong and it will not take much effort on your part to search for them. Because it is very difficult to search, simply remain in your silence and your silence will be heard more loudly than any noise. Your love will start radiating, spreading its net, pulling people without their being even fully aware of where they are going and for what. They will realize only when they have arrived and become a part of this big caravan. What is happening to you is one of the greatest things that can happen to a person.You say, “I feel a longing that brings me toward you.” The same longing will be felt by many, and this will bring them to you just as a longing has brought you to me. Learn from this.I have nothing to give you. I cannot give you a direct contact with God because as far as I am concerned there is no God and there is no heaven and no hell. That’s how I am dismantling all the beliefs that the past has given to you. I want you to be without beliefs, without promises, without future, without past – just enjoying the moment in its fullness. And this is your moment, just as it is my moment.And if in our rejoicing we meet, it does not create a bondage. If in our total living of the present we find ourselves in deep love, in deep friendliness, it does not create any chains, it does not make any contracts; it has nothing to do with the next moment. This moment lived totally and intensely becomes almost equal to eternity. It is enough unto itself.You are saying, “But a passion and desire to fall in love with someone seems to be no longer there.” Once you have tasted something of higher quality it is simply natural that things of lower quality will not attract you. If a longing has arisen in you to come close to me – now you cannot think of continuing your old passions and desires and love affairs, which you used to think were great. Now you are having the greatest love affair possible.More and more only such affairs will be happening. You will live on a totally different plane of consciousness, and lower planes will be left far behind. But you are not a loser. You are a winner. You are growing.You are worried whether you are right or you are going astray. As far as the crowd is concerned, you are not right, can never be right and you are certainly going astray. That will be the judgment of the crowd. Because you have left the crowd, their scriptures, their religions, their ideologies – you don’t belong to them – naturally, according to them you are not right, can never be right, and you have certainly gone astray.But according to me you have rightly gone astray. Nothing could have been more right than going astray from the crowd.A doctor who worked in a psychiatric hospital got a flat tire in the parking lot, and when he took the wheel off he dropped the wheel-nuts down the drain. He was at a loss what to do when one of the inmates walked up and told him to take one nut from each of the other wheels and that would last until he got to a garage.The doctor was very impressed and said, “That’s good thinking on your part, young man. Why are you in here?”The man replied, “I am crazy, not stupid.”It is perfectly good to be crazy here, but not to be stupid. This place is for all kinds of crazy people because they are the very cream of humanity. But this place is not for nuts, not for stupid idiots. You have certainly gone astray from the crowd, but you have found your people here.I never for a single moment think that there is a world beyond you. You are my world. I have completely forgotten what is happening in the world: whether it exists anymore or not, whether the Third World War has happened or has yet to happen. I am not concerned with it at all. My concern is only with the people with whom I feel a synchronicity, the same heartbeat.And once you start feeling the same heartbeat with these beautiful people who are here and around the world, you will not feel lonely. You will certainly remain alone, but you will never feel lonely. And you will remain a stranger to the world, but I have gathered all kinds of strangers.You will not be a stranger here. Here, everybody is a stranger; everybody is an outsider. Among my people, nobody will condemn you, nobody will say that you are worthless. You will be loved and respected as you are, not as you should be. Should’s we have dropped. We live in the existential and the real. We don’t insist that “First you should be according to my ideal and then I will love you.”Once when I was a child my father told me, “Unless you follow the religion of our family, which our ancestors have followed for thousands of years, you will not get my love.”I said, “If there is a condition, then you love your ancestors, you love your religion, you love your ideals, moralities – you don’t love me. Unless your love is unconditional it is not love. And if it is not unconditional I am not going to accept it. Don’t think that just you are capable of loving me. I am also a part of it. I can reject it. If I see even a small condition hiding behind it, I am the last person to accept it. I can live without your love, but I cannot accept a love that has a condition attached to it. It is not love at all.”The whole day he must have thought about it. In the night when I was going to sleep he came and he said, “I am sorry. I understand what you said. Perhaps in the name of love I was just imposing my ideals on you.”How can love impose ideals on anyone? Love simply accepts you as you are; there is no need to be somebody else. I call a place holy only where love is unconditional, shared without asking anything in return, not even in a subtle way.So, don’t be worried. You may be a little crazy; that is absolutely acceptable and lovable because a man who is not a little crazy is too much of a square. He does not have any juice.Now my Veeresh is here, hiding himself. This is the crazy type of man I am talking about. He has been following me everywhere on my world tour, but always hiding, just like that. He has not even a desire to be recognized because “I have been following you all around the earth,” but a pure love. He goes on working for me in Europe. In every possible way, doing whatever he can do, he puts his total energy into it. And when he comes here, and he must be wanting to come here every day, he hides.That’s the way of unconditional love. It is enough that I have looked into his eyes. It is enough that once in a while, if I can catch hold of him he is fulfilled, he is contented. I have recognized him, I remember him – that is enough.A man who is not at all crazy, has no color, has no juice. You cannot expect anything unexpected from him. He is just an ordinary businessman type: not a poet, not a painter, not a singer, not a musician, not a dancer, not a meditator. These things are closed for your so-called sane, sober, respectable people of the society. These respectable people have not contributed anything to the world to make it more beautiful. Only the people who have been called crazy by their contemporaries have been the creative people, the contributors. The whole evolution depends on them.Just think about the first monkey who jumped out of the tree and became a man. What do you think the other monkeys thought about him? “Look at that crazy guy! Is this the way to be a monkey, standing on two legs, on the earth? An outsider, a stranger…” They must have all laughed and enjoyed very much that this fellow has gone crazy. And it must have been talked about for centuries, from generation to generation among monkeys. Perhaps they still talk about it: that just one crazy monkey has created five billion crazy monkeys on the earth.People like Gautam Buddha or Socrates or Pythagoras or Jesus are all outsiders and strangers to their contemporaries and they are all thought to be a little off the track, a little outlandish. And because the crowd, the majority, is there and they write the history books, they don’t talk about the authentic contributors, they talk about the destructive people. All the histories are full of Adolf Hitlers, Benito Mussolinis, Joseph Stalins. And very rarely, in the footnotes, you will find something about Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Plotinus, Kabir…perhaps not even in the footnotes. And these are the real people who have lived, who have loved, and who have created as much humanity, as much consciousness as is possible for a single individual.Rejoice in being a stranger; rejoice in being an outsider. That is your way to satyam shivam sundaram. That is the way which will bring you the truth, and the divine, and the tremendous splendor and beauty that follows on its own accord.Osho,Not counting the discourses, is twenty minutes of meditation a day enough to see me along the path and lead me to experience the satyam shivam sundaram you are pointing us toward?Vimal, first you cannot be allowed not to count the discourses because your meditations cannot happen without these discourses. These discourses are the foundations of your meditation. I am crazy, but not that crazy that I should go on speaking four hours a day if it does not help you in meditation! Do you think I am trying to distract you from meditation?And then you are such a miser, Vimal. I never thought you were so miserly that just twenty minutes in twenty-four hours…not even twenty-four minutes!And you have missed my basic standpoint completely. I don’t want you to think of meditation within limits. I want meditation to become your very life. In the past this has been one of the fallacies: you meditate twenty minutes, or you meditate three times a day, you meditate five times a day – different religions, but the basic idea is that a few minutes every day should be given to meditation.And what will you do in the remaining time? Whatever you will gain in twenty minutes… What are you going to do in the remaining twenty-three hours and forty minutes? – something anti-meditative? Naturally your twenty minutes will be defeated. The enemies are too big, and you are giving too much juice and energy to the enemies and just twenty minutes for meditation. No, meditation in the past has not been able to bring a rebellion in the world because of these fallacies.These fallacies are the reason I want you to look at meditation from a totally different standpoint. You can learn meditation for twenty minutes or forty minutes – learning is one thing – but then you have to carry whatever you have learned day in, day out. Meditation has to become just like your heartbeat.You cannot say, “Is it enough, Osho, to breathe for twenty minutes every day?” – the next day will never come. Even while you are asleep you continue breathing. Nature has not left the essential functions of your body and life in your hands. Nature has not trusted you because if breathing were in your hands you would start thinking how much to breathe and whether it is right to breathe while you are sleeping. It looks a little odd doing two things together – sleeping and breathing. Breathing seems to be a kind of disturbance in sleeping. But then the sleep will be eternal!Your heartbeat, your blood circulation are not under your control. Nature has kept everything that is essential in its own hands. You are not reliable, you can forget, and then there is no time even to say, “I am sorry, I forgot to breathe. Just give me one more chance!” Even that much opportunity is not there.But meditation is not part of your biology, your physiology, your chemistry; it is not part of the ordinary natural flow. If you want to remain just a human being for eternity, you can remain there. Nature has come to a point of evolution where more than this is not needed by nature: you are perfectly capable of reproducing children and that’s enough. You will die, your children will continue. Your children will carry on the same stupidities that you were doing. Some will be coming into the congregation, into the churches; some other idiot will be giving sermons, and the whole thing will continue – don’t be worried.Nature has come to a point where now, unless you take individual responsibility, you cannot grow. More than this nature cannot do. It has done enough. It has given you life, it has given you opportunity; now how to use it, it has left it up to you.Meditation is your freedom, not a biological necessity. You can learn meditation in a certain period of time every day to strengthen it, to make it stronger – but carry the flavor of it the whole day.First, while you are awake, from the moment you wake up, immediately catch hold of the thread of remaining alert and conscious because that is the most precious moment to catch the thread of consciousness. In the day you will forget many times – but the moment you remember, immediately start being alert. Never repent because that is a sheer wastage of time. Never repent, “My God, I forgot again!”In my teachings there is no place for any repentance. Whatever has happened is gone. Now there is no need to waste time on it. Catch hold again of the thread of awareness. Slowly, slowly you will be able to be alert the whole day: an undercurrent of awareness in every act, in every movement, in everything that you are doing or not doing. Something underneath will be continuously flowing.Even when you go to sleep, leave the thread only at the last moment when you cannot do anything because you are falling asleep. And this is one of the laws, that whatever is the last thing before you fall asleep will be the first thing when you wake up. Try it. Any small experiment will be enough to prove it.Just repeat your own name while you are falling asleep: half awake, half asleep, go on repeating, “Vimal, Vimal, Vimal.” Slowly, slowly you will forget repeating because the sleep will grow more and more and the thread will be lost. It is lost only because you are asleep, but underneath your sleep it continues. That’s why in the morning when you wake up, just look around. The first thing you will remember will be “Vimal, Vimal.” You will be surprised: Why? What happened? You slept eight hours, but there has been an undercurrent.And as things become deeper and clearer, even in sleep you can remember that you are asleep. Sleep becomes almost a physiological thing and your spirit, your being becomes a flame of awareness, separate from it. It does not disturb your sleep; it simply makes your sleep very light. It is no longer the sleep of the old days, when your house was on fire and you went on sleeping. That was almost like a coma: you were so unconscious.Your sleep will become thin, a very light layer, and your inside will remain alert. Just as it has been alert in the day, it will finally be even more alert in the night because you are so silent, so relaxed; the whole nuisance world completely silent.Patanjali, the first man in the world to write about meditation, says that it is almost like dreamless sleep, but with one difference. In dreamless sleep you are not aware. In samadhi, in the ultimate state of meditation, there is just a little difference: you are aware.Vimal, you can continue for twenty minutes every day to learn, to refresh, to give more energy and more roots – but don’t be satisfied that that’s enough. That’s how the whole of humanity has failed, although the whole of humanity has tried in some way or other. But so few people have been successful that by and by many people stopped even trying because success seems to be so far away. But the reason is that just twenty minutes or ten minutes won’t do.I can understand that you have many things to do, so find time. But that time is not meditation, that time is only to refresh yourself – and then again you will have to work, earn, do your job and a thousand and one things. Just remain alert whether it is still there inside or it has disappeared.This continuity then becomes a garland of twenty-four hours. Only then, Vimal, will you be able to experience satyam shivam sundaram – not before it.A lion was walking through the forest taking a poll to determine who was the greatest among all the wildlife animals. When he saw the hippopotamus, he inquired, “Who is king of the forest?”“You are,” said the hippopotamus.Next he met a giraffe. “Who is king of the forest?” he inquired.“You are,” said the giraffe.Next he met the elephant. He gave him a good rap on the knee and said, “And who is the king of the forest?”The elephant picked him up in his trunk and swung him against the tree. As the lion slid down, brushing himself off, he said, “You don’t have to get so mad just because you don’t know the right answer.”Vimal, unfortunately I know the right answer. I will not get mad at you, but certainly I will tell you where you are wrong and where you are right.First, sitting with me in these discourses is nothing but creating more and more meditativeness in you. I don’t speak to teach something; I speak to create something. These are not lectures. These are simply devices for you to become silent because if you are told to become silent without making any effort you will find great difficulty.That’s what Zen teachers have been telling their disciples: “Be silent, but don’t make any effort.” Now, you are putting the person into such a difficult fix: “Don’t make any effort and be silent.” Now, if he makes any effort he is wrong – and there is no way to be silent without making any effort. If it were possible to be silent without any effort there would have been no need of any master, there would have been no need to teach meditation. People would have become silent without any effort.I have gone as deep into Zen efforts as possible. They have been working for almost fourteen centuries, since Bodhidharma. They are one of the greatest groups in the world, totally devoted to a single thing and that is meditation. There is no other experiment anywhere that has been done for so long a time continuously. But still there are not many Zen masters.Yes, there are more masters in the stream of Zen than in any other stream in the world, but still they are very few compared to the people who have been working. I have been searching out what was the basic mistake. This is the basic mistake, Vimal: those Zen masters told them the right thing but not in the right way. I am making you aware of silences without any effort on your part. My speaking is being used for the first time as a strategy to create silence in you.This is not a teaching, a doctrine, a creed. That’s why I can say anything. I am the most free person who has ever existed as far as saying anything is concerned. I can contradict myself in the same evening a hundred times. Because it is not a speech, it has not to be consistent. It is a totally different thing, and it will take time for the world to recognize that a tremendously different experiment was going on.Just a moment – when I became silent, you become silent. What remains is just a pure awaiting. You are not making any effort; neither am I making any effort. I enjoy talking; it is not an effort.I love to see you silent. I love to see you laugh, I love to see you dance. But in all these activities, the fundamental remains meditation.This is for you all, absolutely unrelated with anything.Hymie and Becky Goldberg are with their teenage son, Herschel, on holiday in California. Herschel is jogging down the beach when he happens to see someone drowning, not far from the shore. Rushing into the surf, he pulls the man out. Much to his surprise it is Ronald Reagan.The president sits up in the sand, and when he finally manages to catch his breath, he says, “Young man, that was a heroic deed you just did. In such uncertain times as today, with the stock market crash and the Middle East crisis, the world can’t do without me. Tell me son, if there is anything I can do for you, just let me know.”Herschel thinks for a minute, “You know there is one thing.”“Name it,” Ronald Reagan urges.“I would like to be buried with my surfboard in Surfers’ Paradise Beach, here in California.”The request takes Ronald Reagan by surprise. “I don’t understand,” he says. “From the looks of you, you’re in perfect health.”“Oh, I am,” answers Herschel. “But when my father Hymie Goldberg finds out whose life I just saved, he’s gonna kill me!”

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 29 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,While using hypnosis in the service of meditation, I have noticed that the line between therapy and meditation is dissolving. As witnessing can become easy and natural in hypnosis, it seems to provide the ground for a quantum leap into no-mind.Would you please speak on the transformation of hypnosis into meditation?It is one of those crimes that Christianity is responsible for. There was a day when hypnosis was a recognized door toward meditation, but in the Middle Ages Christianity condemned hypnosis alongside witchcraft. That condemnation still lingers on, even in the minds of those who are not Christians but who are influenced without their knowing by Christian ideas.Why was Christianity against hypnosis? You will be surprised to know it was against hypnosis because it leads directly to meditation. Neither the priest is needed nor the church is needed. Not even God is needed. And this was the trouble: if meditation succeeds in the world there are not going to be any religions anymore, for the simple reason that you will be in direct contact with existence and yourself. Why should you go through brokers and all kinds of agents who know nothing, except that they are knowledgeable, except that they have been disciplined for years in how to influence people and win friends?It is not something religious that they are doing. What they are doing is the politics of numbers: gather as many numbers as possible into your fold; that becomes your strength and your power.Hypnosis was a danger to the priesthood, and Christianity is absolutely based from the very beginning on the priesthood. Jesus does not declare himself to be enlightened, nor has any other Christian after him declared him to be enlightened. He declares something nonsensical: that he is the only begotten son of God. God is a hypothesis, and hypotheses are not Indians who go on producing children. Hypotheses are barren; they produce nothing.Just the other day I received from Germany… There was a Protestant conference of Christians, and they invited our sannyasins, hoping to refute our sannyasins and their ideas. But the whole thing backfired.There is nobody in the world who can refute my sannyasins because we are proposing neither beliefs nor hypotheses. We are simply living life. Our philosophy is not something beyond the clouds; it is something rooted in the earth, it is something as scientific as anything can be.This question had arisen there, and there was great difficulty because the sannyasins said, “Osho is enlightened and Jesus Christ is not.” And the priests of Protestant Christianity could not produce any evidence that Jesus was enlightened; there is no statement anywhere. All that he was proclaiming was that he is the only begotten son of God. In fact, that is a definite indication of unenlightenment.He does not know himself and he is pretending to know God. And his prayer is just like our Vimal – twenty minutes and the religion is finished! Then the remaining time you are free to do everything irreligious, and then again for twenty minutes you refresh yourself for your irreligiousness. The statements that Jesus has made are so ordinary because he was simply repeating the old prophets.The sannyasins have informed me that it was a strange situation when they confronted the high priests of Protestant Christianity. They looked at each other: what to do? Enlightenment has not been a Western experience, and the reason why it could not happen in the West is Christianity.Christianity never wanted you to be directly connected with God. You have to go via the priest, the pope, the son, and then God. In between, the mediators are many, and nobody knows who is lying. Of course you can never discover because you don’t have any direct line with God. The priest has a direct line with the pope, the pope has a direct line with Jesus, Jesus has a direct line with God and the numbers are not given in the telephone directories!Hypnosis was the door, has always been the door to meditation. Once a man enters into the world of meditation, he has such clarity, such a strength, so much life arising in him that he no longer needs any father in heaven. He no longer needs any priest to pray for him. He himself has become prayer – not prayer to any God, but simply a prayerfulness, a gratitude to the whole.It was absolutely necessary for Christianity to condemn hypnosis and to condemn it as something created by the devil. For the same reasons witchcraft was brutally destroyed. Millions of women were burned alive because they were also doing the same thing. They were trying to contact the ultimate on their own without going through the proper channel of the church.Your question is very significant. You are asking, “While using hypnosis in the service of meditation…” Hypnosis in itself can be used dangerously unless it is used in the service of meditation. I will have to explain to you what exactly is meant by hypnosis and how it can be misused if it is not used singularly in the service of meditation.Hypnosis literally means deliberately created sleep. It is now known that thirty-three percent, that is one third of humanity, is capable of going into the deepest layers of hypnosis. It is a strange number – thirty-three percent – strange because only thirty-three percent of people have the aesthetic sense, only thirty-three percent of people have sensitivity, only thirty-three percent of people have friendliness, only thirty-three percent of people are creators. And my only experience is that these thirty-three percent of the people are the same – because creativity and sensitivity are meditation, are love, are friendliness. All need essentially one thing: a deep trust in oneself, in existence, and a receptivity and opening of the heart.Hypnosis can be created in two ways. Because of the first way, people became impressed by the Christian propaganda that it is dangerous. This is hetero-hypnosis: somebody else hypnotizes you, a hypnotist hypnotizes you.There are so many wrong ideas attached, and the most fundamental is that the hypnotist has the power to hypnotize you. That is absolutely wrong. The hypnotist has the technique, not the power. Nobody can hypnotize you against yourself, unless you are willing. Unless you are ready to go into the unknown, untraveled darkness, no hypnotist can manage to hypnotize you.In fact, hypnotists don’t deny that they have the power. On the contrary, they claim that they have the power to hypnotize people. Nobody has the power to hypnotize anyone. Only you have the power to hypnotize yourself or to be hypnotized by somebody else – the power is yours. But when you are hypnotized by somebody else it can be misused.The process is very simple, the technique, is very simple. The hypnotist hangs a crystal from a chain just over your eyes, and tells you, “Don’t close your eyes until you cannot keep them open. Fight to the last! Keep your eyes open!” And the crystal shines in your eyes. Naturally, the eyes have to blink continuously to keep themselves from getting dry. They are the most delicate part of your body. You blink your eyes because your eyelids function like windshield wipers on a car. They bring liquid to your eyes and they clean your eyes of any dust, or anything that may have entered. They keep your eyes fresh and are always showering.The hypnotist says, “Stop blinking: just stare at something shiny!” – shiny because anything shiny will soon make your eyes tired. If you are told to look at a powerful enough electric bulb hanging just above your head, naturally your eyes will get utterly tired. And you are told that you are not to close them, unless you feel they are closing by themselves.This is one part. The other part is that the hypnotist is continuously saying that your eyes are becoming very heavy, your eyelids seem to be utterly tired… Just by your side he is repeating these words continuously: that your eyes are becoming tired, the lids want to close – and to you just the opposite direction has been given so that you are to go on fighting to the last. But how long can you fight?It takes no longer than three minutes at the most because a double process is going on. You are focused on the light that is tiring your eyes, and the hypnotist goes on repeating like a parrot, in a very sleepy voice, that sleep is coming over you. You cannot resist; it is impossible now to keep your eyes open.Now these suggestions…and the person is fighting, he knows that his eyes are becoming tired, and the eyelids are becoming heavy, burdened. A point comes within three minutes, not more than that, when he cannot resist the temptation to let them close. The moment the eyes are closed, the man starts repeating, “You are going into deep sleep, and you will be able only to hear my voice and nothing else. I will remain your only contact.”The person goes deeper and deeper into sleep, with continuous suggestions. There is a point when he stops hearing anything else except the sleepy voice of the hypnotist saying, “You are going deeper, deeper, deeper” – and then he tests whether you have gone deeper or not. He will prick your hand with a safety pin, but you are so asleep that you cannot know about it, you will not feel it.In fact, in Russia they have started hetero-hypnosis even for operations. No anesthesia is needed. A person can go so deep given the right conditions: a very sleepy, dim atmosphere – neither dark nor light – a forcefully shining light focused on his eyes; very subtle music in the room, a beautiful fragrance, all these help him to go into such a deep sleep that operations can be done, have been done, and the person knows nothing.So the hypnotist tries a few things. He takes your hand up and lets go of it, and the hand falls – because you cannot hold it, you are fast asleep; in sleep you cannot hold it up high. He lifts your eyelids up, he looks into your eyes and only the white of your eyes is seen; your pupils have moved upward. The deeper the hypnosis, the higher your pupils will move upward.This happens in deep sleep every day, and this also happens when somebody dies. That’s why all over the world people immediately close the eyelids of a dead person – for the simple reason that it is so frightening to see somebody with completely white eyes. In India it has been known for centuries that when a man is going to die, his eyes start slowly moving upward, and the sign and symbol is that he cannot see the tip of his own nose.You can see it. Remember: the day you cannot see your nose six, months at the most! – because when the pupils of the eyes are moving upward, they cannot see the tip of the nose.So the hypnotist opens the eyelid and sees whether it is all white, and all that used to be there, your real eye, has moved upward. Then he is certain that you are no longer capable of hearing anybody, you are no longer capable of disobeying him; whatever he will say, you will do.This is the danger. He can say to you, “Just take out all your money and hand it over to me,” and you will immediately take out all your money and hand it over to him. He can take your ornaments, he can tell you to sign any document that may create trouble for you – that you have sold your house, or donated your house.There is one thing more to be understood, which is very dangerous: he can give a post-hypnotic suggestion. A post-hypnotic suggestion means that he can say to you, “After ten days you will come to me, you will have to come to me, bringing all your money, all your ornaments, anything valuable that you have. Leave it on my table and simply go back.”It is possible to give a post-hypnotic suggestion that after twenty-four hours you will shoot somebody. All these orders will be followed because the person does not know, as far as his consciousness is concerned, he has no idea what has happened under deep hypnosis. Deep hypnosis reaches your unconscious.These were the dangers that Christianity exaggerated, saying that this is against religion, against morality because a woman can be raped and she will not know, or a woman can be told, “You have fallen in love with me,” and a great romance will begin from the moment she wakes up. She will feel a little hesitant because her conscious mind will not understand what has happened, but there is no communication between the conscious mind and the unconscious. The unconscious is so powerful – nine times more powerful – that when the unconscious wants to do something, the conscious may start protesting but that protest is futile.All these things were spread, wildly exaggerated, among man. But the purpose of the church was not to save you from these dangers. The purpose was that hypnosis should become so condemned that nobody could enter from that door into the ultimate realm of satyam shivam sundaram.Christianity kept people completely ignorant about another kind of hypnosis; that is self-hypnosis, not hetero-hypnosis. Only hetero-hypnosis can be misused; autohypnosis or self-hypnosis cannot be misused. There is nobody. You are alone.You can do the same thing by yourself. You can put an alarm clock on, and then repeat three times that within fifteen minutes, when the alarm goes off, you will come back from your deep hypnotic sleep. And then the procedure is the same.You look at the light, and you do what the hetero-hypnotist was doing. Looking at the light, you go on repeating inside, “My eyes are becoming heavy, heavy…heavier, heavier. I am falling into sleep. I cannot keep my eyes open anymore; I am trying my best, but it is impossible” – and it also takes exactly three minutes. That is the maximum; it may happen in two minutes, it may happen in one minute, but the longer you struggle, the deeper will be the hypnosis.I have heard about a man, an old man, who was torturing his family. Every day he would figure out how many diseases he had. The doctors were tired; they said he had no diseases. He listened to the medical program on the television and learned the names of the diseases. Then he started torturing the family, “I am suffering from this, I am suffering from that. Nobody is taking care of me.” This was simply a way for an old man to attract attention.Nobody gives attention to old people, so they find their own ways. They become more irritable, more angry, more fussy. They have their own techniques to attract attention. Their whole lives they were nourished by attention, but now nobody looks at them, nobody even bothers whether they exist or are finished…Jagjit Singh, an Indian singer, who loves me, tells a beautiful joke.One of his friends who lives in London had come, so he asked him, “How are you?”He replied, “All right.”Jagjit Singh said, “And how is your wife?”He replied, “She is also all right.”“And how are your children?”“They are also all right.”Jagjit Singh finally asked, “And what about Daddy?”And the man said, “Daddy? He has been all right for almost four years.” Four years ago he had died, so the friend is saying that he has been all right, completely all right, forever all right for four years!Old people have only these methods to attract attention: that they are suffering from migraine, that they have a stomachache. The greater their medical vocabulary is, the more they will manage!Finally, doctors started refusing, saying, “He is a mad person. He has no sickness, no disease; we have checked him so many times.”But the son said, “What can we do? We should call the doctor.”So the doctors finally suggested that there was a hypnotist and perhaps he might be helpful: “Bring this hypnotist, so he can hypnotize him and tell him that he is absolutely all right. That is the only medicine he needs. If his unconscious grips the idea of being all right, then there will be no problem.”The sons were very happy, and they brought the hypnotist to him. He looked like a doctor with his bag and paraphernalia, with his small Sigmund Freud beard, with a glass on one eye – one has to be properly dressed according to his profession. This was impressive. He asked the old man, “What are your troubles?”The old man listed so many troubles. The hypnotist said, “Okay, just lie down and I will be holding this pendulum that shines because it has a battery behind it. You have to keep your eyes on it until you cannot keep them open.”After a long life’s experience, old people become very cunning and very clever. The old man thought, “From the way he is dressed, this seems to be a con man…and what kind of treatment is going on?” He thought, “Let us see.” He did not wait for three minutes, he immediately closed his eyes, and when the hypnotist took his hand, he dropped it. He knew all the tricks: an old man…he has seen everything in the world!The hypnotist said, “He is completely at ease and asleep. Now I will give him the suggestion: ‘Now you are perfectly all right. You don’t have any disease and you will not harass your children with diseases that don’t exist!’” And the old man remained silent.His sons were very happy: “Why did we never think of the hypnotist? We have been wasting so much money paying the doctors, and all that they say is ‘You harass us. Although you give us money, it is sheer harassment. The old man is not sick at all.’ This man is the right man!”The old man was lying completely still. All suggestions over, the hypnotist collected his fee. One of the sons went out the door to see him off to his car, but even before he returned, the old man opened one eye and asked, “Has that crackpot gone or not?”If you immediately close your eyes, nothing will happen because you will remain conscious. And whatever the hypnotist is saying, he will look like a crank. What nonsense is he talking? “Your eyes are becoming heavy” – they will not become heavy. “You are falling deep in a sleep” – you are not falling, you are perfectly alert. And he is cheating, he is saying that you don’t have any diseases!But if you are doing a session of self-hypnosis, there is no danger. You just go through the whole process, looking at a bright thing that tires your eyes – that is its only function – and you go on repeating what the hypnotist was repeating, just inside your being. Finally, you will find you cannot keep your eyes open; they are closing. You have lost control over them. And that feeling of losing control over your eyelids immediately gives you the feeling that you are certainly falling into deep sleep.As long as you are aware, you go on repeating, “I am going deeper, deeper…” and a moment comes when you have gone deepest into your unconscious. And after ten minutes the alarm will go off, and you will come back from your unconscious to the conscious. You will be surprised how fresh, how young you are feeling within yourself; how clean, as if you have passed through a beautiful garden full of flowers, with a cool breeze.You can also give yourself post-hypnotic suggestions. They have to be given at the last moment when your eyes are closing and you feel that now you will be going deeper. Before going deeper you start saying, “From tomorrow my health will be better.” Just choose one thing – not too many, don’t be greedy – and just a fifteen-day session or a three-week session, just on yourself. Whatever you are saying, perhaps that your meditation will go deeper from tomorrow, and you will find that your meditation is going deeper and you can create a very beautiful link.When the meditation goes deeper, then you can suggest to yourself: “Tomorrow my hypnosis will go even deeper.” You can use both to bring you to the very depths of your unconsciousness. And once you have touched the depths of your unconsciousness, then you can start a second suggestion: “Although I will be in the dark unconscious, a slight awareness will remain so that I can see what is happening.” And then go on repeating, “My awareness which was slight is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger…” And one day you will find the whole unconscious is lighted with your alertness – and that’s what meditation is.Hypnosis can be used, should be used, without any fear. Either together with people who trust each other and love each other, so there is no fear of exploitation, or with your very intimate friends – you know that they cannot harm you, you can open yourself, you can be vulnerable – or just yourself. By yourself it will take a little longer because you have to do two persons’ work yourself. That is a little disturbance.But now, because tape recorders are available, you can dispose of the other person completely and give the suggestion part to the tape recorder. And the tape recorder certainly cannot misuse; it cannot tell you to kill your wife – unless you have put that on the tape! Then I cannot help it. Whatever you put on the tape recorder it will repeat.You can put the whole process on the tape recorder: all the suggestions of falling into sleep, heaviness of the lids, going deeper… And then when you are deepest – a gap of four or five minutes so you can settle in your deepness. Then from the tape recorder comes the voice saying that your meditation will become deeper from today; that you will not have to struggle with your thoughts. The moment you close your eyes, the thoughts will start dispersing themselves.The tape recorder can be immensely helpful because there is no question of trusting anybody. You can trust your tape recorder without any fear. And you can lock the door so that nobody plays with your tape recorder: otherwise somebody may trick you!Self-hypnosis has to be in the service of meditation; that is its greatest use. But it can serve health, it can serve long life, it can serve love, it can serve friendliness, it can serve courage. Self-hypnosis can help you with all that you want. It can dispel your fears of the unknown, it can dispel your fear of death; it can make you ready for being alone, silent, peaceful, it can make you able to continue an undercurrent of meditation for twenty-four hours. You can even suggest, “While I am asleep my small flame of awareness will continue all through the night without disturbing my sleep.”You are saying, “I have noticed that the line between therapy and meditation is dissolving.” That has been my deep desire for long. Therapy should dissolve into hypnosis, and hypnosis should dissolve into meditation. Then we have created one of the greatest forces for enlightenment, which has never been used in the past.Therapy has never been used. Therapy will cleanse you of all garbage. It will take away all your conditionings. Therapy will help you to cathart. Anything that is there and that you have been repressing inside, therapy will throw it out.Therapy is a beautiful cleansing process, and a mind cleansed will fall into hypnosis more easily, without any struggle. Perhaps with therapy even those who are not easily available to self-hypnosis or to hypnosis – the people who don’t belong to the thirty-three percent – may start belonging to the group that is available for hypnosis. Therapy can change one hundred percent of people into authentic candidates for hypnosis.So therapy has to be used in such a way that it slowly dissolves into hypnosis, and then hypnosis has to be used so that it can become steps going toward meditation.I propose that these three things together become my trinity. God and the Holy Ghost and Jesus Christ – forget all that nonsense! That is not a trinity. But something scientific, something that you can do yourself, something that is possible to be practiced; except for that, religion is so full of garbage that people have become more interested in the garbage and forgotten the essential. In fact, the essential has become so small in comparison with the Himalayan garbage that has accumulated over it down the centuries that it is even difficult to find where it is.What I am proposing is a simple thing: you don’t need any priest, you don’t need any church, you don’t need any holy scripture, all that you need is a little understanding and a little courage. Cathart totally in therapy. You don’t know how much crap there is inside you. When you start catharting, then you will know: “My God, is this me or somebody else? What am I doing? What am I saying?”Sometimes what you are saying does not even make any sense, but it was there, otherwise it could not come to you. It has been a hindrance to your meditation and it will be a hindrance to your going deep into hypnosis. It will become a barrier somewhere in-between.So therapy has to be the first thing. The second thing is hypnosis, and the third thing will grow out of it: your meditation. The ultimate in meditation is enlightenment.When meditation comes to its completion, then your whole being becomes full of light, full of blissfulness, full of ecstasy.Osho,The other morning in discourse, for a few moments I felt as if my face were disappearing. It was a very pleasant sensation, and at the same time a feeling of astonishment and surprise arose. Would you please say something about this?It was not your original face that was disappearing. What was disappearing was your mask. Only the mask can disappear. The original face can be covered, but it cannot be made to disappear by any means. The mask is used to cover your face. And we have many masks. We go on changing them as the situation requires.If you are seeing your servant, you have a different mask: you are the master. When you are facing your boss, you have a different mask: although he is humiliating you, you are still smiling. The original face cannot smile; it is only the mask. Deep down you are cursing but you have to smile, otherwise your job is in danger.I heard about an office. The boss used to come only for one hour, but when he came, he would gather the whole office – the clerks, the typists – and tell them jokes. He had only three jokes to tell, and it was a very strange situation: those people had heard those jokes thousands of times, but still when he told them they would laugh so loudly and clap as if they had heard them for the first time and because there were only three, that meant each joke would be repeated at least twice in a week.Even the boss sometimes thought, “What is the matter? Do these people forget all about it?”But one day the secret was disclosed. One girl, a typist, did not laugh. Everybody looked at her: what has happened to her? She has always been laughing louder than anybody…The boss was also very hurt that he had told a joke and she was simply sitting there, not even smiling. He said, “What is the matter with you?”She said, “Nothing is the matter with me. I have accepted another job. Now I will laugh there, not here. Let these idiots continue to laugh. It is because of your jokes that I am changing my job! I am tired because you have told these jokes so many times that sometimes I find myself telling them to myself. It has become such a difficult thing…in the night, in my sleep, I am telling the joke and then I wake up perspiring. Just these three jokes have become my nightmare.“I have changed my job and now for the last time I have come just to see how it feels not to laugh. I am feeling so good because for the first time it is my original face that you are seeing; otherwise all these people who are laughing and opening their mouths ear to ear…these are only masks. Inside they are cursing you, they want to kill you. They know that unless they kill you…“They talk when you are gone, and I have been here listening to their talk. They are thinking, How to kill this fellow? – because unless you kill him, he will kill you! Those three jokes are enough to kill. They have become almost their blood, their bones, their marrow. Even while typing they forget and start typing the jokes.”If year after year you have to hear the same thing and you have to pretend…What you felt was certainly beautiful. This is my only longing: to see you in your original faces. Let these masks disappear. Just become yourself. You will feel light; you will enjoy it. The first time you may feel astonished, but as it goes on happening again and again, astonishment will disappear and the pleasantness will become deeper. A moment comes when a person becomes absolutely original. Then his whole life is full of blissfulness.You have been forced to wear masks because you are expected to behave in a certain way, to talk in a certain way, to dress in a certain way. You don’t have any freedom. The society imposes a complete imprisonment on you, from all nooks and corners. This is your slavery and this is your misery. This is your pain and this is your hell.Get out of all this falseness and just be simple – as simple as the birds singing, as simple as the trees enjoying the sun, as simple as small children.Little Hymie Goldberg was taken to a seance. When he arrived, the medium asked Hymie if there was anybody he would like to contact and speak to.“I’d like to speak to my granny,” said Hymie.“Certainly, my dear,” said the medium, going into a deep trance. She began to moan and talk in a strange voice, saying; “This is your granny speaking from heaven…a wonderful place in the skies. Is there anything you would like to ask me, Hymie?”“Yes, Granny,” said Hymie, “what are you doing in heaven when you’re not even dead yet?”A childlike innocence…Little Ronnie was growing up.“Mom,” he asked one day, “where do babies come from?”“Why, the stork brings them,” replied his mother.“But, mom,” asked Ronnie, “who fucks the stork?”

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Satyam Shivam Sundram 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Satyam Shivam Sundram 30 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why is the new so scary? My wanting and need for recognition are gone along with the doing. Even though deep inside I am tremendously thankful and happy, I find part of myself feeling guilty. I see as well that laziness is not one of my qualities. I can't find the new way for me to be total in my work. It is becoming very painful.Can you please bring some light and guidance to me?The new is always scary because of the simple fact that it is new. You don’t know how to face it. All your knowledge is suddenly found to be absolutely meaningless because there is no answer in your experience and knowledge that can be an authentic response to the new – because you suddenly find yourself ignorant, helpless, not knowing what to do; hence the scariness.Otherwise, instead of being afraid you will have a totally different experience with the new. You will explode with joy. If you are an explorer, an adventurer, then the new will fill you with tremendous ecstasy, and you will see in this new a possibility for your intelligence to function.With the old, intelligence has no need to function: your memory functions. You know the answer already; the answer is part of your memory system. But memory is not intelligence, remember.Intelligence is the capacity to rejoice in the new with an openhearted welcome, with intense clarity. Just by watching the new, the response will arise from your very innermost core. That is the way of the meditator. The meditator is continuously confronted with the new. In fact, he is in search of the ultimate new, which will never become old, which will always be fresh.That is the quality of satyam shivam sundaram. Truth is never old; neither is the godliness that surrounds you from all dimensions, nor the experience of beauty. The roses may come and go, the expressions of beauty may come and disappear, but the experience of beauty is always there, exactly the same.You are asking, “Why is the new so scary?” Because you are still in the mind and you don’t know what meditation is.Mind loves the old. With the old the mind is very at ease because it knows all the answers. It does not feel helpless, it does not feel that it has to choose this way or that way. It knows exactly what is the right answer. The mind never wants you to come in contact with the new. It keeps you going round and round with the old.Meditation is just the opposite of mind. As mind is confined with the old, meditation is an exploration of the expansion of the whole universe. The meditator wants to come each moment to the new, because only with the new does his intelligence become more sharp; only with the new does he himself become new. Only with the new is the way toward the ultimate.The old is dead. Of course the old seems to be very comfortable. It seems comfortable because you don’t have to do anything. You don’t even have to be intelligent. You can remain retarded and yet pretend to the world that you are a great intellectual because you are filled with all kinds of information in your memory.And the memory is not part of your consciousness; the memory is part of your body. The memory is just a mechanism like any computer. You feed it with information and whatever you feed it, it is perfectly comfortable with. It knows it. And knowledge gives you a certain power: you are within the territory where you are the ruler, you know everything.The unknown, the new, suddenly exposes your ignorance, and that hurts. You don’t want to know your ignorance; that’s why the new is scary. But your ignorance is enormous; your knowledge is just a dewdrop. If you don’t want to remain a dewdrop – closed, absolutely non-receptive and insensitive to the tremendous existence that is available to be yours any moment – gather courage and come out of your smallness. The moment the dewdrop takes a jump into the ocean is exactly the situation of a man who takes a jump from the mind into meditation.Mind is so small. Existence and life are so vast, so infinite, that unless you come out of the mind you will live the life of a prisoner and a slave. A slave cannot know what dance is, a slave cannot know what freedom is and the joy of freedom and the blissfulness and the ecstasy of being vast, oceanic.My work with you is to persuade you to come out of your caves which are dark – although they look very cozy to you because you are acquainted with them.It happened in the French Revolution… France had the greatest prison, the Bastille, where only prisoners who were going to be there for their whole lives were sent. They could only enter there; they could never come out. Once a person entered there… It had only a door to enter through; it had no exit.There are only two places like this in the world, and strangely, both are prisons. One is a Catholic monastery in Europe where whoever enters, enters forever. There are still almost ten thousand monks in that monastery. They cannot come out again, at least not while they are alive. Dead, they are free to go out – in fact others will throw them out.And the other place, where prisoners were thrown in, was the Bastille. The Bastille had small cells for the prisoners: thousands of caves, dark caves with no light. The prisoners were handcuffed, chained, and the keys of their chains and handcuffs were thrown into a well that was in the middle of the prison because they were never going to be opened, so what was the point of collecting thousands of keys unnecessarily? There was no point. Those people would die and then their chains would be cut, not opened, so there was no need.In the French Revolution, the revolutionaries immediately thought to open the doors of the Bastille as a priority, and allow thousands of prisoners their freedom. They were thinking that they were doing something great. They could not have expected the response of the prisoners.The prisoners refused. They said, “We have lived here, somebody for twenty years, somebody else for thirty years…” There were a few people who had lived there fifty, sixty, seventy years.Now a man who has lived there for seventy years must be nearabout a hundred years old. His whole life experience is confined to a small cave. He cannot come out of it; he is chained and tethered to the cave wall. He cannot even move out of the cave just to see the sky or the stars or the moon. Naturally, such a person will be afraid to go back into the world after seventy years.Almost everybody he used to know must either be dead by now, or where is he going to find these people he used to know? Their names have faded away, their faces have faded away: a faraway seventy long years… And who knows if they will recognize him? If he cannot remember them, who is going to recognize him? – a man condemned to be in prison for life. And what will he do? From where will he get his food and his clothes, and where will he sleep? He will need a shelter too.And now to work, to earn is almost a forgotten language. And at this age – old, sick, tattered – who is going to give him work or employment? Anyway, even ordinary prisoners who have been in prison for a few months don’t easily get any employment. Who is going to trust a man who has been seventy years in jail? It is too risky.Here everything is comfortable. It may look uncomfortable to an outsider, but for a man who has lived in the cave for seventy years, it may have been uncomfortable in the beginning for a few days, a few months, but man has a tremendous capacity of adaptability. In any situation, if you force him, he will start adapting to the situation.And seventy years or fifty years is a long time: half a century. And now that he has started feeling perfectly cozy, comfortable: no worry about bread, no worry about tomorrow, no worry about anything. He has forgotten the names of his children, he has forgotten who used to be his wife, and what happened to all those people. No, he does not want to go out.The revolutionaries could not believe it. “We are giving you freedom and you are as scared as if we are going to kill you.”And those prisoners said, “That’s exactly what we are feeling: that you are going to kill us. We are perfectly happy here. Just excuse us. We cannot fulfill your expectations. It is too late.”But revolutionaries are stubborn people. They did not listen to the prisoners. They cut their chains, they cut their handcuffs, they forced them out with the same violence with which they had one day been forced in. Against their will they had been brought in; against their will they were brought out.Many of them could not even open their eyes because the light was too much. Their eyes had become too weak, too delicate. Living in darkness, their eyes were no longer capable of opening in the sunlight. Many of them had forgotten how to walk. But the revolutionaries were adamant: they did not listen to their cries. They had tears, but revolutionaries are revolutionaries. They forced them, almost three thousand prisoners, out of the Bastille.There was nobody to receive them, and they moved around the city like dead people, almost like ghosts. They could not recognize anything. Seventy years before, things had been totally different. Nor could they see anybody who was contemporary to them. And by the evening almost all of them had returned back to the prison. They fought the revolutionaries who were preventing them from getting into the prison.They said, “We cannot live outside. Who is going to give us food? And who is going to take care of us: medical care, shelter, clothes? Who is going to be responsible for all this – you?”And the most amazing thing they said was, “We cannot sleep without chains and without handcuffs. We have become so accustomed to them, it feels that something is missing. We cannot sleep – we tried in the day under some trees, but unless we feel the load, the weight of the chains on the feet, on the hands, we cannot sleep. So please don’t harass us. Life has harassed us enough; now at the end we don’t want to change our lifestyle.”Finally the revolutionaries also recognized their problem. They had not thought about it, that man becomes adapted to a certain situation and then that is his territory. In that territory he is perfectly comfortable and cozy.My own experience is that I have talked with beggars who had bank balances. I don’t have a bank balance; I never did. It just happened by chance because I was continuously traveling, I used to come to the railway station in Jabalpur at least ten or fifteen times a month, either coming or going.There used to be an old beggar outside the railway station. Because the first day I had given him one rupee, he would not accept less than that, and he never asked for more than that. So he had become adapted, I had become adapted: I had to give him that one rupee. In fact, if sometimes I came and I did not find the beggar, I would miss him. I would inquire, “Where is the old man?” We had become very friendly, and if sometimes I could not find him, the next time I would give him two rupees – one for the time when I missed him – because it had been very heavy on me.One day just as I was passing the station I saw him. I was not going out of town, but I was just driving by the railway station, going to meet the doctor of the railway employees at the railway hospital. There I suddenly saw in the corner the old man talking to a young boy, and that young boy was my student. I stopped my car and waited. When they were finished they were both shocked. The father was shocked but I could not understand why. I said, “Why do you look so shocked?”The father said, “I cannot hide it from you. I have been hiding it from everybody, but he is my son and he is your student, and I am preparing him to become at least a doctor.”I asked the boy, “You never told me that you are the son of a beggar.”He said, “My father never allows me. He never meets me anywhere where people can see because if people come to know I am the son of a beggar it will be difficult: difficult in the college, difficult for getting further admission into new colleges. It will become impossible, and my father will be exposed: he can educate his son to become a medical doctor and still he is continuing to beg. He brings me the best of clothes.” I used to see him: out of the whole class, he had the best clothes, the best shoes, everything the best.That day I asked the old man, “How much of a bank balance do you have?”He said, “Now I cannot hide it from you, and I trust that you will not expose the fact that he is my son. I have thirty thousand rupees in the bank.”I said, “With thirty thousand rupees you can start a shop, a small factory. Why do you go on begging in your old age?”He said, “Begging is so comfortable. Everything else can make me bankrupt, but begging can never make me bankrupt. And my earnings are more than any shopkeeper or small factory owner. I earn nearabout fifty rupees per day.” Even a doctor in India does not earn that much, nor a professor. And he said, “I have my customers, and why should I unnecessarily go into something new about which I don’t know anything? Begging is my heritage: my father was a beggar, my father’s father was a beggar, and they were all rich men.”For the first time I became aware of a new dimension of the human mind. It does not matter what condition you are in: slowly, slowly you settle down. And once you have settled down you don’t even want to budge because then again you will have to start from ABC. Again you will have to start learning, again you will have to start facing problems. Right now there are no problems: you know all the answers to all the questions that can arise in a certain situation in which you have become completely enclosed.It is cozy and it is comfortable to live in the old, but it will not bring the flowers of freedom and it will not open the whole sky for you to open your wings and fly. It will not allow you to have aspirations for the stars; it will not allow you to move in any direction or dimension. You will remain just like a dead grave where nothing moves.The new is scary, but the new is what I teach you. You will have to drop your fears, you will have to drop your ugly coziness, you will have to drop your small comforts. These are the things with which you have to pay for the greater joys, the higher realms of being, tremendous possibilities of ecstasies. You will not be a loser, but in the beginning you have to risk something.It is good you are aware that the new makes you scared because for centuries man, animals, everybody has been living with the old. Only man has risen once in a while to have a glimpse of the new. Think about buffaloes: can you conceive that at any time in the millions of years of evolution, buffaloes have eaten any other grass than they eat today? The same grass! Can you conceive that one day buffaloes will be different? They are so settled, so utterly settled and so contented. You cannot make a buffalo a buddha. They are perfectly at ease. Why should they bother?The whole animal kingdom is lower than man only for one reason: man is an explorer; he has the adventurer hidden in him somewhere. His mind may be afraid, scared, but his consciousness wants to have communion with the universe, to touch the stars, to open up to all the beauties and the truth and the godliness of existence.You will have to shift your emphasis from mind to meditation, and all fear will disappear. You will have to shift your attention from your comfortable, cozy – but old and dirty and rotten – state toward something new, fresh, young from the body to consciousness, from mind to no-mind. Then every moment you are confronting the new.And one is thrilled with the new. Once you have learned that the new is not your enemy the fear simply disappears. On the contrary, you start searching for the new. The day you start searching for the new with joy and a dancing heart, you have become a sannyasin. That is my definition of a sannyasin.I define my sannyasins from many dimensions; I want to give you the idea of sannyas from as many aspects as possible. The search for the new is one of the aspects of a seeker.You are saying, “My wanting and need for recognition are gone, along with the doing. Even though deep inside I am tremendously thankful and happy, I find part of myself feeling guilty. I see as well that laziness is not one of my qualities. I can’t find the new way for me to be total in my work. It is becoming very painful.”All your problems are your creations. First, you should be immensely happy that the need for recognition is gone. That is a great achievement. You are no longer dependent on others’ opinions. For the first time you are just yourself and you don’t need anybody to approve. This is the beginning of the birth of individuality. Otherwise people are only cogs in the wheel: whatever others say they believe, even about themselves. All that they know about themselves is what others have said. They go on collecting all kinds of opinions and that’s what their self-knowledge consists of. It is a great experience that the need for recognition is gone. You should be happy with it rather than making some problem out of it.Mind is very clever and very cunning. Even if you are feeling very ecstatic, mind will say, “Beware! You may be just having a hallucination” and it will destroy your blissfulness: “My God! It is possible it may be just a hallucination!” When you have a pain the mind never says that – not in the whole history of mankind. When you are having a migraine the mind never says that it may just be illusory.But if you are having a beautiful space within you, as if a rose is flowering, the mind is going to jump on it immediately: “You are daydreaming, this is all hallucination, illusion. You are being hypnotized.” And you immediately listen to the mind because you have listened to it for centuries. It is just a habit.Along with the recognition, you are saying, your doing has also gone. That’s an even greater achievement than the first one. If the doing is gone, the doer must have gone also. But I suspect that’s where the problem is: doing is gone but the doer is there. That is creating the tension that is making you feel a part of yourself as guilty. Who is this part?If doing is gone, nothing is wrong. In fact one of the basic fundamentals for enlightenment to happen is that your doing should go. That does not mean that you will not do things. You will do things but they will not be fulfillments of your ego or projections of your mind. They will be spontaneous. You will rejoice in doing them, or vice versa: because you rejoice you do them.But it seems the doer is still hiding somewhere within you. So a part has disappeared, but the other part is still there creating a feeling of guilt: it is not good to be lazy, it is not good not to do anything, you should do something, you should not become a parasite. That doer goes on creating problems for you, anxiety for you. If you have been able to let the recognition go, the doing go, release the doer also. But remember, that does not mean that you will become lazy. That is a wrong interpretation by the mind.Mind always interprets anything that is going to become a step leading beyond mind wrongly. When you feel let-go, mind will say, “This is laziness.” Mind is a great condemner. It enjoys condemning others, it enjoys condemning you. Its only joy is to condemn.You are saying, “Even though deep inside I am tremendously thankful and happy, I find part of myself feeling guilty.” You have to become aware of that part and drop it. If you can just drop so much, why carry this small part of being guilty? You have not done any wrong to anyone. You are just feeling guilty because the society brings you up with the idea: “Do something, be somebody. Don’t remain a nobody, don’t become a good-for-nothing. Leave your footprints on the pages of history.”What kind of stupidity is this? Why should I leave my footprints on the pages of history? To torture future children? And why should I be somebody special? Those are ego trips.Much has disappeared but something of the ego has remained, which is making you guilty and which is calling you lazy. But this is not laziness; this is relaxation, let-go. And out of this let-go, out of this relaxation will grow new flowers. That is the difference: laziness is barren, nothing grows out of it, it is a desert. So soon you will see the difference. Just don’t cling to the word laziness. Drop it. It is a very negative and destructive word.I have never done anything in the eyes of the world. From the very beginning my family used to say to me, “You are going to be good for nothing!” And they proved right: I am good only for nothing!They were very much concerned: “How are you going to live your life? How are you going to manage?” And I always told them, “Don’t be worried. If I am not worried, why should you be worried? Something or other will happen, don’t be worried.” But they remained concerned and they continually told me, “This is laziness, this is not good.”And I told them, “This is not laziness; it is my meditativeness. I am just simply being silent. And you will see: if it is laziness, you will find my life a desert where nothing grows. And if I am right and it is a let-go, then you will see that it may not be visible to ordinary people, but those who have eyes can see, those who have ears can hear, that my life has become a song, a dance, a celebration – so many flowers – and that I am so contented and so fulfilled.”I have not known any feeling of guilt for a single moment. Just learn the right language on the path of meditation. Your language belongs to the mind. When you change the track from mind to meditation you will have to change many words that mind uses but which are not applicable in the world of meditation. Call it let-go and suddenly you will feel a tremendous relaxation. Call it laziness and immediately some condemnation, some anxiety, something painful. Learn the new language because you have chosen to be on the path in search of the new and the unknown.I am also against laziness. Laziness is simply dullness, it is stupidity, but let-go is the greatest quality a man can achieve. Relaxation is one of the most beautiful experiences, which can bring you so many gifts from the beyond that you are absolutely unaware of. Change the language.If laziness is not one of your qualities, good. Let relaxation be one of your qualities. Relaxation, non-doing, don’t disturb at all; your life just becomes more creative rather than being more productive. Those two words make the difference again. Mind calls productivity “activeness” and creativity is not counted. It takes time for authentic creativity to be realized.Just the other day, one of Van Gogh’s paintings was sold for forty million dollars. A few months before one of his paintings was sold for fourteen million dollars, and at that time it was said that was the most one could imagine; no painting had fetched fourteen million – now what to say about forty?This man lived in poverty, hungry, starving because he could not sell a single painting. And he was not demanding forty million dollars; sometimes he was ready to give one painting just for one meal. Sometimes just for one cup of tea he was ready to give one of his paintings. But even for just a cup of tea people were not willing: “We don’t have space, where will we put it? Just find someone else.” To them it was a problem: “Where to put it? We don’t have space!”And after his death when slowly, slowly the time for his recognition came he was no longer there. It came one hundred years afterward. It is the case with almost every genius. Every genius comes, for absolutely unknown reasons, before his time. Why can’t these people wait a little? It is just that they arrive when their contemporaries are not here. By the time their contemporaries are here, they are gone, so they never know.Do you think Jesus will ever know how many Christians there are in the world now? Do you think Socrates will ever know that now his name is something that keeps Greece proud? Otherwise, without his name, Greece is nothing. It is his teachings and his disciples, Plato and Aristotle, which have kept Greece at a peak of intelligence – because I don’t think anybody else in the whole of Europe has been able to transcend the sharpness of intelligence that Socrates had. Perhaps his contemporaries have not yet arrived, and twenty-five centuries have passed.When Van Gogh’s paintings were recognized people started searching them out. He must have painted thousands of paintings and just went on giving them away – to friends, as gifts, or for a cup of tea or for a meal. And people received his paintings just not to look crude, not to look uncivilized and they thought, “Once he is gone then we can put the painting in the basement.” Nobody was hanging his paintings in their sitting rooms because anybody looking at the paintings would think, “This man had gone crazy! Why is he putting up this painting?” because at the time Van Gogh’s ideas looked crazy. But his time came. His whole family condemned him, saying, “You have not done a single thing and you are a parasite on your younger brother” – because his younger brother went on supporting him just enough so that he could survive.Van Gogh could never eat the whole week: four days he was eating and three days he was fasting – one day eating, one day fasting, one day eating, one day fasting – because with whatever he could save from those three days he would purchase colors, paints, canvasses, brushes for his painting. There was no other way.Nobody has painted with such love and with such joy, with his own life and his own blood. He destroyed himself in painting. And now there is so much searching going on in the basements of Holland and France where he lived. His paintings have been found in people’s basements, and now the prices of those paintings are unbelievable.The last one was sold the day before yesterday for forty million dollars. When the painting was sold a few months ago the critics were saying, “This is the end; nobody can purchase any painting for a higher price than this.” He had made a record – fourteen million dollars. Before this, the record had been only three million dollars for somebody else’s painting. But this was a big jump, to fourteen million, and within three or four months another of his paintings went for forty million dollars – and I can conceive that the price of his paintings may go still higher. Just now two hundred more paintings have been found and those, too, not in good condition.Now this man was one of the greatest creators the world has known, but he was not a doer, he was not a producer. If he had done anything else – carpentry or shoemaking or tailoring – he would have earned enough and everybody would have respected him as a man who earns his living. But he was continuously condemned as absolutely lazy – and nobody knew what he was doing.The whole day would pass and he would forget completely about eating or even drinking water, he was so absorbed in his painting. Only when the night would descend and it became difficult to see, then he would recognize that the day was gone. He was so poor he could not even manage to purchase a few candles. Sometimes in the night he used to paint outside his house under the street lamp.His brother must have been sensitive. He was young and certainly he understood something about paintings because he was working as a salesman in a shop where paintings and other pieces of art were sold. So he had a certain understanding. He loved his brother but what could he do? He himself was a poor man, somehow surviving, and more than that was not possible for him.But one gift he certainly wanted to give his brother: that he should not die before seeing at least one of his paintings sold. So somehow he collected some money and asked a friend, “Go and purchase a painting from my brother. I just want to give him the consolation that his life has not been absolutely futile. At least he sold one painting.”But the man he had chosen had no sensitivity for paintings, so he simply went to Van Gogh and said, “I would like to purchase a painting.”Van Gogh said, so joyfully, “Come! I don’t have a big place, but I have many paintings.”The man said, “Any will do!” That hurt Van Gogh very much.He said, “Any will do? You don’t want to see my paintings? You don’t want to choose?”He said, “It doesn’t matter; don’t waste my time. Any will do.”He said, “Then I am not going to sell, and it is absolutely certain you have been sent by my brother. Just get out and get lost! And tell my brother that this is not the way to console me. Now I am feeling more hurt and wounded than ever.”Then even his brother never tried again.Creativity happens in a state of let-go. Productivity needs tension, anxiety, a doer, ego, recognition. Creativity needs no recognition, no ego, no doer – just the sheer joy of creating it.At least Van Gogh could show his paintings. I cannot even show my paintings. But you are my paintings. I have been creating in my own way something very invisible and subtle which cannot be shown and which cannot be sold, and nobody will ever know about it. It will not be recorded anywhere how many people were transformed, how many people changed their lives from the lowest to the highest peak of illumination. But nobody can say that I have been uncreative. Day and night I am working – but I am not a doer.One of my friends came from Russia, the Soviet Union, and he shook hands with me and he said, “You should never go to the Soviet Union.”I said, “Why?”“Because anybody touching your hands will immediately shrink back.”I said, “But why?”He said, “Because your hands are bourgeois, you have never done anything, and in the Soviet Union to be bourgeois is the worst condemnation. You need the proletariat’s hand, the laborer’s hand, rough.”I said, “My God, then first I will try – if I have to go to the Soviet Union – to make my hands as rough as I can.”This is true that I have never done anything. But I am not lazy; I have never thought for a moment that I am lazy, although I have never done anything. Even if I am feeling thirsty, I trust somebody is going to appear! And somebody always has appeared, so there is no need to distrust in the future.In America, when my bail was set at five hundred thousand dollars – that’s nearabout seventy-five lakh rupees – even the jailer who was taking me back to the jail was worried. He said, “From where? Even the figure is too big. In my whole life I have never seen or heard anybody being bailed for five hundred thousand dollars. How are you going to manage? – and you look so relaxed and so cool.”I said, “I don’t bother about such things. Something will happen.”He said, “But how will it happen?”I said, “That I don’t know. ‘How’ is not part of my language. It will happen!”He looked surprised; he could not believe it. But within ten minutes it happened. He came running to me and said, “You were right, your bail has been deposited!” He said, “It is unprecedented that for a person against whom no crime has yet been proved: there is no evidence against him; and yet such a large amount for bail. But you are stranger than the judge because you remain so cool and so silent.”I went into the jail and I went immediately to take my shower, because it was my shower time. The jailer was standing there and he said, “You cannot miss your shower even today? If nobody pays your bail, then for at least twenty years you will be in jail.”I said, “That is not the concern right now. Right now the concern is to take a good shower. And I have always trusted. After my shower you come to see me.”And after my shower he was standing outside the bathroom. He said, “Somebody has given the bail.” He could not believe it. “How are you managing things?”I said, “I have never managed. In my whole life I have never done anything deliberately, but things go on happening.”Once you are in a let-go, existence takes care of you. Then you are relaxed. If existence wants you to be in jail for twenty years, that’s perfectly good. If it wants you to be out to prepare other people for jail, that too is good! It depends on existence, whether it is satisfied with one or many.Now I am out, preparing many. Sooner or later, in every country, my people will be in jails – and that too, to convert the prisoners into sannyasins – because in almost every jail, I have sannyasins, and they go on asking for guidance. Now I have to send a few sannyasins to them.It is difficult for me to guide people all over the world from here. They are in jails and they want guidance for meditation, and they have problems. The best will be for my people to start visiting – just once in a while, as a holiday!And finally you are asking for some guidance from me. That is a very dangerous thing because I rarely give guidance, and whenever I give guidance something goes wrong! It is my experience that many times people got married and they came for my blessings. Nirvano would say, “Don’t ask for his blessings because once he has blessed you, you are finished.” And she was right because she had been watching: whoever gets my blessings, within a few days they are separated, something goes wrong.Now, yesterday I had given some advice to Vimal. Vimal seems to be clever; he did not take it. But poor Rafia picked it up. Now you will see what happened to Rafia. He is writing:The last question:OshoI did what you suggested.I did not suggest this to him.I went to sleep saying, Vimal… Vimal… Vimal…I was not suggesting this to him.…and sure enough, I woke up saying, Vimal… Vimal… Vimal… Everything was going great until I started hugging a beautiful Indian girl, showed up for the wrong job, and started speaking with a pronounced English accent. Now I am confused. Beloved master, who am I?…Because that girl he hugged was Vimal’s girlfriend and the job he reached was Vimal’s job, not his job.But he certainly became confused repeating “Vimal… Vimal… Vimal…” the whole night. “Who am I?”So when you ask for guidance, be very intelligent in applying it. The best is first see if somebody else applies it and what happens to him!This beautiful silence, this is my creation. Thousands of lotuses suddenly start flowering. Thousands of hearts suddenly become a tremendous harmony, a song, a blissfulness.Just the other day I said a few words about one of the most sincere, honest and authentic therapists. And just now as I entered I saw him again. He was crying just like a child, with utter joy.These tears are my creation. They will not be recorded in any history book, but they will transform many who will come in contact with him. With his tears he has bridged his heart with my heart, his being with my being. He is one of the silent workers who goes on doing, without bragging about anything.This joke is for him, not to have any more tears but to have great laughter.A frustrated spinster was a menace to the police. She kept phoning up to say that there was a man under her bed. Before long she was sent to the mental hospital where she was treated with the latest drugs until one day she declared that she was cured.“You mean, Miss Rustavian,” asked one of the panel of shrinks, “that you can no longer see a man under you bed?”“No, I can’t,” she replied, “I can see two.”The doctors consulted and diagnosed her complaint as malignant virginity, for which there was only one kind of injection that would cure her. They decided to shut her up in her bedroom with Big Don, the hospital handyman. Big Don was told of her complaint and that he would be locked up with her for an hour. He said that it would not take so long.As the bedroom door closed an anxious group gathered outside. From inside was heard, “No, stop it, Don! Mother would never forgive you.”“Stop yelling! It has got to be done sometime! It should have been done years ago.”“Have it your way by force then, you brute!”“It is only what your husband would have done if you had married.”The medics could not wait. They burst into the room.“I have cured her!” cried Don.“He’s cured me!” called out Miss Rustavian. “He has chopped the legs off the bed!”

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The Supreme Doctrine 01-11Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Supreme Doctrine 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Om, may brahman protect us both. May he nourish us both. May we both achieve energy. May this study make us both illumined. May we never hate each other.Om, peace, peace, peace.Om, may my limbs become strong. Also, let my speech, prana – vital air – sight, hearing, and all the sense organs, be vigorous. The entire existence is the brahman of the Upanishads. May I never deny brahman; may brahman not deny me. Let there be no denial at all. Let there be no denial at least on my part. Whatever virtues are in the Upanishads, may they abide in I who am devoted to the atman – self. May they abide in me.Om, peace, peace, peace.I don’t know where to begin or where to end, because life itself is beginningless and endless. Like these hills around you or the clouds wandering above you, or like the sky, you are also beginningless and endless. Nothing ever begins or ends, and that which can have a beginning or an end is bound to be artificial. Nature remains, abides; it is always there.So whenever the question arises of talking about the ultimate, the supreme, the innermost, the very ground of being, it becomes difficult to know where to begin and where to end because it is always there; it has always been so and it will always be so. There has never been a beginning to it and never will there be an end. So I will begin just in the middle because that is the only possible place to begin, and I will end just in the middle because there is no other way to end it.The first thing I would like to say to you is that I have not chosen this Upanishad to comment upon it. There are already too many commentaries and they have not helped anyone. They may have harmed many, they may have become hindrances to many, but they have not helped anybody. Commentaries cannot help because commentaries are second rate. I am not going to comment on this Upanishad; rather, on the contrary, I am going to respond to it. I will just echo and re-echo.Really, whatsoever I say will belong basically to me. The Upanishad is just an excuse. Through it I will explain myself – remember this. Whatsoever I have felt, whatsoever I have known and lived, I would like to talk about it. But I feel the same has been the case with the seers of the Upanishads. They have known, they have lived, they have experienced the same truth. Their ways of expression may be different. Their language is very ancient; it has to be decoded again so that it becomes available to you, to the contemporary mind. But whatsoever they have said, they have said the basic thing.Whenever someone comes to be a void, whenever someone comes to be a nobody, this happens – that which has happened to the seers of the Upanishads. Whenever you are not, the divine becomes present; whenever you are, the divine is absent.Your presence is the problem, your absence is the door. These rishis have become total nobodies. We don’t even know their names; we don’t know who wrote these Upanishads, who communicated them. They have not signed them. No photograph of these rishis exists, no knowledge about their lives. They have simply become absent. They have said whatsoever is true, but just as a vehicle. They have not been in any way involved in the expression. They have made themselves completely absent so the message becomes totally present.These Upanishads are eternal. They don’t belong to any country, they don’t belong to any religion. They don’t belong, they cannot belong, to anybody. They belong only to those who are ready to take a jump into nothingness.I have chosen to talk about the Upanishads because to me they represent one of the purest expressions of the ultimate that is possible – if it is possible to express it at all. Really, it is difficult, in a sense impossible, to convey that which has been known beyond the mind through the mind. In a sense it is absolutely impossible to say something about that which is felt when you are in the deepest of silences. When words don’t exist within you, when verbalization ceases completely, when intellect is no longer functioning, when the mind is not there at all to memorize – then it happens, then you experience. When the mind comes back, when the memory starts functioning, when the intellect takes possession of you again, the experience has already passed.The experience that was there before is not there now: only echoes of it, only vibrations of it are left. They can only be captured, and they can be expressed only through the mind. That is why it has always been impossible – very, very difficult – for those who have known to say something. Those who don’t know anything can say much. But for those who know, it becomes more and more difficult to say something because whatsoever they say appears false. They can compare the experience with its expressions because they have a living experience. Now they can feel what language is doing to it: it is falsifying it.And when a lived experience comes into words, it looks dead, pale. A lived experience which is total, in which your whole being dances and celebrates, looks just dull, of no significance, when it is expressed through the intellect.Those who don’t know can talk much because they have nothing with which to compare. They have no original experience; they cannot know what they are doing. Once someone knows, he knows what a problem it is to express it.Many have remained totally silent. Many have remained completely unknown because of that – because we can only know about someone who speaks. The moment someone speaks he enters society. When someone stops speaking he leaves society, he is no longer part of it. Language is the milieu in which society exists. It is just like blood: blood circulates in you and you exist. Language circulates within society and the society exists. Without language there is no society. So those who have remained silent, they have fallen out of it. We have forgotten them. Really, we have never known them.Somewhere Vivekananda has said – and it is very, very true – that the Buddhas, Krishnas and Christs that we have known are really not the representatives. They are not really central, they are on the periphery. The most central happenings have been lost. Those who became so silent that they couldn’t communicate with us are not known, cannot be known – there is no way to know them. In a way Vivekananda is right, but those who have become so silent that they have not uttered anything about their experience have not helped us. They have not been really compassionate enough. In a sense they have been totally selfish.It is true that to say anything about truth is difficult, but even then it has to be tried. It must be tried because even a diluted truth will be helpful for those who live in total illusion. Even something which carries a very, very far echo will help them to change.It is not that Buddha is very happy with what he says. Whatsoever he says, he feels it is not true. He feels the same way as Lao Tzu felt. Lao Tzu says, “That which can be said cannot be true. The moment it is said it is falsified.” But still, those who live in worlds of many, many illusions, those who are deeply asleep, fast asleep, for them even a false alarm may be helpful. If they can come out of their sleep, if they can be brought to a new consciousness, to a new being, even a false alarm is good. Of course, when they themselves awaken they will know that it was false – but it will have helped.In a sense, wherever we are and whatsoever we are, we are so false that, really, absolutely pure truth is not needed at all. It cannot penetrate you. It will not have any contact; you will not be able to understand it. Only a very diluted truth, modified – in a sense, falsified – can have any appeal for you, because then you can understand the language; it has been translated for you.These Upanishads are very simple; they speak in a very heart-to-heart way. They are not philosophical; they are religious. They are not concerned with concepts, with theories, with doctrines. They are concerned with a lived truth – what it is and how it can be lived. You cannot think about it, you cannot philosophize about it. You can only move into it and allow it to move into you. You can only be pregnant with it, you can only be totally absorbed in it. You can melt in it.We will talk about the Upanishads, and I will bring my own experience as a response to them. But that is only a stepping-stone. Unless you move into the same dimension, it will not be of much use. Unless you move and take a jump into the unknown, it will not help you. Or, it may even be harmful to you because your mind is already too much burdened, too heavy. It need not be burdened any more. I am here to unburden it.I am not going to teach you some new knowledge. I am going to teach you only a pure type of ignorance. When I say a pure ignorance, I mean innocence. I mean a mind which is totally vacant, open. A mind that knows is never open: it is closed. The very feeling that “I know” closes you. When you feel that “I don’t know” you are open: you are ready to move, ready to learn, ready to travel.I will teach you ignorance, unlearning, not knowledge. Only unlearning can help you. The moment you unlearn, the moment you again become ignorant, you become childlike, you become innocent. Jesus says, “Only those who are like small children will be able to enter into my God’s kingdom.” I will try to make you like small children.A very courageous effort will be needed for it. It is the greatest challenge that can be given to you, and unless you accept the challenge you will not be able to understand the Upanishads – or me.For this challenge a few things are to be understood as basic requirements. The first: put aside all your knowledge. For these eight days, kindly be ignorant. You will not lose that knowledge. If you feel that it is good after eight days, you can start carrying it again. But for these eight days, please put down all the burdens that are on your mind. Whatsoever you know, don’t allow it to interfere here because if you allow it to interfere, I will not be able to create the communion for which I have called you.It is going to be a great experiment. If you put aside your knowledge… And you can, just a decision is needed: “For these eight days I will not carry my knowledge; I will not say ‘I know’; I will just feel that I don’t know anything.” If you can feel this, you are ready to enter into the unknown – because the unknown can be entered only when there is no knowledge. Knowledge can lead you only to the known; only ignorance can lead you to the unknown. Ignorance is just wonderful if you can understand the meaning of it.Put aside whatsoever you know. What do you know really? You simply go on pretending that you know. You go on talking about God and about the soul and about heaven and hell, and you don’t know anything at all. But this pretension costs too much because, by and by, you yourself are deceived by it.For these eight days the first thing to be remembered is to be ignorant. Don’t discuss, don’t argue, don’t question, don’t answer anybody. If you are ignorant, how can you discuss and how can you argue? If you are ignorant, how can you question? Really, if you are ignorant how can you even question? What can you question? Your questions also arise out of your so-called knowledge. What is there to answer? If you can feel that you are ignorant you will become silent, because what is there to think about?Your knowledge goes on revolving around and around, it moves in circles in your mind. Put it aside! – and not in parts, because no one can put it aside in parts. Wholesale! – put it aside completely. Decide that for eight days you will be as ignorant as you were when you were born: just a child, a new baby who knows nothing, asks nothing, discusses nothing, argues nothing. If you can be a little baby, much is possible. Even that which looks impossible is possible.If you are ignorant, only then can I work. Only in your ignorance can I transform you. Your knowledge is the barrier. If you feel that your knowledge is so significant and so important that you cannot put it aside, then go away. Don’t remain here because then it is futile. I am not going to increase your knowledge. I am not interested at all in what you know, I am interested in you – what you are. That being that you are can explode only when these barriers of so-called knowledge are thrown away.Be ready for the unknown, and you can be ready only if you are ready to be ignorant. I say that this is very courageous: to feel ignorant is the greatest daring possible to man. Why? – because knowledge gives you ego, knowledge gives you a feeling that you are somebody, that you know this and that. When you feel that you are ignorant, there is no food for your ego to feed upon. If you are ignorant ego disappears.People come to me and they go on asking how to dissolve the ego, and I say, don’t try. You cannot dissolve it. Rather, put aside your knowledge and the ego will disappear. It will disappear just like when the sun arises in the morning dewdrops disappear from the grass. The ego is a dewdrop. When you are really not knowing, that’s what I mean by ignorance. When you are not knowing and you say, “I don’t know anything, I am standing in darkness,” where can your ego stand? Can it have a foothold? With the knowledge disappears the ego. The first thing: be ignorant.The second thing: the human mind has been totally perverted by serious people. Those who have taken upon themselves the great work of making men serious have destroyed all that is beautiful in you. Puritans, moralists, religious teachers, churches have destroyed all that is beautiful in you because the beauty is related to the nonserious.Ugliness is related to the serious, and religion has become ugly because it has become too much attached to seriousness. Don’t be serious. For these eight days be playful, childlike; playful, nonserious – enjoying. Enjoy yourself enjoying others, enjoying the whole world around you. The hills are beautiful, and there will be rains and there will be clouds. This night is beautiful, the silence is beautiful. But if you are serious your doors are closed; then you are not open to the silence of the night – because except for man nothing is serious in existence.Be playful. It will be difficult, because you are so structured. You have an armor around you and it is so difficult to loosen it, to relax it. You cannot dance, you cannot sing, you cannot just jump, you cannot just scream and laugh and smile. Even if you want to laugh you first want something there to be laughed at. You cannot simply laugh. There must be some cause: only then can you laugh. There must be some cause: only then can you cry and weep.You are serious. You look at life like a business or like mathematics. It is not! Life is poetic, illogical. It is not like work, it is like play. Look at the trees and the animals and the birds; look at the sky: the whole existence is playful. You are very serious, so no wonder you have become separate from existence. You are uprooted from it, and then you feel alienated, then you feel like a stranger, then you feel that this existence is not your own. No one else is responsible for it except you and your seriousness.Put aside knowledge, put aside seriousness; be absolutely playful for eight days. You have nothing to lose. If you don’t gain anything, you will not lose anything. What can you lose in being playful? But I say to you, you will never be the same again. If you can really be playful, you will have a new perspective, a new way to look, a new way to be. When you go back you will not be the same man. Your whole life will change its meaning for you because the meaning is given by you. Now life looks boring, life looks meaningless. You have made it so because of your seriousness. Life is playful, beautiful, but it can be beautiful only if your eyes are open to beauty.People go on asking, “Where is God?” You cannot find him because he is a player and you are serious. Hindus have been saying for centuries that this existence is God’s play, and you are so work-oriented, so serious, that you cannot meet him. Of course! Obviously! There is no possibility of your meeting him. You move in different dimensions. He moves in play. The whole existence is just a play. It is not a work; it is not serious.Put aside your seriousness, and for eight days become godlike, playful. It will be difficult because you feel you are very mature. You are not. You have not gained maturity. Of course you have lost your childhood, but just losing childhood is not synonymous with being mature. You can lose childhood without becoming mature. Maturity is not old age; maturity is not concerned with age at all. Maturity is a growth, and the growth must be through childhood, not against it, remember.Your maturity is false because it has been against the child. The child was born; maturity has been created. The child was natural; you are artificial, cultivated. You will have to go back to the child to regain the source from where growth is possible.My insistence on being playful is because of this: I want you to go back to the very point from where you stopped growing. There was a point in your childhood when you stopped growing and when you started being false. You may have been angry, a small child in a tantrum, angry, and your father or your mother said, “Don’t be angry. This is not good.” You were natural, but a division was created and a choice was there for you. If you wanted to be natural then you would not get the love of your parents.Of course, you wanted the love; that was the only security for you, you could not have existed without it. So you opted, you surrendered. You pushed your nature aside. You started laughing and smiling; you became a good boy or a good girl. The day you became a good boy or a good girl was the day of catastrophe. From that moment you have never been natural. From that moment you have been serious, never playful. From that moment you have been dying, not alive. From that moment you have been aging, not maturing.In these eight days I want you to go back to the point where you started being “good” as against being natural. Be playful so your childhood is regained. It will be difficult because you will have to put aside your masks, your faces; you will have to put aside your personality. But remember, the essence can assert itself only when your personality is not there, because your personality has become an imprisonment. Put it aside. It will be painful, but it is worth it because you are going to be reborn out of it. No birth is without pain. If you are really determined to be reborn, then take the risk.For these eight days be small children again. Don’t criticize anybody, don’t condemn anybody. That type of nonsense belongs to so-called mature people, not to children. What children do, do. They enjoy, and they enjoy such simple things that for us so-called mature people it looks absurd. The whole world is filled with beauty, truth, love, but you cannot enjoy anything.When we are meditating, from tomorrow morning, enjoy it. Remember this: regain your childhood. Everyone longs for it, but no one is doing anything to regain it. Everyone longs for it. People go on saying that childhood was paradise and poets go on writing poetry about the beauty of childhood. Who is preventing you? Regain it! I give you this opportunity to regain it.Poetry will not help, and just remembering that it was paradise is not of much use. Why not move into it again? Why not be a child again? I say to you that if you can be a child again you will start growing in a new way. For the first time you will be really alive again, and the moment you have the eyes of a child, the senses of a child – young, vibrating with life – the whole life vibrates with you.Remember, it is your vibration that needs transformation. The world is already always vibrating in ecstasy; only you are not tuned. The problem is not with the world, it is with you: you are not tuned to it. The world is dancing, always celebrating, every moment it is in a festivity. The festival goes on from eternity to eternity, only you are not tuned to it. You have fallen apart from it, and you are very serious, very knowing, very mature. You are closed. Throw away this enclosure! Move again into the current of life.When the storm comes, the trees will be dancing; you also dance. When the night comes and everything is dark, you also be dark. When the morning sun rises, let it rise in you also. Be childlike, enjoying, not thinking of the past. A child never thinks of the past. Really, he has no past to think about. A child is not worried about the future; he has no time consciousness. He lives totally unworried. He moves in the moment; he never carries any hangover. If he is angry then he is angry, and in his anger he will say to his mother, “I hate you.” And this is not just words, this is a reality. Really, in that moment he is in total hate.The next moment he will come out of it and he will be laughing and he will give a kiss to his mother and he will say, “I love you.” There is no contradiction. These are two different moments. He was total hate and now he is total love. He moves just like a river goes on moving, zigzag. But wherever he is – wherever the river is – he is total, flowing.For these eight days be like children – total. If you hate, hate; if you love, love; if you are angry, then be angry; and if you are festive, then be festive and dance. Don’t carry anything over from the past. Remain true to the moment; don’t hanker for the future. For these eight days drop out of time. That’s why I say don’t be serious: because the more serious you are, the more time conscious you are. A child lives in eternity; there is no time for him. He is not even aware of it. These eight days will be real meditation if you drop out of time. Live the moment and be true to it.So, put aside knowledge, put aside seriousness, and thirdly, put aside the division of mind and body. Divided, you cannot meet the oneness of existence. Divided you cannot come to the nondual reality. If you are dual, reality will be dual. You have to be one; only then does the reality begin to be one. It is you who ultimately decide what reality is. If you are mad, the whole existence is mad. If you are silent, the whole existence is silent. If you are in love, you feel that the whole existence is loving.It is you who decide the quality of the existence around you – and you are divided. You think your body and your mind are two things; not only two, but contrary, opposed, fighting: enemies. No, they are not. They are two extremes of one rhythm; they are two poles of one existence. The outer is the body, the inner is the soul, but between the outer and the inner you exist. You are neither the inner nor the outer. The outer is your part and the inner is also your part. You exist in between.Become a unity. At least for eight days, don’t divide yourself. Become one. If you can become one, you will release a tremendous energy. Only that energy can lead you into meditation; otherwise there is no way.Go into a church: they talk and they talk and they talk; they preach. Go to a religious meeting: words, word, words – as if God is only a cerebral question that has to be solved through mind.No, this will not be of much help. Mentation alone won’t do; the body has to be brought in. That’s why, in my meditation techniques, I don’t take you as divided – you are one. If your mind is feeling angry, allow your body to be angry. If your mind is feeling happy, allow your body to dance. Don’t create a division. Let yourself come deep down into the body, and allow the body to flow to your innermost core. Become a flow.You are frozen. I would like to melt you and create a flow again. That’s why I insist on active meditation. By active I only mean that your body must be involved in it. If you simply sit in a buddha posture, you can go on thinking and thinking and thinking; the body is not involved in it and the body is the world. Through the body you are related to the existence, through the body you exist. Your meditation must in some way be deeply rooted in the body; otherwise it will become just a dream floating in the mind, just like clouds without any roots in the earth. I want to push you back to the earth.For these eight days don’t create any division. Be both body and soul simultaneously. The feeling, just the feeling that you are one, will dissolve the many anguishes, many tensions, which you have created by an artificial division. The whole society, the modern society, is paranoid because of this division, schizophrenic because of this division, this split. Standing against yourself, fighting with yourself – nonsense, but everyone is doing it.In this camp be one with your body, have a nondual flow. Be alive in the body. In the meditations use your body as much as possible. Only then will you have a real depth in meditation. So don’t create division. These three things you have to remember.And now, a few more points and then I will take the sutra – a few more points for these eight days. One, give more and more emphasis to exhalation. Really, don’t inhale, only exhale. Don’t be disturbed when I say don’t inhale. I mean allow the body to inhale. Exhale and allow the body to inhale; don’t inhale. Whenever you remember, exhale deeply and then relax and leave the body to inhale.This will give you very deep relaxation – because exhalation is death; inhalation is life. The first thing a child has to do is to inhale and the last thing an old man has to do is to exhale. Death begins with exhalation, life begins with inhalation. And remember that death is total relaxation. Life is tension, death is relaxation.Meditation is more like death than like life, but death is not against life. Death is the very source of all life. Life comes out of death and moves again into death. Death is like the ocean and life is like a river: it comes and falls into the ocean. Then again clouds arise and again it rains and again a river is created, and it moves again to the ocean.Death is like the ocean, life is like a river. Death is total relaxation. That’s why we are unconsciously afraid of exhalation. We inhale, but we never exhale. Only the body exhales as a necessity. Change it completely! For these eight days, exhale and allow the body to inhale. That will relax you – your body, your mind, your whole nervous system. When I say exhale deeply, I don’t mean for you to create any strain. Don’t create any strain. Simply exhale deeply – enjoy it, as if you are dying in it. Your life is moving into the ocean of death. Relax and surrender, and exhale deeply and enjoy it.And then wait. I don’t say prevent inhalation – no. Simply wait. Don’t do anything for inhalation, for or against. The body will take the inhalation by itself and if you have deeply exhaled, a deep inhalation will occur. But first your emphasis should be on exhalation.Secondly: we will be meeting here three times a day, but there will be time in between. What are you going to do in that time? Remember one thing: don’t do what you have always been doing. Don’t continue it – the same talk the same way. Don’t continue it, put it aside. Be new, be original. Don’t do whatsoever you have been doing. Change it, because it has become a habit and if you continue that pattern new things cannot evolve. Put it aside, throw it away.For these eight days don’t move in your old patterns of habit. Don’t say things which you have always been saying. The moment you remember, stop. You know you have said this so many times; you have been saying this to your wife for years, and you know what she will answer. Everything has become a routine, a mechanical repetition.Don’t say it. Say something new. Or if you cannot find something new to say, if it is very difficult to find, remain silent: that will be something new. Or, and this will look foolish, but I want you to be foolish for these eight days – don’t use words, use gestures. If you want to say something to your friend or to someone in the room or to your wife or anyone, use gestures, don’t use language. Just be as if deaf and dumb: use gestures, say something through gestures. Or, if you cannot express through gestures, then use sounds – but don’t use words. A deep exultation will happen to you, a deep benediction will come to you.Use sounds or gestures. Don’t use words, because words are the mind. Use sounds like birds and animals do, or gestures. You will have a new feeling in yourself, you will feel a new being within yourself, because the old pattern of the personality will not be functioning. You can also do this alone and it will be worth it. Anytime during the day, sit alone – go to a tree, sit alone near it and start making sounds. Don’t use words; just as small babies do, go on uttering any sound, repeating and enjoying it: baby talk without any meaning. Just utter any sounds and enjoy the very utterance.What I mean is: here, don’t be a victim of the usual pattern. Don’t be concerned with anyone else. You are always concerned. Be concerned with yourself. Be totally selfish; be concerned with your own self. Enjoy your being, enjoy the surroundings, meditate with the group and alone, and be totally centered in yourself. Don’t think about what others are doing. Allow others to do whatsoever they want to do. Don’t interfere with anybody. Even the idea that you can allow others to do whatsoever they want will free you because you are unnecessarily burdened by others. Be totally selfish.It does not look very religious when I say be totally selfish. To me it is the only religion because only when you are really selfish can you do something for others. Because unless you have something, what can you do? How can you help? How can you love? How can there be compassion? You are nothing within and you go on serving others and thinking about others. That is only an escape to forget yourself. In this meditation camp don’t do that. Remember yourself and forget others.And the last thing: in the meditations, don’t do them partially, don’t do them half-heartedly. Nothing will come out of it. Meditation is not mathematical. Don’t think, “If I do fifty percent, then at least fifty percent will be the outcome.” No, zero will be the outcome. Only a one-hundred percent effort can bring you any results; less will not do.It is just like heating water. At a particular degree, a hundred degrees, it evaporates. Don’t think that at fifty degrees half will evaporate. It will not evaporate at all; it will just become lukewarm. I don’t want you to become lukewarm here. Be either hot or cold. If you are cold, then leave. No need to make any effort unnecessarily. Why tire yourself? If you are a hundred percent hot, be here and you will evaporate. I guarantee that; that’s absolutely certain.If you make a hundred percent effort, if you don’t withhold yourself, if you melt in the process completely and forget yourself, abandon yourself completely in it, the thing for which you have been hankering for lives together can happen. It can happen in a single moment – only a totality of abandonment is needed.And we will be doing these three meditations a day in a group. That too is for a specific reason: because you are individuals only on the top. Deep down you are not individuals. We belong to each other; we are rooted in one consciousness. So a group meditation can be a tremendous experience. You are not alone here. If you can abandon yourself, if you can surrender, if you can melt completely, then the group soul takes you over, you are not there. Then the group dances and you dance as part of it. Then the group feels blissful and you feel blissful as part of it. Then the group moves, sways, dances, and you are part of it. Abandon yourself totally, and then the group takes you over. It becomes a fast, strong current and you are simply taken over.These three group meditations are not individual meditations. You start as an individual, but sooner or later you are not there and the group soul has started functioning. When the group soul starts functioning, you have entered the divine. So don’t remain individuals; that is false, egoistic. Melt into others, and things will start happening to you.Many things are possible, and I hope they will happen to you. If you are really ready, if you have been dreaming about them, hoping about them, and you have come here not as a casual visitor but as a seeker – to stake something, to accept the challenge and to move into the greatest adventure that is possible to human consciousness – then everything can happen to you.Now I will talk about the sutra:Om, may brahman protect us both. May he nourish us both. May we both achieve energy. May this study make us both illumined. May we never hate each other.Om, peace, peace, peace.It is beautiful. The teacher and the taught both are praying to the ultimate – the disciple and the master both are praying to the ultimate.Om, may brahman protect us both. Because as a master or as a disciple, you are not real. Because the master is a division, the disciple is a division. The master is a fragment and the disciple is also a fragment. Both are praying that the ultimate should take care, should take control. The master will lose himself as the master and the disciple will lose himself as the disciple. They will become one; in a deeper reality, they will melt into one. …may brahman protect us both.Now forget the Upanishad. We are here and let this prayer be yours: …may brahman protect us both.I should not function here as an individual, you should not function here as an individual. Rather, we should become one. I am ready; if you are also ready to meet me there is no difficulty. Then it is not that I am leading you toward something, not that you are led by me, but we both are moving toward something together. I am not the leader and you are not the led. I am not the teacher and you are not the taught. We both are moving toward a deeper reality together. No one is the teacher and no one is the taught. This is the feeling of the sutra.…may brahman protect us both. May he nourish us both. May we both achieve energy. May this study make us both illumined. May we never hate each other. Om, peace, peace, peace. There is every possibility that the disciple may start hating the master because if you love, the possibility of hate is always there. If you love the master, then the other part of that love is hate. When you love, hate can erupt any moment. Hate is part of it. Really, love and hate are not two things, but two aspects. Hate is not against love; it is the counterpart of it – the other side of the coin. So when a disciple loves the master, every moment there is the possibility that he may hate. The possibility will grow more when the master tries to transform him – because then he seems dangerous, then he seems destructive.If I say, “Throw away your knowledge,” you will feel that I am like an enemy to you because your knowledge is your treasure. If I say, “Don’t be serious; be like children,” your ego will feel hurt. You will feel, “This man is leading me toward something which will be stupid, foolish.” You can start hating me any moment. If I am really bent upon transforming you, mutating you, then the possibility is always more and more that you will start hating me.That’s why the master says: May this study make us both illumined. May we never hate each other. This sentence is really something – something exceptional, extraordinary: May this study make us both illumined. The master is already illumined; otherwise he is not the master. The disciple is not illumined; otherwise there is no need to be a disciple. But the master says, May this study illumine us both – make us both illumined. This is really subtle. The master is awakened, but this awakening is his own experience, not the disciple’s. The disciple only believes that the master is awakened; he cannot know it. When the master and disciple move as a couple, as a pair, not different and separate – together – then when the awakening comes, the disciple will come to know that both have become awakened, both have become buddhas.This is one meaning; another meaning is also there. You can be illumined alone; that is one experience. But when you move with someone else and the illumination happens to both, it is something else again; it is not the same.Buddha is illumined, enlightened, under the bodhi tree. This is individual illumination; he has come to an individual awakening. But the whole world around him, millions and millions of souls around him, are walking in sleep. Buddha moves among these sleepwalkers and tries to awaken them. Whenever someone is awakened, again Buddha’s own illumination is increased.Remember, whereas before one lamp was burning in the darkness, now two lamps are burning. Then a third one awakens and three lamps are burning, and a fourth one awakens and the light goes on growing. The light goes on growing and now Buddha is no longer an individual.So whenever, wherever, enlightenment happens, it is his enlightenment also. This is deep and subtle, but worth remembering always – that a buddha’s enlightenment also goes on growing. Whenever a disciple awakens, Buddha’s light grows.Buddha is already awakened; there is no problem about it. It is just like I burn a lamp in a room and the room is lit: there is no darkness. Then I bring another lamp, and the light increases. Then I bring a third lamp, and the light increases more. The whole world goes on being filled with more and more light whenever a master is capable of helping a disciple to be enlightened.This seer says a wonderful thing. No one has said it anywhere: May this study make us both illumined.Om, may my limbs become strong. Also, let my speech, prana – vital air – sight, hearing, and all the sense organs be vigorous.That’s what I am saying to you. Allow your body to be relived by you. Don’t separate it; be joined together with it; move into it deeply. When you move deeply into it, everything becomes strong, alive, new.Also let my speech, my prana – vital air – sight, hearing, and all the sense organs be vigorous. All existence is the brahman of the Upanishads. May I never deny brahman…This is one of the most revolutionary things ever uttered.May I never deny brahman; may brahman not deny me. Let there be no denial at all. Let there be no denial at least on my part.Don’t deny, because everything is brahman, everything is that absolute. So whenever you deny, you deny existence. Whenever you condemn – and you may condemn whomsoever you like – whatsoever you condemn, you condemn brahman. If you condemn a thief, if you condemn a murderer, he is condemned because only it – brahman – is there. That is why I say this is one of the most revolutionary sayings.All existence is the brahman. May I never deny brahman… in any way – conscious, unconscious, open or hidden. May I never deny brahman. Let there be no denial at all.The negative mind, the denying mind, is the irreligious mind. The mind which goes on saying no, which does not have the capacity and courage to say yes, is the irreligious mind. The religious mind is a yea-saying mind. Even if there is something which looks wrong to you and your whole mind feels like condemning it, a religious mind will say, “It appears to me that way, but who knows? It is my judgment that it is wrong; it may not be so – because what is the value of my judgment?”Some people brought a woman to Jesus and they said, “She has committed adultery and she has to be killed. And this has been the law – kill her with stones, by throwing stones at her.”And Jesus said, “The law is true, but only those persons can throw stones at her who have not committed adultery ever – not even in the mind. So come forward! – only those persons who have not committed adultery, actually or in imagination.”The crowd had stones; they were standing ready to kill her. But now people started dispersing because there was no one who had not committed adultery in the mind.Finally, Jesus and the woman were left. The crowd had dispersed, and the woman said, “I have done wrong. I am guilty, punish me.”Jesus said, “Who am I to punish you? Who am I to punish you or condemn you? It is between you and your God.”This is the attitude of the religious man: no condemnation. Who are you to condemn? – self-appointed, unnecessarily creating problems for yourself and others. Don’t deny. Denial goes deep: you deny your body, you deny your senses, you deny everything. You have become a great denier. Then, when you become suffocated, you cry and you say, “Why this anguish? Why this misery?” This misery is created by you. A person who goes on denying everything will become more and more shrunken, frozen inside. He cannot do anything: everything is wrong. He cannot eat this, he cannot love in this way, he cannot move in this way, he cannot do this or that. Only cannots and cannots all around him – denials and denials. Then life becomes suffocated. Then you feel miserable.This is one of the most revolutionary sayings ever uttered – that there should be no denial at all: Let there be no denial at least on my part. This goes even deeper. Look at the beauty of it. Because there is every possibility that if I say to you, “Don’t deny,” and someone denies, you will deny him. Why are you denying? If I say, “Don’t condemn” and someone condemns, you will condemn him. The mind goes on playing tricks. In new shapes it brings back all the old diseases again and again.I was talking to a woman who has a great condemning mind. She goes on condemning everyone. Whenever she comes to me she goes on condemning this and that. Then I told her, “This is not good. I don’t say that whatsoever you say is not true. It may be; that is not the point. Your condemning is wrong.”So she said, “If you say that, then I will not condemn anybody.”The next day she came again and she said, “Another of your disciples is condemning. He is not good.” Now the definition of what is good and what is bad has changed, but the condemnation continues. Now he is not good.The rishi says:Let there be no denial at all. Let there be no denial at least on my part. Whatever virtues are in the Upanishads, may they abide in I who am devoted to the atman. May they abide in me.Om, peace, peace, peace.A master is really the home, the abode of all the virtues. Whatsoever the Upanishads teach, whatsoever virtues are there are nothing compared to the heart of the master. But the deepest virtue is in his humility, humbleness. He still goes on praying that all the virtues which the Upanishads sing about “should abide in me, they should not leave me, they should remain in my heart.”A real humbleness goes on praying: that is the point. It is never non-prayerful. Even when everything has been achieved, the prayer continues – because prayerfulness is humbleness, and because prayerfulness is simplicity, and because prayerfulness is innocence. Even if the ultimate is achieved, the prayerfulness goes on continuing.I have heard about one Sufi mystic, Bayazid. He became enlightened, but still he was praying, just as ever. So one of his disciples became disturbed and he said, “Master, you need not pray. You are already enlightened. Why are you praying?”Bayazid is reported to have said, “Before, I prayed for enlightenment, now also I pray for enlightenment.”The disciple couldn’t understand and said, “What do you mean?”The master said, “I prayed so that enlightenment may happen to me. Now it has happened, and I pray in thankfulness, in gratitude that it has happened.” But prayerfulness continues – the same prayerfulness.Prayerfulness is an attitude. The master is the abode of all the virtues. Of course, the Upanishads are created by the masters, not vice versa. No Upanishad can create a master, and a single master can create all the Upanishads. But the master says:Whatever virtues are in the Upanishads, may they abide in I who am devoted to the atman. May they abide in me.Om, peace, peace, peace.

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The Supreme Doctrine 01-11Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Supreme Doctrine 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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At whose desire and by whom impelled does the mind alight on its objects? By whom impelled does the chief prana – vital force – proceed to its function? By whom impelled do men utter this speech? What deva or god directs the eyes and the ears?It – the atman – is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech, the prana of the prana, and the eye of the eye. Wise men separating the atman from these – sense functions – rise out of sense life and attain to immortality.Life is not there at its maximum when you are born; it is at its minimum. And if you remain at that level, you will have a life which is just near death – just a borderline life. Only an opportunity is given by birth, only an opening is made.Life has to be achieved. Birth is just a beginning, not the end. But we normally stay at the point of birth. That’s why death happens. If you stay at the point of birth you will die. If you can grow beyond birth you can grow beyond death. Remember this very deeply: death is not against life; death is against birth. Life is something else. In death only birth ends and in birth only death begins. Life is something totally different. You have to attain it, achieve it, actualize it. It is given to you as a seed, just as a potentiality – something which can be, but which is not already there.You also have every chance of missing it. You can be alive because you are born, but that is not synonymous with really being in life. Life is your effort to actualize the potentiality. Hence the meaning of religion; otherwise there is no meaning in religion. If life begins with birth and ends in death, then there is no meaning for religion. Religion is futile, nonsense. But if life doesn’t begin with birth, then religion has some meaning. Then it becomes the science of how to evolve life out of birth. And the more you move away from birth in life, the more you also move away from death because death and birth are parallel, similar, the same – two ends of one process. If you move away from one, simultaneously you are moving away from the other.Religion is a science to achieve life. Life is beyond death. Birth dies; life, never. To achieve this life you have to do something. Birth is given to you. Your parents have done something: they have loved each other, they have melted into each other, and out of their life force, melting into each other, a new phenomenon, a new seed – you – was born. But you have not done anything for it: it is a gift. Remember, birth is a gift. That’s why all the cultures pay so much respect to parents – birth is a gift, and you cannot repay it. The debt cannot be repaid. What can you do to repay it? Life has been given to you, but you have not done anything for it.Religion can give you a new birth, a rebirth. You can be reborn, but this birth will happen through some alchemical change within you. Just as the first birth happened through two life forces meeting outside you – they created an opportunity for you to enter, to be born: a deep alchemy – now a similar thing has to be done within you. Your parents, your mother and your father, met. Two forces, feminine and masculine, were meeting to create an opportunity for some new entity to be born. Two opposite forces were meeting, two polarities were meeting. And whenever two polarities meet, something new is born, a new synthesis is achieved. A similar thing has to happen within you.You also have two polarities within you, the feminine and the masculine. Let me explain it a little in detail. Your body is born out of two polarities: cells from your mother and cells from your father – they create your body. You have both types of cells – those which came from your mother and those which came from your father. Your body consists of two polarities, feminine and masculine. You are both, everyone is both. Whether you are man or woman makes no difference. If you are a man you have a woman within you: your mother is there. If you are a woman you have a man within you: your father is there. They can again meet within you. And the whole of Yoga, the whole of Tantra, the alchemy, the whole process of religion, is how to create an orgasm, a deep intercourse between polarities within you. When they meet within you, a new type of being is born, a new life becomes alive.If you are a man, then your conscious is masculine and your unconscious is feminine. If you are a woman, your conscious is feminine, your unconscious is masculine. Your conscious and unconscious must meet so that a new birth becomes possible. What can you do for their meeting to happen? Bring them nearer. You have created a separation, you have created all types of barriers. You don’t allow them to meet. You try to exist with the conscious and you go on suppressing the unconscious. You don’t allow it.If a man starts weeping and crying, someone is bound to say immediately, “What are you doing? You are doing something womanish, feminine.” The man stops immediately. The masculine is not expected to weep and cry. But you have the possibility – the unconscious is there. You have moments of feminineness, you have moments of masculineness; everyone does.A woman can become ferocious, male, in some moods, in some moments. But then she will suppress. She will say, “This is not good, this is not womanly.” We go on creating a separation, a distance. That distance has to be thrown away; your conscious, your unconscious must come nearer. Only then can they meet, only then can they have a deep intercourse. An orgasm can happen within you. That orgasm is known as spiritual bliss.One type of orgasm is possible between your body and the body of the polar-opposite sex; it can happen only for a single moment because you meet only on the periphery. The peripheries meet and then they separate. Another type, a deeper type of orgasm, can happen within. But then you meet at the center and there is no need to separate again. Sexual ecstasy can only be momentary; spiritual ecstasy can be eternal. Once attained, you need not lose it. Really, once attained, it is difficult to lose it, impossible to lose it. It becomes such an integration the fragments disappear completely.That’s why when someone asked Buddha, “Who are you? A deva, a heavenly being?” he said, “No.” And the questioner went on asking if he was this or that. Then the questioner became desperate, because Buddha went on saying no. Then finally he asked, “At least you must say that you are male. You must say yes.” Buddha said, “No.” “Then are you a female?” the man asked desperately. Buddha said, “No.” – because a new unity had come into being which was neither male nor female.When your inner man and inner woman meet, you are neither: you transcend sex. That’s the meaning of the oldest Indian image of Shiva as Ardhanarishwar – half man, half woman. That is the symbol of the inner meeting. Shiva is neither: half man, half woman – both and neither. He transcends sex.Remember, unless you transcend sex, you cannot transcend duality. This is a deep psychological problem – and not only psychological, but ontological also. If you remain a man or a woman, how can you conceive the oneness of existence? You cannot. Being a man, you cannot conceive yourself as one with the woman. Being a woman, you cannot conceive yourself as one with the man. A duality persists.Sex is the basic duality. And we have been arguing and discussing for centuries how to attain the nondual. But we go on discussing it as if it is some intellectual matter: “How to attain the nondual?” It is not an intellectual matter; it is ontological, existential. You can attain the nondual only when the duality within you disappears. It is not a question of meditating on the nondual and thinking, “I am brahman.” Nothing will come out of it; you are simply deluding yourself unless the basic duality of sex disappears within you, unless you come to the moment where you cannot say who you are – man or woman.This happens only when your inner man and woman melt so much that they dissolve into each other and all the boundaries are lost, all the distinctions are lost, and they are one. When your inner orgasm, the spiritual ecstasy happens, you are neither. Only when you are neither is life born.In a single moment of meeting between your parents – your mother and father – you were born: in a single moment of meeting. Remember, life is always out of meeting, never out of separation. Life comes only in a deep meeting, in a deep communion. For a single moment your father and mother were one, they were not two. They were functioning as one being. In that oneness you were born.Life always comes out of oneness. And the life I am talking about, or Jesus talks about and Buddha talks about, is the life which will happen when inside you – within you – again a communion, a melting, happens, and the two sexualities within you dissolve.Remember, I say again and again that sex is the basic duality, and unless you transcend sex, brahman cannot be achieved. And all other dualities are just reflections and reflections of this basic duality. Birth and death – again a duality. They will disappear when you are neither male nor female. When you have a consciousness which goes beyond both, birth and death disappear, matter and mind disappear, this world and that world disappear, heaven and hell disappear. All dualities disappear when the basic duality within you disappears, because all dualities are simply echoing and re-echoing the basic division within you.That’s why the old, ancient Indian seers put brahman in the third category. He’s not male or female. They call him napunsak – impotent. They call him the third sex, the ultimate reality of the third sex. The word brahman belongs to napunsakling: it is neither or it is both. But one thing is certain: it transcends the duality. That’s why other conceptions about God look immature, childish. Christians call him father. This is childish, because then where is the mother? And how is this son Jesus born? They say Jesus is the only son, but where is the mother? The father alone giving birth? If the father alone gives birth to Jesus, then he is both – mother and father. Then don’t call him father. Then the duality comes in.Or, some religions have called the ultimate being the mother. Then where is the father? These are just anthropomorphic feelings. Man cannot even think about the ultimate in any other form than human, so he calls it father or mother. But those who have known and those who have transcended the anthropocentric attitude, the man-oriented attitude – say he is neither. He transcends both; he is a meeting of both.In the ultimate, mother and father both are merged. Or, if you allow me the expression, I would like to say: the brahman is mother and father in eternal orgasm – one in the eternal ecstasy of meeting. And out of that meeting comes the whole creation, out of that meeting comes the whole play, out of that meeting all that exists is born.Here we will be trying to bring your unconscious and conscious nearer, your feminine, your masculine nearer. You will have to help me, to cooperate with me. In the meditation techniques you have to destroy all the barriers between your conscious mind and the unconscious. You have to be as free, as totally free as possible because suppression has created the barriers.So don’t suppress. If you feel like screaming, scream. The very scream will bring your conscious and unconscious nearer. If you feel like dancing, dance. The very dance will bring your conscious and unconscious nearer. Really, dance can be very helpful, because in dance your body and your mind are in a deep meeting. It is not only the body which is moving; within the body your consciousness is also moving. A dance becomes a dance only when your body is filled with the grace of your spirit, when your spirit is flowing out of your body, when your spirit has taken a rhythm with the body.All the old religions were dancing religions. They were more authentic. Our new modes of religion are just false. You go into a temple or into a church or into a gurdwara and you just verbalize. Someone preaches and you listen. It has become cerebral. Or, you pray and you talk with God. Even with God you use language. You cannot be silent with him; you cannot believe that he can understand you without your talking. You have no faith. You don’t trust him; you want to explain everything to him.I have heard…A mother overheard her small child praying in the night to God, and he was saying, “Dear God, beloved God, stop Tommy from throwing things at me – and by the way, I have told you this before.”But this is what we all are doing: praying to God to “Stop Tommy from throwing things at me.” Even if you go to the Vedic rishis they are doing the same: “Do this; don’t do that.” You cannot allow him to do whatsoever is his will. You give your own program. And if he follows you, you are a believer, and if he doesn’t follow you, you will say that he doesn’t exist. He can exist only if he exists as your follower.But existence cannot follow you. Existence is greater than you; existence is the whole. You are just a fragment, and a fragment cannot be followed. The fragment has to follow the whole. This is what a religious mind is: the fragment following the whole, the fragment surrendering to the whole, the fragment not struggling, the fragment in a let-go.Religion has become verbal, linguistic. Here we will try to bring the authentic religion. The secretmost core of it is that you must come to it totally – with your mind, your body, your emotions, everything. Nothing is denied. Cry and weep and laugh and dance, and then sit in silence. Do all the things that your inner being happens to do; don’t force it to do anything. Don’t say, “This is not good; I should not do it.” Allow a spontaneous flow. Then the unconscious will come nearer and nearer to the conscious.We have created the gap through suppression: “Don’t do this, don’t do that,” and we go on suppressing. Then the unconscious is suppressed. It becomes dark. It becomes a part in our own house where we never enter. Then we are divided. And, remember, then there are perversions.If you allow your unconscious to come nearer to your conscious, much sex-obsession will disappear. If you are a man and you deny your unconscious, you are denying your inner woman; then you will be attracted to outer women too much. It will become a perversion because now it is a substitute. The inner feminine has been denied; now the outer feminine will become obsessive to you. You will think and think about it: now your whole mind will become sexual. If you are a woman and you have denied the man, then “man” will take possession of you. Then whatsoever you do or think, the basic color will remain sexual.There is so much fantasy about sex because you have denied your inner other. So now this is a compensation. Now you are compensating for something which you have denied to yourself. Look at the absurdity: the more you get obsessed with the other sex the more you feel afraid; the more you deny the inner the more you suppress it; and the more you suppress it the more you become obsessed.Your so-called brahmacharis are totally obsessed with sex for twenty-four hours a day; they are bound to be. It is natural: nature takes revenge. To me, brahmacharya – celibacy – means you have come very near to your own feminine or your own masculine, then it has come so near there is no substitution for it. You are not obsessed with it; you don’t think about it. It disappears.When your own unconscious is nearer to you, you need not substitute it with someone else outside. Then a miracle happens. If your unconscious is very near, then whenever you love someone, a woman or a man, that love is not pathological. If your unconscious is so near, that love is not pathological. It is not possessive, it is not mad. It is very silent, tranquil, calm, cool. Then the other is not a substitute and you are not dependent on the other. Rather, the other becomes just a mirror.Remember the difference: the other is now not a substitute, something which you have denied. The other becomes a mirror of your inner part, of your unconscious. Your wife, your beloved, becomes just a mirror. In that mirror you see your unconscious. Your lover, your friend, your husband becomes a mirror. And in that mirror you can see your unconscious clearly mirrored, projected outside. Then wife and husband can help each other to bring their unconscious nearer and nearer.A moment comes – and it must come if life has really been a successful effort – when wife and husband are no longer wife and husband: they have become companions on the eternal journey. They help each other; they have become mirrors to each other. They reveal the unconscious of the other and they help each other to know themselves. Now there is no pathology, no dependence.Remember one more thing: if you deny your unconscious, if you hate your unconscious, if you suppress your woman or man within, then you can go on saying that you love the woman outside. But deep down you will hate her also. If you deny your own woman, you will hate the woman you love. If you deny your own man, you will hate the man you love. Your love will be just on the surface. Deep down it will be hatred. It is bound to be so, it has to be so, because you will not allow the other to become the mirror of your unconscious. And you will be afraid also. Man is afraid of woman. Go and ask your so-called saints. They are so afraid of women. Why? They are afraid of their unconscious, and the woman becomes a mirror. Whatsoever they have hidden, she reveals.If you have suppressed something, then the other polar opposite can reveal it immediately. If you have been suppressing sex and you are sitting in meditation in a lonely place and a beautiful woman passes by, suddenly your unconscious will assert itself. That which has been hidden will be revealed in a woman passing and you will be against that woman. You are foolish – because that woman is not doing anything at all, she is just passing. She may not even know that you are there; she is not doing anything to you. She is a mirror, but the mirror is passing and in that mirror your unconscious is reflected.The whole so-called spirituality is based on fear. What is the fear? The fear is that the other can reveal the unconscious, and you don’t want to know anything about it. But not knowing will not help, suppression will not help. It will remain there. It will become a cancer; by and by it will assert itself more and more, and ultimately you will come to feel that you have been a failure and that whatsoever you have suppressed has become victorious and you are defeated.My whole effort is to bring your unconscious nearer to your conscious. It should become so much acquainted with you so that it is not unknown. You become friendly to it, then the fear disappears – the fear of the polar opposite. And then the hatred also disappears because then the other is just a mirror, helpful. You feel gratitude. Lovers will be grateful to each other if their unconscious is not suppressed and they will be hateful to each other if their unconscious is suppressed.Allow your whole being to come into function. Your emotions are imprisoned, encapsulated. Your body movements are imprisoned. Your body, your heart, has become just as if it is not part of you. You simply carry it along like a burden. Allow your emotions full play. In the meditations we will be doing, allow your emotions full play and enjoy the play, because many new things will be revealed to you.You have not screamed; you cannot remember when you last screamed. When the scream comes to you and takes possession of you, you will become afraid. What is happening? – you are losing control. But lose control! Your control is the poison. Lose control completely. Allow your emotions to erupt like a volcano. You will be surprised at what is hidden in you. You may not even be able to recognize that it is your face.And allow your body to have full play also, so every cell of the body becomes vibrant, alive. Just as a bird alights on a branch and the branch starts wavering – vibrant, alive – let your being alight on your body and allow your body to be vibrant, alive, alive with the inner force. Suddenly you will enter a new unknown door. You will open a new dimension of your own existence and that dimension will lead you to the ultimate, to the divine.Now the sutra:At whose desire and by whom impelled does the mind alight on its objects? By whom impelled does the chief prana – vital force – proceed to its function? By whom impelled do men utter this speech? What deva or god directs the eyes and the ears?The master is asking what the original source in you is – of all your life, of all your movements, of all your expressions. What force creates desire? What force impels you to be alive? What force gives you the lust for life? There must be a hidden force, and in a way inexhaustible: it goes on and on; it never tires.At whose desire and by whom impelled does the mind alight on its objects? When you look at a beautiful woman or a beautiful flower or a beautiful sunset, who impels you? Who throws you outward? Who is the inner source of all your activity?The Upanishads say that whatsoever you do, the doer is always the brahman – whatsoever you do, you are not the doer. The doer is always the brahman. If you run filled with lust after a woman, the Upanishads say it is also brahman. Because of this, Christian missionaries could never understand what type of religion Hinduism is. Even lust is spiritual because the original source is always the brahman. Whatsoever you do with your energy, brahman is moving in it.There is a story…The god Brahma created the world and he fell in love with it. Christian theologians cannot understand it. And naturally, it is difficult to understand. Brahma goes on creating other beings and he goes on falling in love. He creates a cow then he falls in love and becomes the bull – and on and on: the whole creation is created. He creates the cow and he becomes the bull. He goes on dividing himself into two polar opposites.The story is just beautiful, if you can understand it. He goes on dividing into two polar opposites. And remember, the reverse is the process to reach him again. Go on nondividing; go on meeting with the polar opposite. He creates the world through polar opposites. He creates the cow; he is the cow because he has created the cow out of himself. And then he becomes the bull, he is the bull. He is both the feminine and the masculine.And then he follows the cow, and then the cow tries to escape the bull. The cow tries to hide and through her hiding she invites the bull. This is like hide-and-seek. That’s why Hindus say the whole creation is just a play – a play of the same being dividing itself into polar opposites and then playing hide-and-seek.You are a brahman. Your husband is a brahman; your wife is a brahman. And the brahman is playing hide-and-seek. The whole idea is simply superb. The reverse is the process to reach the ultimate again: don’t play hide-and-seek. Allow the divided parts to mingle into each other. Let them merge, and the brahman arises again – the one.This master asks: At whose desire and by whom impelled does the mind alight on its objects? By whom impelled does the chief prana – vital force – proceed to its function? Who breathes in you?By whom impelled do men utter this speech? Who speaks in you?What deva or god directs the eyes and the ears? Who is directing your senses?The Upanishads are not against the senses. They are spiritually sensuous; they don’t deny. Denial is not their slogan at all, denial is not their attitude. They accept and they say that even in the senses the divine is moving because there is nothing else to move. They make everything sacred, they make everything holy. They don’t condemn, they don’t say, “This is sin.” Sin is unknown to the Upanishads, absolutely unknown. They say there is no sin – it is a play. Even in sin, even in the sinner, the same energy is moving.Everything becomes holy. And if you can say with your full heart that everything is holy, you will become holy immediately because the very feeling that everything is holy and sacred makes the sin disappear. Sin is created by condemnation and the more you condemn, the more sinners you create.The whole world has become a great crowd of sinners because everything has been condemned – everything. There is not a single thing which you can do which has not been condemned by someone or other. With everything condemned, you become a sinner. Then guilt arises – and when there is guilt you can pray, but the prayer is poisonous; it comes out of your guilt. When you are guilty you can pray, but that prayer is based on fear. That prayer is not love, cannot be. Through guilt love is impossible. Feeling yourself condemned, a sinner, how can you love?The Upanishads say everything is holy because he is the source of all. Whether or not the river looks dirty to you is irrelevant. He is the source of all – the dirty river and the sacred Ganges, to both he gives the energy. To the sinner and to the saint, he gives the energy. Really, there is no story like this, but I would like a story like this: that he created the sinner, then he became the saint, just like the cow and the bull, and then the hide-and-seek. He created the saint and then he became the sinner and then the hide-and-seek…Total acceptance of whatsoever exists: just by being in existence, it is holy.It – the atman,or the brahman– is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech, the prana of the prana, and the eye of the eye. Wise men separating the atman from these – sense functions – rise out of sense life and attain to immortality.Whatsoever you do are the functions of him, of the total. The total functions in you. When you breathe, what do you do? You do nothing. The breathing comes in and goes out. Rather, he breathes in you; you cannot do anything. If the breath leaves you, what will you do? If it doesn’t come back, what will you do? If it has left then it has left and if it does not come back you cannot do anything. Really, when it is not coming you are no more. Who is there to do anything? He breathes, not you. The emphasis is on the total, and not on the individual.This has to be constantly remembered, because we go on forgetting this. Our emphasis is on the individual, the I: “I am breathing, I am alive, I am seeing you.” No. The master says he – the brahman – is seeing through the eyes, he is the eye of the eye. When I speak, I am not speaking: he speaks. And when you listen, you are not listening: he listens. He becomes the cow, he becomes the bull; he becomes the speaker, he becomes the listener. It is a mysterious hide-and-seek, a great play, a great drama; beautiful, if you can understand. He is everywhere – in the listener, in the speaker, he is everywhere. When you are silent, he is silent within you. When you speak, he is speaking in you.This emphasis is not only metaphysical, not only a doctrine. As a doctrine it is superb, but it is to help you toward a new realization. While speaking, if you can feel he is speaking, all the fever in it will be lost. While fighting, if you can remember he is fighting through you, the fight will become a drama. While being silent, if you can feel, he is silent within you. And if the silence is disturbed and thoughts start moving, you know that he is disturbed, not you. And he has become the thoughts and now he is moving like clouds in your inner sky. He is both, so why be worried? He is both.When you are healthy he is healthy in you and when you are ill he is ill in you. You are totally unworried; you need not come in. Your whole burden has been thrown upon him. That’s why I say this is not only metaphysical. It is deeper – one of the deepest techniques to transform your total being.If he is doing everything, then why go on carrying yourself unnecessarily? He breathes and he is born and he dies. When you die, he will die – not you. Then why be afraid of death? You become unconcerned. This unconcern relieves you of all burden. And this is the actual fact; this is not make-believe. This is the actual fact: whatsoever is happening is happening to the total. The individual is just an illusion.I have never been as an ego and I am not as an ego, and I cannot be; only he is. And when I say he, I mean the total. Don’t try to conceive of him as a person. He is not a person; he is the total – the whole. That which breathes in you breathes in the trees and that which sings in you sings in the birds and that which dances in you dances in the rivers, in the brooks, in the springs, and that which speaks in you speaks in the breeze passing through the trees. The total.Just change the gestalt, just change the pattern. Don’t emphasize the individual; move to the total. And then what is the problem? Then there is no problem. Every type of problem enters with you; anguish and anxiety enters with you. Without any burden on you, you are liberated. You can become a mukta, you can become a siddh, a liberated one, this very moment. Just realizing, feeling, “I am not; he is,” the past disappears, the future is no more because the future is created out of your worries, imagination, projections. Then he will take care. Then whatsoever happens will happen and whatsoever happens will be good because it is out of him.This is what trust is – not that you believe in a God sitting upon some throne in heaven and guiding everyone from there, a great controller or engineer or something like that – no! He is not the managing director. He is not. There is neither any throne nor somebody sitting on it. And faith doesn’t mean that you believe in a concept, in a philosophy. Faith means trust – trusting the whole. Then everything is blissful. Because how can anything else be? How can anything other than bliss be? You create misery because you come in. Go out just as if a lamp has been put out. Go out – and then he is.It is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech, the prana of the prana, and the eye of the eye. Whatsoever appears on the surface, whatsoever it is, makes no difference. Always, hidden, he is there. Look at me with full remembrance, with mindfulness that he is looking through you, and immediately the quality of consciousness changes. Just now look at me: he is looking, he is the eye of the eye, and immediately you are not there and a tremendous silence happens. The very quality of your being is different when you look at me as if he is looking, not you.You are listening to me: forget that I am here; he is here – the total. The total has taken possession of me, the total has become active in me, the total has changed me into his instrument. Look at me as if he is speaking, listen to me as if he is speaking, and then everything is different. You are no longer there – a sudden flash and everything changes. It is not a question of time. You are not to practice it, you can see it this very moment.Look at me. You are not there; the total, the whole, has become eyes, the whole has become eyes in you. You are just an expression of the will of the whole, of the desire of the whole. The whole has become words through me, he is manipulating me, he is using me. And then, in this room, only he is. Then the totality becomes one. Then the parts are lost and fragments are no more. Then there is a deep orgasm between the speaker and the listener. Then you will feel the presence, but the presence can come only if you forget yourself.Remembering God is not really a remembering of his name. Remembering God is not going on chanting “Rama, Rama, Krishna, Krishna” – useless, futile. Remembering him means forgetfulness of yourself. If you are not – forgotten, completely forgetful of yourself, abandoned – he is. When you are not, suddenly he is – and this can happen in a single moment.I am reminded of an incident that happened after the Second World War. Before the war, in a small village in England, there had been a statue of Jesus just on the crossroads – a beautiful statue with raised hands. And on the statue there had been a plaque, and on that plaque had been written: “Come unto me.”The statue was destroyed in the Second World War; a bomb fell upon it. And when there was restoration work and the village was again coming to be alive after the war, they remembered the statue, so they tried to find fragments of it. In the ruins the fragments were found and the statue was restored again. But the hands could not be found. They were missing.So the village council decided to ask the artist to make new hands. But an old man in the village who was always seen sitting near the statue – both when it was there and when it was not – said, “No. Let Jesus be without hands.”The council asked, “Then what will we do about the plate underneath? It is written, ‘Come unto me,’ and it had raised hands.”The old man said, “Change the plate and write there, ‘Come unto me. I have no other hands than your own.’”And now the statue stands there without the hands, and written underneath is: “Come unto me. I have no other hands than yours.”In your hands he is moving, in your eyes he is moving, in your heart he is beating – the total. And he has no other hands, remember. He has no other eyes, he has no other heart to beat. He is beating all over, he is alive all over. This is the message.It is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech, the prana of the prana, and the eye of the eye. Wise men separating the atman from these – sense functions – rise out of sense life and attain to immortality. All these senses are the functions and he is the functionary within. Knowing this, you are not against the senses. Knowing this, you simply change the emphasis. Then you are not obsessed with the senses; you are always looking for the inner core. And the rishis say that by knowing this transcendence you attain immortality. Remember, only you can die; life never dies. Because you are born, you will die; that is the natural end to every birth. Life goes on – life goes on eternally moving; life never dies. Waves in it are born and die, and the riverlike life moves and moves and moves.Once you come to feel the river within your wave, you are immortal. If you can realize him seeing through you, breathing through you, you are immortal. Only this shell, this vehicle of the body, will disappear. You will never disappear. You cannot disappear – you have always been.Sometimes you were a tree because the tree was the vehicle – because he willed to be a tree through you. Sometimes you were a cow because he willed himself to be a cow through you. Sometimes you were a butterfly, sometimes a flower, sometimes a rock – but you have always been here. You have always been here. You are not a new visitor. No one is a new visitor; no one is a stranger. You have always been here and now, but with different vehicles. Sometimes a rock was the vehicle; now you are a man or a woman: now this is a vehicle.If you can understand and know that the vehicle is just the vehicle, the vehicle can be changed. It will have to be changed. But the inner one who goes on changing faces remains the same. That one is immortal, life is immortal. You are mortal. And why are you mortal? – because you get identified with the vehicle. Moving in a cart you become the cart. Riding on a train you become the train. Flying in an aircraft you become the aircraft. You go on forgetting that the aircraft, the cart, the train, the car are vehicles.You are not the vehicles; you are the total, and the total goes on changing its vehicles. So then you are immortal. Remember, you cannot be immortal – you identified with the body. You are immortal knowing, transcending the body. The consciousness is immortal, the very aliveness is immortal.The sutra says:Wise men, transcending these – sense functions – rise out of sense life and attain to immortality.And the more you feel the inner, the essential, the eternal, the immortal, the less and less you are obsessed with the sense life. You can play it, but you are not obsessed.Krishna playing on his flute is not obsessed with the flute; or Krishna dancing with his girlfriends, gopis, is not obsessed. It is just a play. Life becomes a play, not an obsession, when you know the immortal.Now get ready for the meditation.

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The Supreme Doctrine 01-11Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Supreme Doctrine 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You said that when the master is in an absent-like presence and the disciple is also absent-like, then the divine work begins. If both are to be absent-like, then please explain the role of the master in the spiritual endeavor.There is no role as such. The role is possible only if the master exists as a person. If he exists as somebody, then he can play a role. Really, our personality consists of nothing but roles. Your personality is the many roles you go on playing: those roles are your faces. In the morning you have one face, a role to play; in the office you have a different face; back home again you change your face. You go on changing the whole day, moment to moment. Whenever you have to play a role, you create a face, you become an actor.The master is one who has stopped playing roles. He is not playing anything, he is not doing anything; he has come to understand that the doer is the total. The individual is in illusion if he thinks that he is doing something. The master cannot think that he is helping the disciple or that he is endeavoring for his transformation. All this happens of course: the transformation happens, the disciple changes, is reborn, but this is not something done on the part of the master.The master has become nobody. He exists not as a presence, but as an absence. Within him there is no mind, within him there is no ego, within him there is no center. The center has been given back to the divine; the ego has been surrendered. He has become a vehicle, he has become a passage – just a flute. Now the divine sings through it. Now no song belongs to the master – nothing. How can he play a role? How can he endeavor? How can he do something?All these words – do, role, endeavor, help – are egocentric. They mean that the master is doing something. No, the master cannot do anything. He is not, but things happen around him. I am not saying that the disciple will not be transformed; he will be transformed, but he can only be transformed through a master who is not doing anything. If the master is doing something, the disciple cannot be transformed. The very effort on the part of the master shows that the master is not there yet.There is no question of effort. The master exists as an absence, as a nobody, and this very fact becomes a tremendous force. This very fact, this existence of a void, creates mysterious happenings around it. But the master is not doing them. Remember, the river is flowing toward the sea, but the river is not really flowing, not doing anything. This flow is just nature. It is natural for the river to flow. There is no effort on the river’s part. The tree is growing; the tree is not doing anything – there is no effort, no center, no ego to do. It is happening.Life is a happening, and a man becomes a master when he has come to realize this: that the total is doing, and we are unnecessarily bothered and we unnecessarily interfere and we unnecessarily bring in our own centers – illusory, because no individual can have any center.One of the greatest Christian mystics, Meister Eckhart, said that only God can say “I.” No individual can really say “I” because the I belongs to the total. My hand cannot say “I,” because the I belongs to me. My leg cannot say “I” because the leg belongs to me and the I belongs to me. My leg, my hand, my eyes cannot assert “I” because they are fragments, part of a greater unity. You are a similar phenomenon: you are not an entity in yourself, you are just part of a great organic whole. You are just a fragment, an atomic cell in it – you cannot say “I.”That is why all the religions say the I is the only barrier, because the I is the most fallacious thing possible. It cannot belong to you. You don’t know why you are born, you don’t know the forces that control your life. No one has asked about your choice. You simply find one day you are alive. Then who goes on breathing within you? You don’t know.Then suddenly one day you will be no more. No one will ask you. It is not your decision to be born and to die. But something happens and goes on happening. Something happens and you are born, and something happens – you are no more, you disappear again. How can you say “I”? No decision of yours has been used. No decision: the I can belong only to the divine.Then a problem arises and the problem is this: if the master cannot help, if the master cannot do, how can a master promise? Someone has shown me the wall hanging [Osho indicates the blue banner suspended behind him on the podium] “I have come not to teach, but to awaken. Surrender and I will transform you. This is my promise.”Then how can I promise you? Then how can I say that I will transform you? Really, this is a trick. I am not going to transform you – I am no longer there. But if you surrender, you will be transformed. If you surrender you will be transformed – not that I will transform you. The very surrender brings you to the point where transformation happens, and when it has happened, then you will know and you will laugh because it has been a great joke.I cannot do anything. The very concept of doing is irrelevant: I am no longer there. But you will not understand that language. You can understand only the language of the I; hence, I have said, “I will transform you,” and it is true you will be transformed. It is true that once you surrender there is no barrier for your transformation. You will be reborn. I am not doing anything and I cannot do anything. Nothing is needed to transform you. You are enough.But you have lost confidence and this trick is just to give you your confidence back. You have forgotten your own possibility. You have forgotten who exists within you, what tremendous energy is hidden within you. You have forgotten. Someone else is needed to tell you. You have the treasure, but you have forgotten it. I cannot give you the treasure – you are the treasure. But I can simply show it to you, just give you an indication.When Jesus says, “I will deliver you,” when Jesus says, “I will liberate you,” or Buddha says, “I am your path, your way,” when Krishna says to Arjuna, “Surrender to me and I will do everything for you,” these are all tricks to help those who have forgotten themselves. But the promise is true because it happens. Not that someone helps you. Your own energy comes into being, your own energy becomes vital, your own sources are tapped, your own being becomes active.You cannot understand the language of not-I. Hence, I have spoken in terms of I: “I have come not to teach, but to awaken.” No one has come, no one can come. We have always been here, you and I. I cannot come, I cannot go. There is nowhere to go and nowhere to come from. We have been in existence, we have existed always. And who am I to teach you or awaken you? But you have forgotten your own potentiality, your own possibility, and some trick is needed to throw you back to yourself.Remember, I am not doing this because I have a lot of compassion for you. No, nothing of the sort. I have no compassion at all for you. You don’t need it. You are not slaves, you are not poor, you are not beggars. You are divine in your own right; you are as divine as any Krishna, any Buddha. Nothing is lacking there; everything is present but you are fast asleep. And when I say or when I teach or when I appear to do something, it is not that I feel compassion for you – no. This is just how it happens within me to play this.For me, this is just a play. I enjoy doing it; you need not be grateful toward me. I enjoy it. You need not be at all in any debt toward me, because I have enjoyed it, I love it. It is just as if a flower flowers and you pass nearby and the flower gives you a gift of its perfume. Just like that something has flowered within me and you pass near me and I present a gift to you. If you take it, I am grateful toward you; if you refuse it, you are your master.Really, if this attitude can penetrate deep within you, then there is no master and no disciple. Then relationship disappears. It must disappear. The divine starts functioning only when there is no master and no disciple and the relationship disappears.When I am the master and you are the disciple, a duality exists. And there are so-called masters who go on telling you that you are the disciple and they are the masters, they are higher and you are lower. They create a hierarchy; really, they create a politics around it. That type of master will not be of much help. They may be harmful, because they are not giving you that which already belongs to you. They are again creating an illusion.What I am doing here is not creating a relationship. But rather, on the contrary, dissolving the relationship. If we can be here without thinking in terms of being master and disciple – if we can just be here, present, alert, alive – the thing will happen. Wife and husband is a relationship. Father and son is a relationship. Master and disciple? – it is not a relationship at all; it only appears so. It is not a relationship because the whole effort is to dissolve duality, and relationship exists in duality.A master is really trying not to be a master, and a master is trying for you not to be a disciple. The whole effort is to bring you to a point where relationship disappears, where there are not two, but a simple presence. And when there is no relationship, but you are alert and I am alert – remember, if you are alert and I am alert, I am not and you are not – in that alertness “I” is dissolved and the flames of two lamps become one. Only in that oneness does the divine start working.The divine works only in oneness; that is his mode of function. The more divided you are, the less he can function; the more divided, the farther you move away from the divine. That’s what I have meant.So two things about this question: one, the master is not doing anything, not playing any role. He is not making any endeavor. It is not in any way an effort on his part. He has become alert, awakened, and now something goes on flowing through him. This flow is riverlike. Wherever this river moves it will make people more alert. Not that there is any effort on its part: this is its nature. So a master is by nature a master, not by any effort. Wheresoever he moves he will be a master.I remember one story about an Egyptian mystic, Junnun. Junnun always travelled hidden in the garb of a beggar, and he even had emperors as his disciples. One disciple, one very rich disciple, asked him, “Why do you dress as a beggar? Why do you mix with the common masses and crowds? This is not good, because you are a great master.”Junnun is reported to have said, “A master is by his nature a master, so wherever he moves he is a master – wherever; it makes no difference. If he is standing in a crowd, there also he is a master. He is the master and he is functioning and the crowd is being transformed by his presence, just by his presence.”Mohammed says in the Koran that no master should go to a rich man’s house. If the rich man wants to meet him, he should come to the master. Then one Sufi mystic, Bayazid, was asked – because he was going to rich men’s houses, to the palace of the emperor to teach there – “Why are you going against the prophet? Mohammed says no master should go to a rich man’s house. There is no need. If the rich man desires, he should come to the master’s feet. But you are moving even to the palace, so what is the matter? Are you against the prophet, or you don’t believe in the saying?”Bayazid said, “You don’t know the reality. Mohammed is right, and I follow his teachings and his saying. But whether a master goes to the emperor’s house or an emperor comes to the master’s hut, it is always the master who changes the other. It makes no difference.”Basically, it is always the master to whom you come. Whether the master goes to the palace or the emperor comes to the master’s hut, it makes no difference. It is always the emperor who is coming to the master because he is to be changed. He will be changed.Bayazid says it is the nature of the master to change others; it is not an effort. Nothing is being done by the master, simply his presence – and if he appears to do something, that appearance is just a trick because you cannot understand the language of nondoing. You can only understand the language of effort. So he creates a language for you. Even if you cannot understand his language, he can understand your language very well. So he gives you whatsoever you can understand and by and by your understanding grows. And one day when you really come to the point when you can understand a master, you will start laughing – because he has not done anything. But you will feel grateful in that moment, because without doing anything he has totally transformed you.Really, if something is to be done it is a violence. If in transforming you, changing you, I do something, it is going to be aggressive, it is going to be violent. Every effort is violent. But just by my presence, just by your being around me, something starts happening in you even though I am not doing anything. Only then is it love, is it not violence.Then a very peculiar phenomenon happens: if someone tries to change you, you will resist him – because instinctively you become aware of the violence, instinctively you start defending yourself. If someone tries to change you and make you good, religious, moral, and all that nonsense, you will resist. Your ego will be hurt, and you will start defying him, and will start doing things which you never meant to do, just to defy him.Good fathers are the cause of bad generations. So-called saints and sages are the cause of the degeneration, of the immorality that exists all over the world – because they go on forcing. And whenever someone forces you, even if he is forcing you toward heaven, you will refuse. And it is good to refuse, because he is killing you, your spirit. If you are forced into heaven you will be a dead man there. It is better to go to hell, but by one’s own choice. You will at least be free. You will at least be a soul.A real master never forces anything upon you, not in the least, not even indirectly – no. Because if a master cannot know the working of the mind, then who can know? If he cannot understand this working of the human mind and consciousness – that it becomes rebellious, resistant if you force something upon it – then who can know? A master knows; that’s why he never does anything. He simply allows you to be near him. He may create tricks so that you can be near him. For example, I say to you, “Meditate.” You are meditating, but the basic thing is you are just near me. And while you are meditating, without doing anything, something is happening.I am talking to you: that is a trick. There is no need to talk. If you can understand, you can simply sit here near me. There is no need to say anything. But then you will get bored. You will ask, “What am I doing here – sitting and sitting?” Your mind needs some toys to play with, so I give you toys and your mind goes on playing with the toys. But all the while something is happening which is the basic thing. You are not aware of it, but one day you will become aware.And then you will see what the trick was, what the technique was. The technique is to engage your mind somewhere else so that you are available to me and to my presence. And I can meet you without any interference from the mind.The second question:Osho,This morning you talked about the inner intercourse and orgasm which happens between the outer male body and the inner female unconscious, and vice versa. Please explain how this happens in the active meditation we are practicing here.It happens in the active meditation you are doing here because all that is hidden and suppressed is brought out by it. It is a catharsis, an expression. It is just the reverse process of suppression. So you will have to understand the process of suppression.Someone has died: you feel very sad, but you think in your mind that it is not manly to weep and to cry. It will look like a weakness, and you have always maintained a strong image of yourself. Everyone knows that you are a very strong-willed man. How can you weep? – this is womanish. So you suppress the tears. They want to come out, they want to be released and relieved, but you suppress them. Those tears will become poison, because the system was throwing them out and you suppressed them. You go on smiling. Your heart is weeping and crying, and you go on smiling.You are trying to maintain an image. You cannot be natural; you cannot allow your heart, your body, your mind, to function naturally. You go on manipulating them. You choose: something has to be expressed and something has to be repressed. That repressed part becomes the unconscious.Really, there exists no unconscious. You repress something and you repress it very deeply because you yourself don’t want to be aware of it, you don’t want to be conscious of it. Otherwise it will be a heavy burden on the mind. So you go on forgetting it. You go on being unconscious about it, that it exists there. You forget its existence, and you yourself create an unconsciousness within.This is the way you become divided, you become two. The rejected part becomes the unconscious and the accepted part becomes the conscious. If you are a man, then you are rejecting the woman, because no culture has yet existed on earth which accepts bisexuality. All the cultures that have existed up to now were not really aware of the fact that to be a man or to be a woman is not something absolute. It is relative, it is a question of degrees.If you are a man, it doesn’t mean you are a hundred percent man. Nobody can be, because to be a hundred percent man you will have to be born out of your father with the mother not contributing anything. That’s impossible. Or to be a hundred percent woman, the father would have not to be there at all. Only the mother would be involved because if the father contributes something the male element has entered; if the mother contributes something the female element has entered. This is a new fact brought out by depth psychology – a new fact for the West, but Tantra in the East has always been aware of it.Man is only in relative terms a man: he may be sixty percent man and forty percent woman; or a woman may be sixty percent woman and forty percent man. That’s why many things happen. Sometimes the degrees are so near that someone may be fifty-one percent man and forty-nine percent woman, so you cannot decide really whether he is a man or a woman. He will walk, he will talk, he will move, in a feminine way – forty-nine percent. And this difference is of hormones. New hormones can be injected. And this is a borderline case – forty-nine percent woman, fifty-one percent man. You can inject a few more feminine hormones, and the balance will change and the man will become a woman.There have been many accidents when suddenly a boy becomes a girl or a girl becomes a boy. Then scientists became aware about this phenomenon. Then they came to understand that there are borderline cases. Now there are hormones available, and I think that the time is not very far off, it will happen, even before this century ends, that the alternatives will be available to everyone: you can change your sex.And it is a good idea – because if a man has remained for thirty years a man, it will be a good change. Really, to be a woman is to move into another world, and this is a greater change than going to the moon. There is nothing much there; it is just like the earth. But a man moving to be a woman or a woman becoming a man is moving to a completely opposite pole.Really, whenever the alternative becomes possible, only foolish people will not use it. Those who are wise will use it, because then you can become aware and you can live in two totally different worlds. And that will give a new light to the human mind, because man has never understood what woman is, neither women are capable of understanding men, because their psychologies differ so absolutely, they exist on such extreme poles.Freud has said, “I have been working for forty years with human psychology, but still I cannot say what a woman desires, what a woman wants, what her mind is.” It is difficult, because a man cannot understand a woman. Whatsoever he understands will be a point of view because he is standing at the other pole. He will be looking at a woman as a man, and that changes everything. A woman cannot understand man because she is always looking from the standpoint of being a woman. And we cannot change places. If biology helps us, then the old controversy between man and woman will disappear.I am saying that you are a man only relatively, or a woman only relatively. And if you are a man, then you will have to suppress the other part – which is a woman, which your mother contributed to you. Why? What is the need to suppress it? We suppress it because we have been trying to live according to logic. That is the greatest fallacy man has committed. We have been trying to live according to logic, and life is illogical.Life is both man and woman together, and logic is always either feminine or masculine. Your logic says you are a man, so cut all those qualities which don’t belong to a man. That suppressed part becomes your unconscious. You are a woman, so everyone says you that must be kind, loving, sympathetic. You must not be cruel, you must not hate, you must not be aggressive, because that is not how a woman is conceived to be.This is nonsense. Really, if a woman becomes aggressive, she is incomparable. No man can compete with her, because your aggression is exhausted already – you have used it too much. And she has not used her man – that man is still fresh and young. If she becomes aggressive, then no man can compete with her. If she is angry and violent, you will look just pale before her.And similar is the case with man. They say a man must be aggressive, violent, powerful – must have willpower, must not be weak, must not show sympathy, love; these things are womanish. But if a man can really love, no woman can compete with him – because his “woman” has remained always virgin and fresh, unexhausted, unused. What I am saying is this: that your other is illogical, so you deny it in order to have a clear-cut image, a logical image.I have heard…Once it happened that a very great Zen mystic and master died. His disciple, Rinzai, was very well known, more known than his master. His master was known because of Rinzai. Rinzai was a great man, famous all over Japan. And when the master died, thousands and thousands of people gathered to pay their respects. They were surprised because Rinzai was weeping and crying, and tears were rolling down his cheeks.Many friends said, “What are you doing? These people who have gathered are talking about you, and they say, ‘We cannot conceive of Rinzai weeping. We thought he is a man who is totally unattached; we thought he is a man who has renounced all attachments, and now he is weeping. And this man Rinzai has been teaching us that the soul is immortal – only the body dies, and the body is nothing: dust returns unto dust. So why is he weeping now?’”They demanded an answer. They were logical, because if a man says that the soul is immortal, then death should have no meaning. “Then why are you weeping?” they asked. “And when you say that no attachment is the key, why are you attached to your master? Only the body has died, and you have always been teaching that the body is just dead matter. So why be worried about it? A dead thing has become dead.”They demanded an answer, and they were logical. But what did Rinzai say? Rinzai said, “Your question is logical, but what can I do? The tears are coming down. I am weeping. I find myself weeping. Not only are you surprised: I am surprised. What can I do? This is how life is happening in me, and life is illogical.”Rinzai said, “It is good that my master has died, as he has made me aware of my total life. Without him I was thinking I was unattached. If he had not died, I could never have stumbled upon the fact that I have a heart and that I have tears and that I can weep.“So, you are not the only ones who are surprised. Rinzai himself is surprised. But I will not suppress life. I have been accepting life totally, and I still say the soul is immortal and only the body has died. Only the body is dead, but the body was also so beautiful. I am weeping for the body. Dust unto dust: really, I still say that dust has gone back to dust, but that dust had taken such a beautiful form that I am weeping for it.”It is recorded in Zen chronicles that Rinzai proved to be real to life, not to logic.Be real to life, not to logic, and then whatsoever you have suppressed will come up, will explode. This is what the active meditation is doing: bringing the suppressed up to be expressed; bringing your tears back to life, bringing your anger, your laughter, your sadness, back to life; throwing everything out of your system so that your system becomes purified, so that your system becomes innocent again. With this innocent system you can contact the divine. This poisoned system cannot have any contact.Active meditation is catharsis. It is to purify you. And when you are purified and the unconscious has been acted out, the barrier between the conscious and the unconscious falls – because the barrier is created by suppression. When you are not suppressing, the barrier disappears and then there is no boundary between the conscious and the unconscious.Then you are both: you are bisexual – man and woman both. And when you are both, you will have a new feeling of being, a new unity within you. You will not feel disrupted, divided. You will become organic, one. This oneness can lead you to the ultimate oneness; this oneness is the first step.The third question and the last:Osho,You said be a total yea-sayer, be totally with the body. But it is our common experience that then there is every possibility of the senses being permissive and indulgent. Please explain the wisdom behind the above saying.So let them be permissive and indulgent. Why be afraid? What is wrong in it? The fear comes from a long tradition of suppression. Why be afraid of your senses being permissive? Why not permit them? Who are you not to permit them? And what has happened to you? – do you think that you have enslaved your senses? Quite the contrary is the case: your senses have enslaved you, and you cannot be free unless your senses are free. Unless your total being is free, you cannot be free. This is one of the deepest problems for the human mind. You will have to understand it.First you say something is wrong, then you become afraid of it. Then you try to suppress, not to do it. And the more you suppress it, the more your mind is filled with it.For example, if you suppress sex then your mind will become sexual. Really, no animal is sexual except human beings. Sex exists for animals, but they are not sexual. For animals sex exists, but they are not sexual because they never think about it. They don’t go on brooding about it, they don’t create nude films, they don’t publish nude magazines. They don’t do anything about sex. Whenever the desire arises they move; whenever the desire is not you cannot move them. They simply follow their nature.But man creates a sexual mind by suppressing sex. And the more he suppresses, the more he becomes sexual, because whatsoever you suppress goes into your blood, into your bones. It becomes part of your being. When I say be a yea-sayer, you become afraid. Why? It is not because what I am saying is dangerous, but because the moment you think of yea-saying you become aware of all the poisons you have suppressed: “If I say yes, all this poison will be released.”You think that if you say yes to sex you will become mad after it – you will commit adultery, you will become a maniac. The situation is just like this: if a man fasts for thirty days, then even a hint about food makes him mad. It’s not that a hint about food can make anybody mad – the food is not the cause. The cause is his own suppression. He has been suppressing his hunger, his desire to eat. Any hint, however indirect, and he will become mad. And he will say, “Don’t say such things.”A word can break his whole suppression, can explode his whole being. He will become afraid; he will not look at food. He will pass through the streets and he will not look at the signboards of the restaurants, he will just look down. But whatsoever he is doing, even looking down at the road, he will see food.Really, everything will finally become an indirect invitation to food. If he looks at the moon he will think about bread – white bread floating in the sky. He cannot see his beloved’s face there: impossible. He will see bread.You will project whatsoever you are starved of. Really, if your beloved is not with you, only then can you see her face in the moon. If your beloved is with you, what you see? You will see simply the moon. And when you see the moon simply as the moon, you are healthy. When you see your beloved’s face, you are unhealthy. Or when you see bread floating you are unhealthy, you are perverted.A moon is a moon. Nothing else should be seen in it. Anything else that you see is a projection. Something suppressed goes out and creates an illusion; it is a hallucination. Whatsoever you suppress becomes hallucinatory. Then you are living in it, moving in it, and of course you become more and more afraid and scared. So the more you get scared, the more you suppress it.You are in a suicidal effort; that’s why such questions arise: “If I say yes, the first thing that comes to the mind is whatever I have said no to.” That thing will assert itself immediately. If you have been starving your body, fasting, dieting, and I say, “Say yes,” the first thing that comes to your mind will be to go and eat. And then you will become afraid, because you have been dieting and now the whole thing will go to the dogs if you say yes.If a man who has been suppressing sex thinks about saying yes to the whole of life, he will be afraid of sex. Whatsoever you have suppressed, whatsoever you have said no to, will demand. It will be the first thing that will come to your mind to say yes to, and this will create trembling. But this trembling is coming not because of yea-saying – it is coming because you have said no. This is the point to be understood: it is coming because you have said no. The questions come: “What if the society becomes permissive? What if everyone indulges?” It is because the society has been repressive. It is because everyone has said no to life energies.Try saying yes. In the beginning it may happen that you will become permissive. In the beginning it may happen that you will become indulgent, because whenever a suppressed force is released it moves to the other pole forcibly. But wait and be a witness. Sooner or later the suppressed force will be lost, and for the first time in your life you will become healthy. And then the pendulum will come and stand in the middle.When the pendulum comes in the middle you are healthy – but you have been keeping it to the left, pulling it to the left. And now you are afraid that if you leave it, it will go to the very right. Of course it will go, but it is going to the right not because you are leaving it; it is going to the right because you have been clinging to it and pulling it to the left. Leave it – the sooner the better. It will go to the right. Allow it to go, and don’t pull it to the left. Allow it to go. By and by, it will move from right to left, from left to right. The momentum that you have given it by suppressing has to be released, so it will have to move. But don’t give it a new momentum; just become a witness.By and by, the pendulum will become static in the middle. When the pendulum is in the middle of your mind and you are not afraid of indulgence or permissiveness, you have become free. Now you are healthy and natural.My whole emphasis is to be natural. The more natural, the nearer to the divine. Nature is not against the divine; nature is the expression of the divine. But you have been taught again and again that nature is against the divine: “Kill nature so that you can reach godliness.”You will never reach in this way because nature is not against the divine. If it is against, it cannot exist. How can it exist? How can anything exist which is against the divine? It is part of the total, part of the game. Don’t be against it. And how can you be? You are part of nature. You can go on deceiving yourself, that’s all.Allow it to flow in a natural way, allow it a natural rhythm, and by and by it settles. And when it settles, you will suddenly find you are standing in the divine. When there is no fight with nature, just an acceptance, you have moved beyond nature. But this “beyond nature” is not against nature. It is really a growth through it. You will come to brahmacharya – to a beautiful celibacy – but not through fighting sex. No one has come that way ever, no one can ever come that way.When you are growing through sex, becoming more and more alert through sex, sex will be transformed. This is the way: if you suppress sex it becomes sexuality; if you express sex it becomes love. Through sexuality you cannot reach the divine. It is a perversion. Through love you can reach – it is a natural growth.The more you accept natural instincts totally, without any condemnation at all, by and by they subside and the fever is lost. And when they subside you have tremendous energy left with you. That energy can become the arrow toward the divine. It becomes! There is a celibacy which comes through growth and there is a celibacy which comes simply through negation, denial. The celibacy that comes through denial is perverted: your mind will be filled with sexuality. The celibacy that happens gracefully, through alertness, through acceptance, becomes grace. It has a beauty of its own, and by and by it goes beyond itself. Then it is love. Then it is prayer. And the love that was flowing toward the opposite sex starts flowing toward the divine – the same love, the same energy.So keep it in your mind: I am not against anything. I am for transcendence, but not against anything. Godliness is not against the world: it is a transcendence. It has to be achieved through the world; that is why you have been thrown into the world. But you feel, and you go on thinking, that you are wiser than God himself. He has thrown you into the world to grow, to experience, to be enriched through it. And you are so wise…Be a little foolish; don’t be so wise. And allow the divine to have its own way through you; experience life with a yea-saying heart. And when you say yes, the very life becomes divine.Now get ready for the meditation. A few things before you get into it: for fifteen minutes you have to stand and stare at me with your hands raised above as if a divine force is to come to you, and you are receptive and welcoming. While standing, you have to stare at me without blinking the eyes. Even if tears start flowing, do not bother – allow them to flow. And you have to go on jumping so that your energy is dynamic, not static.I will give you indirect suggestions by my hands. I will raise my hands slowly upward, and when I raise my hands upward you have to bring your total energy up to jump, to dance. Be totally active when I raise my hands upward. When I feel that now you have become a storm, that now the group soul has taken place, that now the individuals are thrown, that they have melted down and here only a group soul exists, whenever I feel this I will put my palms down this way. That means that now God can descend upon you. In that moment go completely mad so that you are totally open and something can happen within you.For fifteen minutes, this first step. Then for fifteen minutes there will be total silence. You have to close your eyes. The light will be put off, and there will be total darkness and silence for fifteen minutes. And at the end, for ten minutes, you can celebrate; you can dance and sing and be grateful.Now get ready for the meditation.

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The Supreme Doctrine 01-11Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Supreme Doctrine 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The eyes cannot approach it, neither can speech nor mind. We don’t, therefore, know it, nor do we know how to teach it. It is different from what is known and it is different from what is unknown. Thus have we heard from our predecessors who instructed us about it.What speech cannot reveal but what reveals speech – know thou that alone as brahman and not this – anything objective – that people worship here.What mind does not comprehend but what comprehends the mind – know thou that alone as brahman and not this that people worship here.The deepest mystery of existence is the phenomenon of knowledge. You can know everything except your own self. The knower cannot be known because to know something means to reduce it to an object. The very process of knowledge depends on duality. I can know you because I am here, inside, and you are there, outside. You become an object. But I cannot know my self because I cannot make my self an object. I cannot encounter my self in any objective way. I cannot put my self in front of me. And if I could put my self in front of me then that which is put in front of me would not be my self. How can that which can be put in front of me be my self? Really, the inner one which will look at it will remain my self.Self is subjective, and this subjectivity cannot be made objective. Hence, the paradox: that which knows all cannot know itself; that which is the source of all knowledge remains unknowable. If you can understand this, then this sutra will reveal much. This is one of the most profound sutras. It goes deeper than all that the mystics have said. It says self-knowledge is impossible. You have heard, it has been preached, it has been told everywhere, “Know thyself.” But how can you know yourself? You can know everything other than you. One point will always remain unknown, unknowable. That point is you.The word self-knowledge is not good at all. Knowledge of the self is not possible. But this may create a deep pessimism in you. If knowledge of the self is not possible, then the whole of religion becomes absurd because this is what religion is meant to do – to give you self-knowledge. Then there must be some other meaning to the word self-knowledge. Then there must be something, a hidden dimension, through which you can know the self and still not make it an object. Knowledge must be possible in an altogether different sense.In the world, whatsoever we know is objective and the subject remains unknowable, the knower remains unknowable. But can this knower be known? This is the basic question, the basic problem. If there is only one way of knowing – that of objective knowledge – then it cannot be known. Hence, all the scientific thinkers will deny that the self exists. Their denial is meaningful. All those who are trained to think in terms of object, of objectivity, will say there is no self.Their saying this means that they cannot conceive of another type of knowing. They think that there is only one type of knowing and that is objective. The self cannot be made objective; hence, it cannot be known. And that which cannot be known cannot be said to exist. How can you say that it exists? The moment you say it exists you have said that you have known it. You cannot assert its existence. If it is not known, not only not known but also unknowable, then how can you say that it exists?Scientists go on saying that there is no self, that man is a mechanism and that what appears to be consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, a by-product. They say that there is no self, there is no center – that consciousness comes into existence just through chemical phenomena and when the body withers away, consciousness disappears.So for science, death is total death; nothing remains after it. Consciousness is not substantial; it is a by-product. It cannot exist without the body. It is part of the body, just a combination of many material things. It comes into being; it is not elementary. It is a compound, a combination, a synthesis, something which depends on other things. There is no self. Science says there is no self because the self cannot be known.The very word science means knowledge. And if something is unknowable, science will not approve of it, science will not agree to it. Science means that which can be known. Only then is science not mystical. It cannot fall into absurdities. For science, the very word self-knowledge is absurd. But still, religion is meaningful because there is another dimension to knowing.Try to understand that dimension of knowing where the known is not reduced to an object. For instance, if a lamp is burning in a dark room, everything in the room is lit, is known through the light of the lamp. But the lamp is also known by its own light. Everything else – chairs, furniture, the walls, paintings on the walls – they are known through the light. But through what is the light itself known?The light is self-enlightening: just by its presence it reveals others and it reveals itself also. But these two revelations are different. When the chair is known through the light, the chair is an object. The light falls on it and if the light disappears the chair cannot be known. The knowledge of the chair depends on the light, but the knowledge of the light itself doesn’t depend on the chair. If you remove everything the light will still be light. There will be nothing to reveal, but it will go on revealing itself. The revelation of the light is self-revelation.Similar is the case with the inner phenomenon, the inner self. Everything is known through it, but it itself is known not by anything else – it is a self-revealing phenomenon. It reveals itself. Self-knowledge doesn’t mean that the self is known by something else, because then the something else will be the self. So whatsoever is known in an objective way cannot be the self. Always the knower will be the self. But how can this self be known? The self is a self-evident, self-revealing phenomenon; nothing else is needed to know it. You need not reduce it to an object.Really, when all objects are removed from the mind, when all furniture is removed from the mind, suddenly the self reveals itself. It is self-revealing. That is the difference between matter and consciousness: matter is not self-revealing and consciousness is self-revealing; matter has to be known by something else and consciousness knows itself. That is the basic difference between matter and consciousness. There are trees, but if there is no conscious being they cannot be revealed; they need someone’s consciousness so that they can be revealed.There are rocks, beautiful rocks, but if there is no consciousness they will not be beautiful because then no one will become aware that they are there. Their existence will be mute. Even the rocks themselves will not be able to know that they exist. Existence will be there, but there will be no revelation of it.A small child comes playing near a rock: suddenly the rock is revealed. Now it is not a mute existence. Through the child the rock has become assertive. Now the tree is revealed. Now everything around the child becomes alive in a new meaning. The child has become a source of revelation. Everything around him becomes alive. Hence, the deeper your consciousness, the deeper you reveal existence.When a buddha is born the whole existence celebrates in him because of such a deep consciousness. All that is hidden in matter becomes manifest. It was never known before. Just by the presence of an enlightened person, the whole existence around him is enlightened. Everything becomes alive, feels through him. Consciousness reveals others, but there is no need to reveal it for another consciousness. It is self-revelatory.Take it from another angle: everything needs proof because everything can be doubted. But you cannot doubt the self; therefore the self never needs any proof. Can you doubt the self? One of the great Western thinkers, Descartes, used doubt as a method to know. He started his journey of knowledge through doubt – very penetrating doubt. He decided that he would doubt everything until he stumbled upon a fact which could not be doubted. And unless there is a basic fact which cannot be doubted, you cannot build a palace of knowledge because there is no foundation stone to make it. If everything can be doubted and has to be proved, then the whole edifice is just logical. Something deep down must be indubitable, something which does not need any proof.God is not indubitable. Remember this: God is not indubitable. He can be doubted – not only doubted, he can be disproved. And really, when someone doubts God, you cannot prove his existence. You can only convince those who are already convinced, but you cannot convert a new man; that is impossible. Not a single atheist can be converted because he needs proof and you cannot prove God.God is not indubitable. He can be doubted, rejected. The whole hypothesis can be said to be false. There is no proof that can help. So Descartes goes on discussing, inquiring, and he says that unless he comes to a point, to something in existence that is indubitable… Not that it can be proved – no. Rather, it cannot be doubted. And ultimately he comes to the self and says that the self is a greater reality than God. It is, because the self cannot be doubted. Can you doubt it? Even to doubt it you will have to have it.For example, if you are in the house and someone comes and asks whether you are in the house or not and you say, “I am not,” the very fact that you say “I am not” will prove that you are there. You cannot deny yourself. The very fact that you say, “I am not” shows that you are there. The denial becomes the proof. There is no need to affirm it; even denial becomes the proof. When even denial is a proof, the fact is indubitable. How can you doubt it?You cannot say, “I don’t know whether I am or not” – or can you? Even to be in such confusion, you need to be there. How can there be confusion without you? You cannot say, “I don’t believe that I am,” because even not to believe, someone is needed to be there. There is no way to deny that you exist, that the I exists.This self is the only indubitable fact in the world; everything else has been doubted. There have been skeptics who have doubted everything, even ordinary things of which you cannot conceive how they can be doubted. You are here, but the English philosopher Berkeley says, “I cannot believe that you are there. You may be just a dream. And there is no way to prove that you are not a dream, because when I dream, I dream of people such as you.” And this is one of the essential qualities of a dream: in a dream the dream appears real.So if you are appearing real, Berkeley says that does not prove anything, because in every dream the dream appears real. Can you doubt while you are dreaming? You cannot; the dream appears real. Even a very absurd dream appears real. It is just illogical, irrelevant, but still it appears real while it is there. So Berkeley says that there is no way to prove whether you are real or not. You can be doubted – everything can be doubted.One of the great Indian mystics, Nagarjuna, has doubted everything – everything! He says nothing is real because everything can be doubted. But there is only one point which he goes on avoiding: he never talks about the self because then his whole edifice, his whole philosophy, would fall down – because that cannot be doubted. It can be asked of Nagarjuna, “Okay. The whole world is illusory and everything can be doubted, but who is this doubter? Do you doubt it – this doubter who denies the whole world?” The self is indubitable because it is self-evident. No proof is needed, no argument is needed. It is self-evident.Mahavira denied God: he said there is no God. But he couldn’t say there is no self. Then the very self became divine for him. He said, “Only the self is God.” And that is true: in you, the self is the nearest thing to divine existence. That is why it cannot be doubted. It is self-evident, self-revealing, self-enlightening.This is the second way of knowing. The scientific way is to know a thing as an object. The religious way is to know the subject as the subject. In the scientific way, knowledge has three parts: the knower, the known and the knowledge. The knowledge is just a bridge between the knower and the known. But religious knowing does not have three parts. The knower is the known and the knower is the knowledge. This knowing is not divided into three. It is one, it is undivided.Now we will enter the sutra:The eyes cannot approach it, neither can speech nor mind. We don’t, therefore, know it, nor do we know how to teach it. It is different from what is known and it is different from what is unknown. Thus have we heard from our predecessors who instructed us about it.The eyes cannot approach it, neither can speech nor mind. The eyes can approach everything else because everything else is in front of the eyes and the self is not in the front. The self is behind the eyes, only the self is behind the eyes. Everything else is in front. You can encounter everything through the eyes, but you cannot encounter the self because it is not in front; that is one thing. So the eyes cannot be used to see it. Really, you will have to become blind to see it. Not actually, but the eyes must become so vacant, nonseeing, so closed, not functioning, only then will you know it. Eyes cannot approach it. You will have to come to it without eyes. You will have to come to it just like a blind man.So really, a blind man and a man with eyes are not different as far as the self is concerned. As far as the world is concerned the blind man is at a great loss; he cannot know anything. But as far as the self is concerned he is not at any loss – not at all. And if he is a wise man, his blindness may be a help to him.That’s why we in India have called blind men pragya chakshu – wise eyes. It is not that every blind man is wise, but potentially he is nearer to the self than those who have eyes because those who have eyes have wandered through the eyes far away into the world. They have gone very, very far away. You can move through the eyes to the very end of the world. And science goes on creating more powerful eyes for you so that you can see minute parts, atomic phenomena, and so that you can see to distant stars.Science goes on removing you from the self. So the more an age becomes scientific, the less it comes to religious knowledge. Now you have more powerful instruments with which to see, and you have gone far away from your self.Senses have become powerful. Really, science is doing nothing but creating more powerful senses for man: your hand can now reach to the moon; your eyes can now reach to distant stars. Every sense has been magnified, and this goes on.A blind man is closed inside himself; he cannot go out. But he can go in if he is not disturbed by the fact that he is blind, and if he is helped by the society to know that this is not a misfortune but a blessing in disguise.That’s what we mean when we call blind men pragya chakshu. We say, “Don’t be worried about the ordinary eyes. You can gain inner eyes through which you can know yourself, so don’t be worried about the outer eyes. Forget them completely. You are not losing anything because no one gains anything through the eyes. You can move within easily because the outer door is closed.”Eyes are your doors for going out. Through eyes you are moving, through eyes the desire, through eyes the illusion, through eyes the projection – through the eyes moves the whole world. But the innermost cannot be approached through the eyes. You will have to become blind. Not that you have to throw away your eyes, but that your eyes must become vacant, objectless, without dreams. Your eyes must become empty – empty of things, empty of pictures, empty of reflections.If you can look into the eyes of an enlightened one, you will see they are totally different. A buddha looks at you and at the same time he is not looking at you. You don’t become a part of his eyes. His look is vacant. Sometimes you may get scared because you will feel that he is indifferent to you. He is looking at you so vacantly, not paying any attention to you.Really, he cannot pay any attention to you. The attention is lost now; he has only awareness. He cannot be attentive to anything exclusively because that exclusiveness is created by desire. He looks at you as if not looking. You never become a part of his eyes. If you could become a part of his eyes, then you would become a part of his mind – because eyes are just the door to the mind; they go on transmitting the outer world to the inner. Eyes must become blind. Only then can you see your self.This sutra says that the eyes cannot approach it; it is unapproachable by the eyes. But we go on asking how to see God and we go on saying that unless we see God we cannot believe. You cannot see; seeing is of no help. You can see only the world. God cannot be seen. And if someone says that he has seen God, he is in illusion. He has seen a vision, a dream – a beautiful dream, a holy dream, but still a dream. So if you say that you have seen Krishna and you have seen Rama and you have seen Jesus, you are dreaming – good dreams, beautiful dreams, but still dreams. You cannot see God. Eyes are of no help there. Through the eyes he cannot be approached. You must become blind to see him.When you lose your eyes – really, when there is no desire to see – your eyes become vacant. Suddenly it is revealed within. It doesn’t need any eyes to see it; it is self-revelatory. Generally things are not self-revelatory; hence, eyes are needed. The self is self-revelatory. Really, in a deeper sense, when you see through the eyes he is seeing through the eyes, not the eyes themselves. That is another dimension to be known.When I look at you are my eyes looking at you? Eyes are just windows. I am looking at you through the eyes. Eyes are just windows; I am standing behind them. If I stand in the window and look out to the hills, will you say that the window is looking at the hills? The window will not be mentioned at all. I am looking through the window. Eyes are just apertures, windows. The consciousness looks through them and there is no way for this consciousness to look at itself through the eyes. The eyes are for others. The eyes are devices to look at the other. For your self no eyes are needed.For example, if I want to look at the hills I will look out of the windows, but if I want to look at my self there is no need for the window. I can close the window. There is no need for it because I am not outside the window, I am inside it. For everything else eyes are helpful. Everything can be approached through them; only the self cannot be approached through them.The eyes cannot approach it… Remember this. Then the false question of, “How can I see God?” will drop. You will not create that question or create around that question a false search. You will not ask where you can see him, where he can be found. He is nowhere, and really, eyes are irrelevant for him. He is hidden behind, within. Close your eyes and he will be revealed.But he cannot be revealed just by closing the physical eyes because just by closing the physical eyes you are not closing anything. The world you have gathered in goes on and you go on looking at it. I can close my eyes and still I can see it there. Then the eyes are not vacant. Then the eyes are still filled. When all the pictures disappear, all the impressions disappear, the eyes are vacant. Then, when the eyes are vacant, you can approach it, you can approach the inner.…neither can speech nor mind. Verbalizing will not help, intellectual thinking will not help. Whatsoever you can think will not be it because thinking is also outgoing, thinking is also for objects. Science insists on thinking; religion insists on no-thinking. Science insists: “Make thinking more rational, then the nature of things will be revealed more accurately.” And religion says: “Don’t think, then the nature of the self will be revealed to you.” They are diametrically opposite.Religion says, “Stop thinking, drop thinking, drop thoughts. They are the barrier.” And science says, “Make thinking more logical, accurate, keener, analytical, rational. Don’t bring any type of faith into it; don’t bring any type of emotion into it; don’t get involved in it. Let it be impartial – logical to the very extreme. Only then will the nature of things be revealed.” And both are right. As far as the world is concerned science is true and as far as the inner subject is concerned religion is true.But you can fall into a fallacy, and that fallacy is worldwide, universal. A scientist, when he comes to feel that the keener the thinking the more he reaches to the innermost core of a thing, starts thinking that the same method should be used for the inner search also. The fallacy has started. That method cannot be of any help for the inner search. And really, if the scientist insists on using the same method as he uses in science, the same experimental, objective methodology, then he will come to conclude that there is no self. It is not that there is no self, but that the method of the scientist is to reveal things; it cannot reveal the self. He will just bypass it. Because of his method he will miss it.That which is helpful in the world is a hindrance for the inner. The same fallacy has been committed at the opposite pole also. When a religious person reaches the inner self through nonthinking, he starts believing that through nonthinking the nature of the world can also be revealed.The East committed that fallacy very deeply; that’s why the East couldn’t create any science. You cannot create science through nonthinking. The East has been absolutely nonscientific. There were great minds born here, but they couldn’t create any science. They discussed and discussed; philosophically they were superb, but nothing happened in the outside world. Nothing can happen.The West has now created a great edifice of science with persons like Einstein. But the inner search remains nil. Even when Albert Einstein was dying, he felt frustrated. He had penetrated into the mysteries of the universe, and he had come to reveal one of its deepest cores – the theory of relativity. But he came to realize that although he knew many things never known before, as far as his own self was concerned it still remained a mystery. He knew nothing about it. The methods are opposite because the directions are opposite.To know a thing you have to move out, to know your self you have to move in. To move out you have to move in thought and thought is an outgoing process. To move in you have to stop thoughts, to cease thinking. Nonthinking is an in-moving process.This sutra says: …neither speech nor mind. The mind will not be of much help. Only meditation can be of help. Meditation is to create a “no-mind” within you. Remember this: meditation is to create a no-mind within you; hence, my emphasis on going completely mad so that the mind is dropped. The mind always resists madness. The mind says, “What are you doing? Are you crazy?” The mind always wants clear-cut logical things. The mind always asks, “Why are you doing it?” And if you cannot answer why, the mind will say, “Stop.”But life answers no whys. If you fall in love, the mind says, “Why have you fallen in love?” And then you create some idea around it: because the face of the girl is so beautiful… This is not the case. Really, the face of the girl looks beautiful because you have fallen in love, not the vice versa. It is not that the face is beautiful and that is why you have fallen in love; otherwise everyone will fall in love with your girl. But no one is falling – the face may not be beautiful, but your love gives it beauty. Your love creates a beauty around it.That’s why you go on laughing about others’ lovers. You think that a certain man is crazy, going mad, falling for that type of girl. You feel repulsed and he feels attracted. You think he is crazy. No, he is not crazy because love is not a logical phenomenon. You fall in love. We call it a falling because you fall from the head. It is not a rising in love, it is a falling because the head sees it as a fall. You have lost your reason, you are have gone mad.Love is a sort of madness. Really, life itself is a sort of madness. If you go on asking why, you cannot live for a single moment. If you go on asking, “Why breathe? Why get out of bed today? Why?” there is no answer; “Why go to sleep?” – there is no answer; “Why go on eating every day? Why go on loving the same person every day?” – there is no answer. Life is answerless. You can raise the questions, but there is no one to answer them. Life is a sort of madness.Reason is death, not life. The more you become rational, the more dead you will be because again and again you will ask why, and there is no answer. Then you will not do anything and then you will go on ceasing, shrinking. Life is a mad expansion and in meditation we are moving deeper and deeper into life – to the very depth, to the very central core.The mind has to be left behind. That’s why I say don’t ask why – just move. And whatsoever comes to you spontaneously, allow it to happen. If you allow it, in the beginning the mind will say, “Don’t do it. What will others think? What will they say? A man like you, so rational, dancing like a child? Crying and weeping and screaming like a madman? Don’t do this.” The mind will go on checking you and you will need courage not to listen to your mind because the mind cannot approach it: you have to put the mind aside.The mind is a device to deal with the world. It is of no use to you. You existed before the mind, you exist deeper than the mind; the mind has come to happen to you. It is just on the periphery. We have different types of minds, but our being is not different. The mind is a gathering, an earning. A child is born; he is born without a mind. He is a simple being, then by and by the mind goes on being created around him. He will need a mind to move in society, to work, to survive – he will need a mind.The mind is an instrument. That is why every society will create a different type of mind. If you are born in an aboriginal village, hidden in the hills, not knowing any technology of the modern world, oblivious of whatsoever is contemporary, your parents will give you a different type of mind because you have to move in a different world. If you are born in the East you have a different type of mind, if you are born in the West you have a different type of mind. If you are a Christian you will have one type of mind and if you are a Mohammedan you will have a different type of mind, even if you are born in the same village.Mind is a creation, a cultivated thing. But a being without the mind is the same everywhere. If you penetrate deeply, then another thing will be revealed: if you are a human being you have one type of mind and the tree standing just outside the window also has a mind – a different type. As far as being is concerned, you and the tree have similar beings. Only the mind differs.Because the tree has to exist among trees, she has to create a mind, an instrument, to exist among them. You don’t need that type of mind. That’s why you feel that trees don’t speak – you don’t know their language. You think animals don’t speak, they don’t have any language. Really, the case is that because you cannot understand them, you think they have no language. They have their own language. They have their own mind, which is suited to their milieu, suited to their atmosphere, suited to their society.Mind is a device to survive in the outer world; it is not needed within. And if you carry it, you cannot move within. With the mind you will move out, you cannot move within. Drop the mind, put it aside. Say, “Now you are not needed. I am moving withinward – you are not needed.”We don’t, therefore, know it, nor do we know how to teach it. That which can be known by the mind can be taught by the mind. But if it is impossible to know it by the mind, how to teach it? – because the teaching is going to be through the mind. So the brahman, the absolute, the self, cannot be taught; it is impossible to teach it. Then what am I doing? Or what is a Buddha or a Christ or a Krishna doing? What are they doing if it cannot be taught? And what is the seer of the Upanishad, Kena, doing if it cannot be taught? It cannot be taught, that is absolutely true, but still something can be done.A situation can be created in which it becomes infectious. It cannot be taught, but the “infection” can be given to you. In a particular situation you can become infected by it. So the whole phenomenon of master and disciple is not a teaching phenomenon. The master is not really teaching anything. The master is just trying to pull you into a situation, to push you into a situation where it can happen to you.All the devices of Yoga and Tantra are just to create a situation in which the thing can happen. I can lead you into a situation where you will become aware of a different sort of reality, but that reality cannot be taught. Can you teach a blind man what light is? You cannot. Whatsoever you do, you will not be able to teach it. But one thing can be done: you can treat his eyes; the eyes can be operated upon. And if the blind man comes to see, he will know what light is.Light can be experienced, but cannot be taught to a blind man. And we are just like blind men as far as the inner reality is concerned. Your inner eyes can be opened to it, but you cannot be taught it.That is why faith has been the cornerstone of all religious phenomena. The blind man must have faith, otherwise he will not allow you to operate on his eyes. He will say, “You may destroy my eyes.” He has none, but he will become scared: What are you going to do? And if he thinks you are going to operate, that you are going to do surgery, he will say, “Don’t touch my eyes. You may destroy them. And how am I supposed to know that when you have operated there will be light? And what is light? First tell me. First prove what light is and whether light exists at all. Unless you prove this I cannot allow you to operate on my eyes.”And there is no doctor who can prove that there is light. The doctor can only say, “Have faith in me.” Nothing else is possible, no argumentation is possible. The doctor can only say, “Trust in me. Even if you are not going to gain anything, one thing is certain: you are not going to lose anything because you have no eyes to lose.”That’s what Buddha, Krishna, and Jesus have been saying: “Have faith. And you have nothing to lose, so why get so worried? What can you lose believing in me? What have you got? If you have anything, then escape from me as fast as possible. But you have nothing – nothing to lose – but you are so worried.” People come to me and they ask, “How can I believe?” I tell them it is not a question of how because the “how” needs answers. Faith means you have nothing to lose – so why not experiment? Why not try?Karl Marx has said to the proletarians of the world, “You have nothing to lose except your chains.” He may not be right about the proletarians, but I tell you that you have nothing to lose except your chains, nothing to lose except your bondage, nothing to lose except your blindness. And the whole phenomenon is possible only when you trust – because you are moving into an unknown territory, uncharted.I say I have known it, but I cannot teach you. I can lead you to the point where you will become aware that it exists, but I cannot teach you. There is no language to teach it, no mind to teach it. There is no way to teach it, no symbols to teach it. Whatsoever you know, it cannot be translated into that knowledge. It is beyond it. I have known something; I can take you to that point where you will also become aware of it and you will say, “It is!”The mind cannot know it; therefore, we don’t know it because whatsoever we know, we know through the mind. Our whole knowledge consists of mind and mind and nothing else. So we cannot know it, nor do we know how to teach it.It is different from what is known and it is different from what is unknown. That creates a deeper problem again. It is different from the known… obviously, because if it were not different from the known, then you would have known it already.Whatsoever you know, it is not it. And the way you know, you cannot know it, otherwise you would have known it by now, because you have been in existence for millions and millions of lives. But you have been missing it again and again. And buddhas go on talking about it and you go on listening to them about it and nothing happens.It is different from the known and it is different from what is unknown – because the unknown can be known. Unknown means just that which is not known yet. Use the same methods of knowledge and someday it will be known.Science divides the world into two: the known and the unknown – there is nothing else. Science says the known and the unknown. The known is that which we have come to know and the unknown is that which will be known sooner or later. Religion brings a third category: the unknowable. Religion says there is something which is known, something which is unknown, and something which is unknowable. If there is something which is unknowable, only then is religion possible; otherwise science is enough. The unknown will go on being reduced to the known.It is conceivable that one day science will come to the point when there is only one category: the known. By and by, the unknown will become known. At a point somewhere there will be nothing unknown. It can be conceived of through science. But religion says there is something which is neither like the known nor like the unknown: it is unknowable. Whatsoever you do you cannot know it. So when everything becomes known, still the unknowable will be there – the mystery, the mysterious, the mysterium, will remain.Why insist that it is unknowable? Why not say it is unknown? – because the known is through the mind and the unknown will become known through the mind, but the unknowable is behind the mind. Whatsoever you do by the mind, you will never approach it. You will have to drop the mind. And with the mind the known drops and the unknown also, because those two are the dimensions of the functioning of the mind. The known and the unknown are the workings of the mind. When the mind drops, both have dropped and you have entered the third dimension. This third dimension is of the unknowable. You are there in that dimension; the self is there.But the rishi says a very beautiful thing:Thus have we heard it from our predecessors who instructed us about it. He says, “Thus have we heard from our own masters.” He knows himself also; he can say, “I have known this. This is what I have known.” There is no difficulty in saying it. But he says, “This is what we have heard. Our masters have said it.”This has a quality of its own – the Indian heritage, the Indian attitude of saying things, the Indian way of always being humble, not assertive. So Buddha says, “Whatsoever I am saying was known before me by other buddhas. This is nothing new.” This is the emphasis. The emphasis is that this is nothing new, nothing original. And really, truth cannot be original; only untruth can be original. You can invent lies, but you cannot invent truth – or can you?Truth cannot be invented. Truth is eternal, timeless. So it is absurd to say that I have discovered it. You only rediscover it; you never discover it. Rediscover – it has been discovered again and again, millions of times. It has been known again and again, millions of times. You always rediscover it; you never discover it.To emphasize this fact the rishis say, “It has been said so by those who preceded us. It has always been known.” He doesn’t claim any originality. That claim belongs to the ego. That claim, “This is my discovery,” belongs to the egoistic mind. Really, the ego always feels hurt if you say, “This is nothing original.” If someone says something and you say it is nothing original, he will feel hurt. If someone writes a book and you say, “This is nothing original; it has been written so many times by so many people, so why have you unnecessarily labored on it?” he will feel hurt. Every author, every thinker, tries to prove somehow that whatsoever he is saying is original. This is a modern disease.In the West, if you are not saying anything original then what is the use of saying it? Why are you saying it? Don’t say it. In the East, quite the opposite has been the case. If you are saying something original, then the East will say: “Wait and ponder over it. Don’t assert it, don’t say it, because if it is original then something must be wrong with it; otherwise someone must have known it before. The truth is eternal. If it is original, then something must be wrong with it. Wait, don’t tell anyone; otherwise you will be in difficulty because you will be proved to be a liar. Wait, ponder, meditate. The world has existed so eternally, beginningless, how can you conceive that you come to know an original truth which was not known before? It is impossible.”But it happens because our span of knowledge is very little. It is just like this: in the season the trees will bloom, the flowers will come. These flowers cannot know about the flowers of the last season. They cannot know; they have never met them. They will think themselves so unique, so original: “We have never been on this earth; this earth has become so beautiful because of us. Because we bloom, the whole existence has bloomed.”They don’t know that this has been going on eternally. Every year the season comes and the flowers bloom. But the flowers cannot meet with each other, so every flower thinks he has come for the first time. This gives him a flavor, an ego. He feels he is something, somebody.The Eastern emphasis has always been that truth is eternal; you can only rediscover it. Many have known, many will know. You are just a part of a long procession. It is your season so you have bloomed – but other buddhas have bloomed. It is just like when you fall in love: you think this type of love has never been, that something new has entered into existence. No lover can believe that anyone ever could have loved in the way he loves his beloved.And this is good as far as it goes. This is good. How can you believe otherwise when you are in love? You think others have loved, but not this way; others have loved, but it was not such a deep intense thing. It has never happened; it is original.The same is with thoughts: when a thought appears in your mind, you think such a thought never happened before. But thoughts are just like clouds: they gather in the sky every year, then they disappear and then they gather again. The world moves in a repetitive circle.So Indians, particularly wise Indians, have always been emphasizing that whatsoever they say is nothing new; it has all been said before. This is a very non-egoistical attitude, and there is a very deep wisdom hidden in it. How can truth wait for me to be discovered? How can it wait for me to discover it? It has been discovered again and again. But one discovers it and it gets lost again because it cannot be transferred.If I have come to a truth, I cannot give it to you. It cannot be transferred because truth is not a thing. It is a happening in the being; it cannot be transferred. So the truth that I rediscover will be rediscovered again. And when you rediscover it you will feel something new has happened, something original. But if you know and if you can appreciate a non-egoistic way of life, then you will know that the rishi is right: it has been said before, known before.What speech cannot reveal but what reveals speech – know thou that alone as brahman and not this – anything objective – that people worship here.What speech cannot reveal but what reveals speech… You cannot say it, you cannot speak it, but through speech it is being expressed. Really, without it you cannot speak, without it you cannot see, without it you cannot feel. It is your life. You cannot speak about it but he is the speaker; you cannot see it anywhere but he is the seer; you cannot think about it but he is the thinker; you cannot do anything without it because he is the doer. So whatsoever you do, he is revealed. You cannot reveal it, but whatsoever you do he is revealed because he alone is. Brahman means life: he alone is.What speech cannot reveal but what reveals speech – know thou that alone as brahman and not this – anything objective – that people worship here. People go on worshipping idols. We make God into an object because we cannot feel comfortable unless something is there in front of us. We feel uncomfortable, uneasy. A God unknown, unknowable, is difficult. We create an idol and then we put the idol in front of us and worship it.This is stupid in a way because you created the idol and now you are worshipping it as if it was the creator. You worship the idol as if the idol created you. You created the idol; the real creator is hidden behind. Really, God is not in the worshipped object, it is in the worshipper. It is not in the object to which you pray, it is in the innermost source from where the prayer bubbles up, from where the prayer comes up. It is always within. But for us, something becomes significant only when it is without because we have become fixed in a mode where everything must be objective in order to be. That creates the problem, so we have created temples and churches and mosques just to objectify that which cannot be objectified. But human stupidity is such.Mohammed preached that he cannot be objectified; you cannot make any idol of him. He was right. He was saying what the Upanishad is saying. But what have the Mohammedans done? They thought it was their duty to destroy idols, to destroy temples, to set them on fire. Because he cannot be objectified, so wherever he is objectified, “Destroy the object.”See the human stupidity: Mohammed was trying to say that you can forget the object and move within. But they did not forget the object, they became obsessed with the object again. “Move and destroy!” So someone is worshipping God in a stone and someone is destroying the stone, but both are attached to the stone in their own ways and both think that the stone is very significant – one to worship it and the other to destroy it. One feels if he does not worship this stone he will not be religious, and one feels if he does not destroy this stone he will not be religious. The stone is for both very significant. We go on moving to the object. Either we love or we hate, but the object remains there.The emphasis of those who have known is to forget the object and remain with the subjectivity alone. Don’t create any object, any image, any name, any form. Don’t create anything. The creator is already there; you cannot improve upon it. Don’t do anything. Just move within and know it.What mind does not comprehend but what comprehends the mind – know thou that alone as brahman and not this that people worship here.Mind cannot comprehend him, but he can comprehend the mind. Mind is included in him – everything is included; even the stone is included in him. But the stone cannot include him: this is the point. Draw a big circle and then draw a small circle in it. The big circle includes the small circle; the small circle is part of the big circle, but the small circle cannot include the big circle.Your mind is included in the divine, but your mind cannot include the divine. It is a part and the part cannot include the whole. The whole comprehends all, includes all. And when a part starts saying, “I include the whole,” the part has gone mad, the part has gone neurotic.You – whenever you try to comprehend that, the total, through the mind, you are doing something absurd. It is impossible. A drop of water cannot include the ocean, but the ocean includes it. And if the drop of water says, “I am the ocean,” then the drop has gone crazy. But this drop of water can become the ocean. If this drop of water drops into the ocean, loses the boundaries, loses the finiteness, the limitations, then that drop has become the ocean.The mind cannot say, “I know.” The mind can drop into the oceanic totality and then it is included there.Whatsoever we worship is just a game. It is good: if you feel good worshipping, then it is good. It is a good game and I never intend to destroy anybody’s game. If you worship, if you feel good going to a church, it is good: go on doing it. But remember that you are missing the basic point: the ultimate is within the worshipper. So while you worship don’t focus your eyes on the worshipped object. Focus yourself within, on the worshipper. There it will be revealed, there it is hidden.

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The Supreme Doctrine 01-11Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Supreme Doctrine 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You have said that intellectual learning and knowledge have helped no one and that the Upanishad says that nothing is to be denied. If the intellect is there and we are not to deny it, what is the best way in which to use it?The first thing to be understood about the intellect is this: that the intellect exists on denial. The very function of the intellect is to deny, to say no. The emphasis of the Upanishad on not denying is basically to relieve you of your intellectual effort.Intellect always says no. So the more one becomes intellectual, the more and more one becomes incapable of saying yes. Yes-saying means faith, no means doubt, and intellect depends on doubt. If you doubt, intellect has a function. If you don’t doubt, there is no function left for the intellect.Intellect is denial. When the Upanishad says, “Don’t deny anything,” it means that the intellect will have no function at all. Think of your own mind: whenever you say no, it starts working; whenever you say yes, yes becomes the end – there is no further journey.This age is one of the most intellectual ones, and this intellectual milieu is created by thoroughgoing doubt about everything. The greater the intellect, the more skeptical it will be. It can function very keenly if you say no. If you say yes, intellect is annihilated; hence, the emphasis of all religions on faith – because in faith intellect cannot move. There is no basis for it to move. There is no further goal; yes becomes the end. If you can say yes to the whole existence, thinking will stop. Thinking has the quality of denial. The master says, “Don’t deny.” In the nondenial, intellect disappears.And you ask me what to do about intellect. It will not be there. You will not have to do anything; you will not have to deny it. And you cannot deny intellect because denial is intellectual. If you deny intellect, the very denial gives more roots to your intellectual mind. You will become a victim. If you deny intellect, you will become a victim of a deeper intellectual effort. You cannot deny it. How can you deny it? – because denial starts thinking. You can find reasons why not to deny, but those reasons will be appeals to the intellect. You can find arguments why to deny, but those arguments will be intellectual.Faith has no arguments for or against. So really, those who have given arguments for God’s existence I call irreligious because arguments have nothing to do with religion. There have been many well-known thinkers all over the world, particularly in the West, who have tried to prove that God exists. I call them irreligious – because if you can prove God’s existence, then the intellect becomes superior to God’s existence. Then it is proved through the intellect, and whatsoever is proved through intellect can be disproved through the same intellect. So those who try to prove are really the persons who challenge others to disprove.Atheists exist because there are argumentative theists. When you say, “Because of this God exists,” then you are giving a challenge to someone, to someone’s intellect, who can say, “This reasoning is false.” And arguments can be given for and against, ad infinitum; they never reach to any conclusion. Really religious persons have not argued about God: they have lived. They have lived in the way in which one should live if God is. You cannot see God, but you can see a divine person. You can see a person who is living godliness. That is the only proof. But that proof is not for the intellect. That proof is not intellectual at all. That proof is absolutely beyond intellect – it reaches directly to your heart; you feel it.Whenever you see a Ramakrishna or a Ramana, whenever you see a person like Jesus, it is not the intellect that comes to conclude that this man is divine. You feel it first. Your heart starts vibrating in a new dimension; you feel a new perfume of being. But this is feeling; you cannot prove it.Intellect can prove or disprove, but it can never give you faith. Even when it proves, it proves only itself; nothing else is proved. If you can prove the existence of God, you have not proved the existence of God; you have simply proved that you are a very intellectual being, that’s all. You have proved that you have a very keen intellect, you have proved your own ego, nothing else. And intellect is the subtlest food for the ego – you feel that you know, you feel that you can prove, you feel that you can disprove, you feel to be the center. Even God depends on you: if you prove him, then he is; if you say no, then he is no more. He is secondary. Remember, for intellect everything is secondary and intellect is primary. Everything else becomes number two; intellect remains number one.Faith says that this supremacy of intellect should be thrown away. Only then can the total being assert itself. And then being is primary and intellect becomes secondary. Then existence is primary; then intellect is just a part. Intellect is dictatorial; faith is democratic because faith gives expression to your whole being. Intellect is only one part trying to be supreme.When you do as the Upanishad says and you don’t deny, then the intellect disappears. If you don’t deny, you will not have the intellect there at all. The no is needed. That is the foothold. Without the no, the intellect cannot stand. So the question, “What to do about intellect?” really doesn’t arise. Don’t deny anything and there will be no intellect to be worried about.The second question:Osho,The first few days of active meditation tend to tighten muscles, causing pain everywhere. Is there any way to get over that?Go on doing it! You will get over it – and the reasons are obvious. There are two reasons. First, it is a vigorous exercise and your body has to get attuned to it. So for three or four days you will feel that the whole body is aching. With any new exercise it will happen. But after four days you will get over it and your body will feel stronger than ever.But this is not very basic. The basic thing goes deeper, and that basic thing is something modern psychologists have come to know. Your body is not simply physical. In your body, in your muscles, in the structure of your body, many other things have entered through suppression. If you suppress anger, the poison goes into the body. It goes into the muscles, it goes into the blood. If you suppress anything, it is not only a mental thing, it is also physical – because you are not really divided. You are not body and mind; you are bodymind – psychosomatic. You are both together. So whatsoever is done with your body reaches to the mind and whatsoever is done with the mind reaches to the body, as body and mind are two ends of the same entity.For instance, what happens to the body if you get angry? Whenever you get angry certain poisons are released into the blood. Without those poisons you will not get mad enough to be angry. You have particular glands in the body, and those glands release certain chemicals. Now this is scientific, this is not just some philosophy. Your blood becomes poisoned.That’s why, when you are angry, you can do something which you cannot do ordinarily – because you are mad. You can push a big rock; you cannot do it ordinarily. You cannot even believe afterward that you could have pushed this rock or thrown it or lifted it. When you are back to normal again, you will not be capable of lifting it again because you are not the same. Particular chemicals were circulating in the blood. You were in an emergency condition; your total energy was brought to be active.But when an animal gets angry, he gets angry. He has no morality about it, no teaching about it. He simply gets angry and the anger is released. But when you get angry, you get angry in a way similar to any animal. But then there is society, morality, etiquette, and thousands of things. You have to push the anger down. You have to show that you are not angry; you have to smile – a painted smile. But you have to create a smile, and you push the anger down. What is happening to the body? The body was ready to fight – either to fight or to fly, to escape from the danger; either to face it or escape from it. The body was ready to do something: anger is just a readiness to do something. The body was going to be violent, aggressive.If you could be violent and aggressive, then the energy would be released. But you cannot be – it is not convenient, so you push it down. Then what will happen to all those muscles which were ready to be aggressive? They will become crippled. The energy will push them to be aggressive, and you will push them backward not to be aggressive. There will be a conflict. In your muscles, in your blood, in your body tissues, there will be conflict. They are ready to express something and you are pushing them not to express. You are suppressing them. Then your body becomes crippled.This happens with every emotion, and it goes on day after day for years. Then your body becomes crippled all over. All the nerves become crippled. They are not flowing, they are not liquid, they are not alive. They have become dead, they have become poisoned and have all become entangled. They are not natural.Look at any animal and see the grace of the body. What happens to the human body? Why is it not so graceful? Why? Every animal is so graceful; why is the human body not so graceful? What has happened to it? You have done something with it: you have crushed it and the natural spontaneity of its flow has gone. It has become stagnant. In every part of your body there is poison. In every muscle of your body there is suppressed anger, suppressed sexuality, suppressed greed and everything. Suppressed jealousy, hatred – everything is suppressed there. Your body is really diseased.So when you start meditating, all these poisons will be released. And wherever the body has become stagnant, it will have to melt, it will become liquid again. This is a great effort: after forty years of living in a wrong way, then suddenly meditating, the whole body is in an upheaval. You will feel aching all over the body. But this aching is good, and you have to welcome it. Allow the body to again become a flow. Again it will become graceful and childlike; again you will gain the aliveness. But before that aliveness comes to you the dead parts have to be straightened and this is going to be a little painful.Psychologists say that we have created an armor around the body and that this armor is the problem. When you get angry, if you are allowed total expression, what will you do? When you get angry, you start crushing your teeth together; you want to do something with your nails and with your hands, because that’s how your animal heritage will have it. You want to do something with your hands, to destroy something.If you don’t do anything your fingers will become crippled; they will lose the grace, the beauty. They will not be alive limbs. And the poison is there. So when you shake hands with someone, really there is no touch, no life, because your hands are dead.You can feel this. Touch a small child’s hand – a subtle difference is there. When the child really gives you his hand… If he is not giving, then it is alright – he will withdraw. He will not give you a dead hand, he will simply withdraw. But if he wants to give you his hand, then you will feel that his hand is as if it is melting into your hand. The warmth, the flow – as if the whole child has come to the hand. The very touch, and he expresses all the love that is possible to express.But the same child when grown up will shake hands as if a hand is just a dead instrument. He will not come in it, he will not flow through it. This has happened because there are blocks. Anger is blocked; before your hand becomes alive again to express love, it will have to pass through agony, it will have to pass through a deep expression of anger. If the anger is not released, that anger is blocked and love cannot come out of it.Your whole body has become blocked, not only your hands. So you can embrace someone, you can take someone near your chest, but that is not synonymous with taking someone near your heart. These are two different things. You can take someone near your chest: this is a physical phenomenon. But if you have armor around your heart, a blocking of emotions, then the person remains as distant as he ever was; no intimacy is possible. But if you really take a person near, and there is no armor, no wall between you and the person, then the heart will melt into the other. There will be a meeting, a communion.Your body has to release many poisons. You have become toxic, and you will have pain – because those poisons have settled down. Now I am creating a chaos again. This meditation is to create chaos within you so that you can be rearranged – so that a new arrangement becomes possible. You must be destroyed as you are, only then can the new be born. As you are, you have gone totally wrong. You have to be destroyed and only then can something new be created. There will be pain, but this pain is worthwhile.So go on doing the meditation and allow the body to have pain. Allow the body not to resist and allow the body to move into this agony. This agony comes from your past, but it will go. If you are ready it will go. And when it goes, for the first time you will have a body. Right now you have only an imprisonment, a capsule, dead. You are encapsulated; you don’t have an agile, alive body. Even animals have more beautiful, more alive bodies than you.By the way, that’s why we have become so much obsessed with clothes – because the body is not worth showing. We have become so much obsessed with clothes. Whenever you stand naked you will see what you have done to your body. Clothes go on hiding your body from you.This has been my experience through so many meditation camps: if some people become naked in the camps, really only those people are the ones who have beautiful bodies; thus, they are not afraid. Those who have ugly bodies come and they complain, and they say, “This is not good, people going nude.” Their fear is natural. They are not really afraid of others going nude, they are afraid of themselves; they cannot face their own bodies.This disease is a vicious circle, because if you don’t have a live body you want to hide it, and when you hide it, it becomes more and more dead – because then there is no need to be alert about its being alive.Through centuries of clothing we have lost touch with our own bodies. If your head is cut off and you encounter your own body without a head, I am sure you will not be able to recognize that this is your body – or will you be able to recognize it? You will not be able to recognize it because you are not even acquainted with your own body. You don’t have any feeling about it; you are simply living in it without caring about it.We have done much violence to our bodies. So in this chaotic meditation I am forcing your bodies to be alive again. Many blocks will be broken; many settled things will become unsettled again; many systems will become liquid again. There will be pain, but welcome it. It is a blessing and you will get over it. Continue! There is no need to think what to do. You simply continue the meditation. I have seen hundreds and hundreds of people passing through the same process. Within a few days the pain is gone. And when the pain is gone, you will have a subtle joy around your body.You cannot have it right now because the pain is there. You may know it or you may not know it, but the pain is there all over your body. You have simply become unconscious about it because it has always been with you. Whatsoever is always there, you become unconscious about. Through meditation you will become conscious and then the mind will say, “Don’t do this; the whole body is aching.” Don’t listen to the mind. Simply go on doing it.Within a certain period the pain will be thrown out. And when the pain is thrown out, when your body has again become receptive and there is no block, no poisons around it, you will always have a subtle feeling of joy wrapped around you. Whatsoever you are doing or not doing, you will always feel a subtle vibration of joy all around your body.Really, joy only means that your body is in a symphony, nothing else – that your body is in a musical rhythm, nothing else. Joy is not pleasure; pleasure has to be derived from something else. Joy is just to be yourself – alive, fully vibrant, vital. A feeling of a subtle music around your body and within your body, a symphony – that is joy. You can be joyful when your body is flowing, when it is a riverlike flow.It will come, but you will have to pass through suffering, through pain, and that is part of your destiny because you have created it. But it goes. If you don’t stop in the middle, it goes. If you stop in the middle, then the old settlement will be there again. Within four or five days you will feel okay – just the old, as you have always been. Be aware of that okayness.The third question:Osho,Will you please indicate something about the fifth stage in the active meditation.Nothing can be said about it; that’s why I never talk about it. The fourth is the last – the fifth will happen, but nothing can be said about it. There is no need either. The fifth is not a stage, it is your being. The first four are states, steps, but the fifth is not a stage, it is not a step. It is your own being, it is your nature. But nothing can be said about it. If you come to the fourth the fifth will happen to you, that much is certain.If you can come to a total silence in the fourth, then the fifth will happen. It is a growth of your silence. But nothing can be said about it – or whatsoever can be said will be misunderstood. For example, if I say it is absolute bliss – and it has been said that it is absolute bliss – you will misunderstand it because you don’t know what bliss is. You know certain pleasures and you think that bliss must be something like pleasure. It is not. You can think only in terms of pleasure because that’s what you are acquainted with. You can think it is infinite pleasure; it is not. It is not pleasure at all.Or you can think negatively, that there will be no pain, no suffering as Buddha has said. Buddha said: in that ultimate state of being there will be no suffering. And when people used to ask to him, “This is not enough. Tell us something more. You are saying what will not be there. Please tell us something about what will be there. You are saying there will be no suffering, but what will be there?” Buddha refused to answer. He said, “I will not say anything. This much I can say: there will be no suffering.”But even that will be misunderstood – because you are left nowhere, hanging. If it is said that it will be pleasure-like, then it is wrong. If it is said that there will be no pain, it is better than the first, but still not exactly right because you may carry the impression that it is going to be of negativity when it is not. Buddha was misunderstood in this country. He was thought to be a nihilist, a negativist, who was saying that in nirvana there will be no suffering, that’s all. But what about bliss, sat-chit-anand – existence, consciousness? Simply no-suffering?But whatsoever is said will be misunderstood because we understand only that which we know. You know pleasure, you know pain, but in the fifth there will be neither. The duality will cease: there will be no pain, there will be no pleasure. Now it becomes inconceivable. What will it be like? If there is no pain and no pleasure, what will it be like? It becomes inconceivable; you cannot imagine it.Bertrand Russell has said somewhere that if it is really so, that nirvana or the ultimate is beyond pain and pleasure, then it must be like a deep slumber, a deep sleep. That seems logical. If there is no pain and no pleasure, how can you be conscious? – because consciousness needs something there to be conscious about. If there is nothing – no pain, no pleasure – then there is no challenge for consciousness to be there, and you will fall into a deep coma.Everything will be misunderstood; that’s why I never talk about it. I simply lead you to the door of the temple and leave the temple for you to enter and know. I leave you at the door of the temple. These four steps help you reach to the door. Then you can enter. You are standing right in front of the door and the door is open. If the temple magnetizes you, calls you, challenges you, you will enter. No one has returned from the fifth step. No one can return because it is the ultimate ecstasy. Your whole being simply gravitates toward it.The fifth is left out of discussion. It is your own being; it is not a stage. The first four are stages. In the first you are working with your vital energy, with your prana – with breathing. Breathing is life. In the first step, you are working with your life. You are destroying the pattern of your breathing. Through chaotic breathing, you are destroying the settled pattern. And if you can destroy the pattern of breathing, then all the patterns in all your bodies will be loosened – because breathing is the most subtle thing to work with.You may not have observed, but whenever your mind changes, your breathing changes. Even a subtle change in mood and your breathing immediately changes. Or, to be more correct, even before the mood changes, the breathing has already changed. When you are happy you breathe differently; when you are angry you breathe differently; when you are tense you breathe differently; when you are sad you breathe differently; when you are relaxed you breathe differently. The rhythm always goes on changing.Observe it. Observe the moods of your breathing. You are not breathing the same way the whole day. In the morning you breathe differently, in the evening differently. Just by knowing about your breath, everything can be said about your mind, what is happening to your mind.Sooner or later, when medical science and psychology can penetrate into this phenomenon of breathing more deeply, they will make a graph of it. Your breathing graph will show what types of moods you have been passing through during the day. When you are asleep you breathe differently; when you are alert you breathe differently, when you are sleepy you breathe differently. Breathing can be changed easily, and if you change the breathing you change the mind.You can work from both ways. There are many schools of Yoga. Some schools, particularly the schools of Raja yoga, start with the mind. They say first change the mind, then the breathing will change by itself. And there are other schools, particularly of Hatha yoga, which say change the breathing and the mind will follow. Both are right because both are related.Do one thing: while you are feeling relaxed – someday just sitting in your armchair, and the whole world seems to be happy and at ease and you feel at home – note your breathing. Just observe the rhythm: how are you inhaling and how are you exhaling and what is the proportion of time, how much gap is there between inhalation and exhalation? Note everything; then do one thing more. Sometime, when you feel angry, breathe the way you were breathing when you were relaxed – and it will be impossible to be angry. Then you cannot be angry. You cannot be angry! It will be impossible to be angry because anger needs a different type of breathing.When you are in love, sitting with your friend or with your wife or with your beloved, note down how you are breathing and then try to breathe that way anywhere and suddenly you will feel love bubbling up. Note it down. While just lying on the bed with your beloved, note down how you are breathing. Then sit beside a tree and breathe the same way. Suddenly you will feel that the tree has become the beloved because now the love is flowing.When you are unaware of this fact you unnecessarily create much misery for yourself. You go on breathing wrongly in wrong places and you create many riddles, many puzzles and confusion.In the first step, we work with breathing to create a chaos, because unless a chaos is there you cannot be born. The first step is to break all the old patterns of breathing.In the second step, we are working with emotions to bring out all the suppressed emotions. If you have really taken deep, chaotic breaths, the suppressed emotions will come out easily. They will start coming out by themselves: you will not need to do anything. The second step will follow automatically if the first has been done rightly. If you have not been resistant in the first, the second will follow easily. In the second we are working with the emotions to bring them out, to act them out, to throw them out.When you are angry with someone and you throw your anger on him, you are creating a chain reaction. Now he too will be angry and this may continue for lives and you will go on being enemies. You can continue this for centuries. It is not going to end. Where will it end? There is only one possibility. You can end it only in meditation, nowhere else, because in meditation you are not angry with someone: you are simply angry.Remember, this difference is basic. You are not angry with somebody; you are simply angry, and the anger is released into the cosmos. You are not hateful toward anyone. If hate comes, you are simply hateful and the hate is thrown out. In meditation, emotions are not addressed; they are unaddressed. They move into the cosmos, and the cosmos purifies everything.Remember, it is just like a dirty river falling into the ocean: the ocean will purify it. Whenever your anger, your hate, your sexuality, moves into the cosmos, into the ocean, it becomes purified. But whenever a dirty river falls into another river, then the other river also becomes dirty. When you are angry with someone, you are throwing your dirt at him. Then he will also throw his at you and this will become a mutual dirtying process.In meditation you are throwing yourself into the cosmos to be purified. All the energy that you throw is purified in the cosmos. The cosmos is so vast and so great an ocean you cannot make it dirty. In meditation we are not related with persons. In meditation we are related directly to the cosmos.In the second step, we are throwing emotions out. It is a catharsis. In the third we are using a mantra: “hoo.” It is a Sufi sound just like the Hindu sound om, but more useful for the modern man than om can be because om is a very delicate sound. When you say om, it never goes below the heart. It is not very violent; it is very nonviolent. Om is one of the most nonviolent sounds.It was invented by and for a different type of people from you – for those who were very loving and nonviolent, for those who were simply natural, simple; for those who lived in nature, in villages; for those who were not educated, uneducated; for those who were simply human, not very cultivated and conditioned. They were animal-like – pure, simple, innocent. The om was invented for them. Even this much was enough to change them. Om is a very delicate hammer. It hits the heart very delicately. But it was enough for them because they had hearts. For you it will not do. You need a very violent hammer.Sufis invented this second sound, hoo. This is part of Allah-hoo. Sufis repeat, “Allah! Allah!” and when you repeat it continuously, it becomes “Allah-hoo! Allah-hoo! Allah-hoo! Allah-hoo!” Then the beginning part is dropped, the Allah is dropped, and only hoo is retained. Then it becomes, “Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!” When you say hoo it goes directly to the sex center. It penetrates directly to the sex center; it hits the sex center.This age is so sexual that you need a hammering on the sex energy. The heart is no longer there. If you are going to try om, you are knocking at a door which is vacant. No one lives there now. The center of gravity has shifted down to the sex center. Your center is not the heart. The heart can be the center when you are centered in love, but now you are centered in sex, not in love.Psychologists say that love is nothing but the foreplay to sex. They are right – because they have no other specimen to study. They study you and then they come to conclude that love is nothing but foreplay – just creating a situation in which sex can happen, nothing else. So when sex has happened, love disappears. It is just like when you feel hungry you gravitate toward food and look at food with enchanted eyes. But when your hunger is satiated, you look away from the food. All the enchantment is lost.So when you love your wife or your husband, the love is just the etiquette to enter into sex – because it will be too rude to start immediately. So it just acts like a lubricating agent. And when sex is satisfied, the husband moves to his own side of the bed and goes to sleep. Finished! – all the enchantment is gone. It will come again only when he feels that type of hunger. Psychologists say that love is nothing but foreplay – just a mannerism. And they are right, because they don’t know any other type of man.Om was invented, discovered, for a different type: for those who were in love. Not that they never had sex: they had it; otherwise you would not be here. They were having sex, but the basic difference in quality is this: they were centered in love and their sex was but an expression of it, nothing else. Love was basic and sex was just one of the many expressions of it – the deepest expression, but an expression of love anyway. They loved first and then sex happened. It was not cerebral, it was not planned.If you want to use the contemporary jargon, then I can say that sex was nothing but afterplay. The psychologists say love is nothing but foreplay, but I say that then sex was nothing but afterplay – just to finish the game. It was the peak, but it was not the center. Love was the center. Then the heart functioned in a different way, vibrated in a different way. Then om was enough to work with. Om can help a person who is very loving and who has a heart; otherwise, it cannot help him.Hoo is the sound for this age. It will hit you directly at the sex center. If you really hit loudly with “Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!” you will feel a subtle hammering inside. And sex energy can move in two ways: it can move outward and it can move inward.When you feel attracted to a woman or to a man, the energy has started moving outward. Really, a woman or a man – a person of the opposite sex – is hitting you from without. And this is literally true. When you feel that some woman is attracting you, if you can become alert and observing you will feel a subtle hit at your sex center. The feminine energy, or if you are a woman, the masculine energy hits you on that center. The same hit will be felt when you shout hoo, but from within. And if you go on hammering the sex center from within, an opening is created and the energy starts to flow inward and upward.Once you know how to make this energy flow upward and withinward, you will reach to higher orgasms, higher peaks of ecstasy, than you can ever reach with any woman or any man. An inner meeting will have started.The first step is to change your prana, your breathing pattern. The second stage is to throw out your emotions, the suppressed part of your mind – a catharsis. And the third is to hit your life energy to move upward. And when the energy starts moving upward, then you are not to do anything, you are simply to lie down as if dead.There is to be no diversion there. The energy simply moves upward and you are not to do anything. That’s why I go on emphasizing not to move. After the third step when I say “Stop!” stop completely. Don’t do anything at all because anything can become a diversion and you miss the point. Anything, just a cough or a sneeze, and you may miss the whole thing because the mind has become diverted and the flow will stop immediately because your attention has moved.Don’t do anything. You are not going to die. Even if the sneeze is coming and you don’t sneeze for ten minutes, you will not die. If you feel like coughing, if you feel an irritation in the throat and you don’t do anything, you are not going to die. Don’t be afraid: no one has ever died. Remain dead as far as the body is concerned so that the energy can move in one flow.When the energy moves upward you become more and more silent. Silence is the by-product of energy moving upward and tension is the by-product of energy moving downward. You will be more and more in anxiety when energy moves downward; you will be more and more silent, quiet, calm and cool as energy moves upward and withinward. And these words downward and outward are synonymous, and inward and upward are synonymous. And when you have become silent, that energy is moving like a flood, it is passing through all the centers, all the chakras. When it passes through the chakras it cleanses them, it purifies them, it makes them dynamic, alive, and the flood goes upward, upward to the last chakra.Sex is the first chakra, the first center, the lowest – and we exist at the lowest. That’s why we know life only at its minimum. When the energy flows upward and reaches to the last chakra, to the sahasrar, energy is at its maximum, life is at its maximum. Then you will feel as if the whole cosmos has become silent: not even a single sound is there. Everything becomes absolutely silent when the energy comes to the last chakra.You know the first chakra; it will be easy to understand through that. When the energy comes to the sex center, you become absolutely tense. The whole body is feverish, your every cell is in a fever. Your temperature goes high, your blood pressure goes high, your breathing becomes mad. Your whole body is in a temporary delirium – at the lowest.Quite the opposite is the case at the last chakra. Your whole body becomes so cool, so silent, as if it has disappeared. You cannot feel it. You have become bodiless. And when you are silent, the whole existence is silent because the existence is nothing but a mirror: it reflects you. In thousands and thousands of mirrors, it reflects you. When you are silent the whole existence has become silent.This is the fourth step and I will not say anything about the fifth. This is the door – absolute silence. Then you can enter the temple and you can know it, but I cannot say it. And if you come to know it, you will also not be able to say anything about it. It is inexpressible.The last question:Osho,In the morning and afternoon meditations I start off with vigorous movements, but somewhere in the middle – especially as the music and the surrounding screaming increase – a strange silence envelops me and the movements gradually die down. This silence deepens as the tempo of the music mounts and I feel as if I am a center of silence in the surrounding tempest. It feels welcome. Is this a reaction and hence to be discouraged? Should I willfully continue the vigorous movement and remain silent only at the end? Even at the end, when we are to celebrate, I enjoy remaining silent – and the more the music and screaming, the deeper the silence tends to be.This is the silence I was talking about just now. When the energy floods upward, this silence will happen to you. Don’t discourage it. This is what we are endeavoring for. Welcome it. This is the guest for which we are waiting. Remember, start vigorously. But if you feel that the movement and the noise are dying down by themselves and a deeper silence is descending upon you, and the storm all around you and the noise and the screaming and the maddening milieu don’t affect your silence – rather, they deepen it – then you can be certain that this is real and you are not deceiving yourself. Then remain silent. And at the end this will happen. If you have become really silent, silence will be your celebration.But it may be different with different individuals; it depends. It depends on the type of individual. Someone would like to express his joy by dancing, someone by singing, or someone will simply weep: tears will flow down – not in agony, but in bliss. Someone else may remain just silent: this is his celebration.So don’t get worried about how to celebrate. The way it happens to you is your celebration. And if this type of silence comes to you, then welcome it, enjoy it. Cooperate with it so it deepens more and more.Now get ready for the meditation.

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The Supreme Doctrine 01-11Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Supreme Doctrine 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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What sight fails to see, but what sees sight – know thou that alone as brahman, and not this that people worship here.What hearing fails to hear, but what hears hearing – know thou that alone as brahman, and not this that people worship here.What prana does not reveal, but what reveals prana – know thou that alone as brahman, and not this that people worship here.This century started with a very strange declaration. The declaration was made by Friedrich Nietzsche. He said, “God is dead, and hence man is totally free from now on.” The declaration looked very strange the moment it was made, but it proved prophetic. And, by and by, it became the base of the modern mind.Really, for the modern man, God is dead. It is not that God is dead: if God can be dead then nothing can be alive because by God we mean the essential, eternal life, the very ground of existence. But for the modern man God is dead. Or, we can say in another way that modern man is dead to God. The relationship has broken; the bridge is no longer there. Whether you believe or disbelieve makes no difference. Your belief is superficial; it doesn’t go very deep.Your disbelief is also superficial. When belief itself is superficial, how can disbelief go very deep? When theists are very superficial, how can atheists be very deep? When the yes itself has lost meaning, how can the no carry any meaning? All the meaning that atheism can carry comes from the depth of theism. When there are people who can say with their total being yes to God, only then does the no become meaningful. It is secondary.God is dead, and with God even disbelief is dead. Belief is dead and with it disbelief is also dead. This century and the modern mind are, in a way, in a very peculiar situation. It has never been so before. There have been persons who were theists who really believed God exists. There were persons who were really atheists and who believed with the same intensity that God doesn’t exist. But the modern mind is indifferent: it doesn’t care. Whether God exists or not is irrelevant. No one is interested in proving it one way or the other.Really, this is the meaning of Nietzsche’s declaration that God is dead. You don’t care even to deny him. You don’t care even to argue against him. The bridge is simply broken. We have no relationship for or against. Why has this happened? Why has this phenomenon become so prominent in the modern mind – this indifference? We will have to seek the causes.The first cause is we were always thinking of God as a person, and to think about God as a person is false, untrue, and that idea had to die. The idea that God is a person – controlling, managing, creating, maintaining – is false. God is not a person. The idea became so significant because of our minds. Whenever we think about something, either we can think of it as a thing or as a person. Only two alternatives are open: if something exists, then it must either be a thing or a person.We cannot think, we cannot imagine, that things and persons are both manifestations of something deeper – hidden. The force becomes a thing; the same force becomes a person. But the force itself is neither. God, taken as a person, is dead. The concept is dead, and the concept had to die because God cannot be proved as a person. And taken as a person, he doesn’t solve any problem. Rather, on the contrary, he creates more – because if God is a person then why is there evil in the world? He must be allowing evil, he must be cooperating with it. Then he becomes an evil person.André Gide has said somewhere, “It is difficult for me to conceive that God exists as good. But I can conceive that God exists as evil, as Satan, because there is so much evil in the world, so much suffering, so much pain, so much anguish.” He cannot imagine that God is managing this whole affair. There must be something like a Devil in charge of it, a supreme Devil. God should be good; otherwise what type of God is he? Basic goodness must be there. But as the world appears, it seems God is devilish, not good: he is playing with evil, and somehow it appears that he is enjoying this whole suffering – torturing and enjoying it.If God is a person, then there are two alternatives: either he will become the Devil or we will have to deny that he exists. And the second is better. God as a person had to die because it became impossible to conceive of him as good. But the concept was wrong; it was anthropocentric. We conceived of God as a supreme man, as a superman. God was conceived as a magnified person like ourselves. We only magnified man.In the Bible it is said that God created man in his own image, but this is said by man and the real thing is just the reverse: man created God in his own image. The image created by man had to disappear. And it is good that type of God is dead, because with that conception removed, we can start a fresh inquiry into what godliness is.The Upanishads are totally different. They never say God is a person; that’s why they have relevance for the modern mind. They don’t say that God is a person. They say God is the very ground of being, not a person. God is existence, not existential. This distinction is subtle, but try to understand.A thing exists, a man exists, a woman exists, a person exists, but they can go out of existence. Whatsoever exists can become nonexistent – it is implied. Whatsoever exists can go out of existence. But existence itself cannot go out of existence. So we can say the chair exists, we can say the house exists, because they can go out of existence. But we cannot say that God exists.God is existence – it is not that God exists; God is simply synonymous with existence. Really, to say God is, is to repeat. God means is. It is bad language to say God is, because is, the very isness, is God. God means is – isness. “God exists” is wrong. God is existence. Or God is just another term for existence. Existence never dies, never goes out of existence. Forms come and go, forms change. Nothing is permanent in the world of forms. So the Upanishads say nama and rupa – name and form – are the world, and that which is beyond name and form is God. But what is beyond name and form? Existence itself is beyond name and form.The Upanishads think of God not as a person but as existence itself – as the very ground of existence. Nama-rupa-ateet – beyond name, beyond form. What is beyond name and beyond form? There are trees around this house; they exist. There are hills beyond those trees; they exist. You are here; you exist. In the trees, in the hills, in you, what is in common? The forms are not common: you have a different form, trees have a different form and the hills have an altogether different form. The names are not in common, the forms are not in common. What is in common? That common denominator will be God. You exist, trees exist, hills exist. Existence is in common: everything else is just accidental. The essential is that you exist, the trees exist and the hills exist. Existence is in common. That existence is God.But the Upanishads never became very popular. They cannot become popular because for you, if God is existence, it loses all meaning – because how can you relate to existence? If God is a person, a father, a mother, a brother, a beloved, you can relate, you can think of relationship. But how to relate with existence? Existence is so pure, so abstract. How to pray to it? What to call it? How to cry and weep before it? There is no one there.Because of this human weakness, the Upanishads never became very popular. They are so true they cannot become very popular. To make truth popular is almost impossible because the human mind will not take it as it is. The human mind can only think, “If God is a person, then we can relate.” That is why there is so much influence of bhakti cults – of devotional cults. One needs to pray, to be in devotion, to surrender, and a person is there so it becomes easy. You can pray, you can talk, you can communicate. Of course there is no one there, but for you it becomes easy. If you can imagine someone is listening to your prayer, it becomes easy for you to pray.No one is listening. There is just abstract existence which has no ears to listen to you, no eyes to see you, no hands to touch you. It will be difficult for you to pray. Because of this difficulty, man always thinks that God is a person. Then everything becomes easy, but everything becomes wrong. It becomes easy on the one hand, but it goes wrong on the other hand.That God is dead, and there is no possibility to revive him, no possibility to give blood and a heartbeat to him again. He is really dead. That God cannot be introduced again in the world. We have passed that moment. The human mind has become more mature; the childish attitude toward God cannot be there again. But it has become a hangover. We still go on thinking in terms which are dead. We still go on picturing him although all name and form has dissolved.The Upanishads have relevance now. Five thousand years ago they were before their time. When this Kenopanishad was written, it was before its time; now the time has come and the Kenopanishad can be understood. The Upanishads can be understood because God as a person is no longer there. Now God can exist only as an impersonal existence.But there will be difficulties because then you will have to change everything; your whole religion will have to be changed because the center has disappeared. For the old religion the center has disappeared, and a new religion will arise with a new center, a new religious attitude.Hence my insistence is on meditation, not on prayer. Why? – because prayer needs a person, meditation needs no person there. You can meditate without there being a person to listen to you, because meditation is not a prayer; it is not addressed to anyone. It is just something you are doing without someone else being there. It is not a relationship.If God is dead, then prayer has become meaningless. Only meditation can be meaningful. When you pray, you pray to someone. When you meditate, you simply meditate. When you pray, prayer is dual – dualistic: you are there and someone else is there to whom the prayer is addressed. Meditation is nondualistic – advaita; there is no one else. It is not a relationship at all. You are alone. And the more you enter this aloneness, the more you enter meditation.Meditation means the capacity to be alone – and not only to be alone, but to enjoy the very aloneness; to become so alone that the other disappears completely – the other is not there. It is to become so alone that you start falling within yourself and the abyss opens, and you go on falling within yourself. When you fall within yourself, sooner or later the form will be lost, the name will be lost, because they exist only on the surface. The deeper you drown the more you come nearer to God – God as existence, not as a person.So this is the distinction. If you are praying, God is outside you. That God is dead: now that outside God is no more. You can go on thinking about him, that he is somewhere there in heaven, in the skies, but you yourself will feel this is childish. There is no one there. That God has been escaping from every abode.Once, in the days of the Rig Veda, God lived in the Himalayas, because the Himalayas were unapproachable. He used to live on Mount Kailash. But then men entered there, so he had to fly from there to where he could not be found. He made his abode on the stars, on the moon. But now man has reached the moon, and now he is not there. Sooner or later, man will be everywhere and God will be nowhere, because where can he hide? Nothing is unapproachable now, or everything will become approachable sooner or later. He has no place to hide. This concept cannot exist anymore. God as a person is not to be found anywhere. And it is good because now you can turn from prayer to meditation.Really, prayer is childish. In a way it is neurotic, because you create a God in your imagination and then you start praying to it. And you can become so hallucinatory that you will start answering your prayer from the side of God. Then you really have gone mad. Then you are not in your senses. You can do it; many people have done it and they are known as great saints. They were ill, because with godliness only silence is possible. When you become silent you cannot relate to the other; you fall within yourself. God has now come to be a force within. It is not a person without; it is now a force within.There is one beautiful story in the old Indian literature. It is said it happened that God created the world, and then he used to live on earth. It was his own creation, so he enjoyed it and lived with men and animals and trees. But soon he was in great difficulty, because the whole day he was disturbed – even in the night he was not allowed to sleep, because people would go on complaining: “This is wrong, that is wrong; why have you done this, why not do it this way?” Everyone would come to advise him and give suggestions.He got so fed up that he called a council of his wise deities, wise counselors, and he asked them, “Find a place for me to hide from my own creation, because they will kill me or I will commit suicide. Every single moment they come to advise me, and they keep saying, ‘Do this, do that; this is wrong, and this must not be done,’ and their opinions are so contradictory that if I follow them the whole thing will become a mess.”So someone suggested, “Go to the Himalayas. Hide there on Gourishankar, Everest.”“But,” God said, “you cannot see further ahead. Some day Tensing and Hillary will come there, and it is only a question of a few hours.” For God it is only a question of a few hours, so he said, “This will not do.”Then someone suggested, “Go to the moon.”“But,” he said, “you don’t know. Only a few minutes more and men will be there.”Then one old, wise counselor came to him and said in his ear, “It will be better that you hide in man himself. There he will never try to enter.”And it is said that God accepted the suggestion, and from that moment he has not been troubled at all.Now the moment has come to trouble him there. And only through meditation can you enter there, not through prayer, because prayer goes on believing that he lives somewhere – on Everest or on the moon; prayer goes on trying to locate him outside. Meditation completely washes away the whole concept that he is outside, or that he can be prayed to, or that he can be talked to, or that you can relate to him. No, you can simply move within yourself. And the deeper you move, the deeper you are moving into him. But this meeting will be in silence because he is not the other. He is you – he has been hiding as you.If you can follow me, if you can understand the distinction between prayer and meditation – God as a person and God as existence – then it will be easy to follow this sutra:What sight fails to see, but what sees sight – know thou that alone as brahman, and not this that people worship here.What sight fails to see… because if he was without, you could see him. Then the sight couldn’t fail to see. Then ways and means could be found, and you could see him if he is without. But he is not there. That’s why the sutra says: What sight fails to see… You cannot see him; there is no way to see. Whatsoever you do you cannot see him. But people have seen him, so what to say about them? What to think of them? They have seen!There have been Christian mystics who say they have seen Jesus standing before them. There have been Hindu devotees who say they have seen Krishna playing on his flute. There are other types of devotees all over the world. Someone sees him as Rama, someone sees him as Krishna, someone sees him as Jesus, someone as Mary – and they go on seeing.This Upanishad says, What sight fails to see… Then they must have been imagining. Beautiful imaginings, very deeply satisfying! When you see Jesus standing before you, you are filled with a deep contentment, with deep satisfaction. But it is still a dream – beautiful, but a dream: a vision that you have created, a vision that you have desired, a vision that you have longed to see. And whatsoever you long to see you are capable of seeing, because the human mind can create any imaginary thing and give it reality. That is the capacity of the human mind. You can create a dream and you can make it real.Of course, it will be real only for you, no one else. When you see Jesus you cannot make him a vision for others also. If your friends ask you, “Allow us also to see your vision,” you cannot help. You cannot do anything because a dream has a peculiar quality: it cannot be shared. You can dream your dream, I can dream my dream – but you cannot enter into my dream, I cannot enter into your dream. A dream is the most private thing in the world. Everything can be made public, but dreams cannot be made public.Howsoever you love your friend, your wife, your husband, howsoever intimate you are, you cannot enter into each other’s dreams. That remains private. And the same is the case with visions such as your seeing Jesus. No one else can share this experience. You will walk with him on the street, and everyone will see you walking alone; that is a private dream of your own.I have heard one anecdote…It happened once that a girl, a young girl, dreamed that a very beautiful prince came riding on a horse. He picked her up, kissed her deeply, and then rode away with her. The horse was running fast and the girl asked the prince, “Where are you leading me? Where are you taking me away to?”The prince said, “It is your dream – you tell me. It is your dream, and you will have to tell me where I am leading you. You tell me!”When you are seeing a vision of Jesus or Krishna, really you have only divided your own mind into two parts: one which has become the devotee and the other which has become the God. And if you ask Krishna, “Where are you leading me?” he will say to you, “It is your dream. You tell me.”But when I say it is a dream I am not condemning it, I am simply stating a fact. It is beautiful. You can enjoy it. There is nothing wrong – what is wrong with enjoying a dream, a beautiful dream? You can enjoy it. The problem arises if you start thinking it is reality. Then you are moving on dangerous terrain; then be aware. The mind can project anything.Go to any madhouse and see. There you will see everyone talking to someone who is not present; everyone is talking and answering also. Every man there has become split. They go on seeing visions, they go on seeing projections. And those projections appear so real to them that we have to put them in madhouses because now they cannot be relied upon. They have lost contact with reality and are now in contact only with the dream world.That is what a madman means: he has lost contact with reality. There is now no contact with fact; there is contact only with his own fiction. He lives in his own private world. He is not living with you in the real world, he is not a part of it and you cannot convince a madman that he is wrong. That is impossible. He may confuse you, but you cannot confuse him. And if you live a long time with a madman you may go mad yourself.I have heard it happened once that an emperor became mad. He had a passion for playing chess, so some psychologist suggested that if a great chess player went on playing chess with him, this might relax his mind. He was still interested in chess. The whole world had become nonexistent; only chess had remained as a link to the real world. So the greatest champion was called, and that champion played chess with the mad emperor.For one year this continued – he was playing chess with the mad emperor. And in the end it happened that the emperor became okay, but the chess player became mad. The emperor had traveled back to reality and the poor man who was playing chess with him had become mad.If you live with a madman for one year, it will be difficult for you not to become mad. He will confuse you, but you cannot confuse him. He is beyond that. You cannot touch him, because he lives in his own private world. You cannot enter that world. It is impossible to enter into his private world. And you cannot convince him that he is wrong. Wrong and right, true and false, are the distinctions of the real world. In the dream world nothing is wrong, nothing is right. Whatsoever is, is right by its own right; just by being there it is right.There are religious madnesses, there are secular madnesses. People can go mad in two ways – a secular way and a religious way. When you go mad in a religious way, people will respect you because they think you have achieved something. So don’t go mad secularly – remember! Whenever you want to go mad don’t go secularly, always try the religious way. Then people will respect you – but only in the East. It is now no longer so in the West: whatsoever the type, they will call you mad.Whenever you are projecting a reality through your own mind, you are creating an illusion around yourself and then you can see it. But the Upanishads are so realistic. They say you cannot see: What sight fails to see, but what sees sight… You cannot see him through the eyes, but he can see your eyes because he is hidden behind you. Your eyes are just in front of him. He is you; he can see your eyes. But you cannot see him through the eyes. He is hidden behind all your senses. He can see your senses.If you go deep into meditation you can see the inner core of your body, the inner wall. This has been a strange happening, because in the West it has been only three hundred years since medical science came to know about the inner structure of the body – and that too by dissection. By cutting the body, analyzing the body, dissecting the body, Western medical science came to know about the inner structure of it.But for the East it has been a strange phenomenon. Yogis and tantrikas have always known it, and they never dissected a single body. They know how many nadis, how many nerves there are. They have completely determined how the whole inner body functions – but they never dissected a body, they were not surgeons. How did they come to know about it? They came to know it through a totally different way. They became so meditatively silent within that in that silence they became detached from the body. They became just an awareness inside. Then they started to see what is inside.You know your body only from the outside. This is peculiar because you live inside and yet you have not observed it from the inside. It is as if you live in a house, and you go around and around it never coming to know it from within – how it looks from within. Your body has two surfaces. There is the outer surface which we are aware of because we can see it through the eyes, touch it with the hands. Then there is the inner surface of the body for which the eyes and the hands cannot be used.If you can simply become alert and silent, detached, you will come to know the inner surface. Then you can see your eyes, and then you can hear your ears, and then you can touch your hands, and then you can know your body. But your body cannot know you.This is what the sutra says: What sight fails to see, but what sees sight – know thou that alone as brahman, and not this that people worship here.Except for your body, there is no temple to enter and search in. There is no mosque and no church where God abides – he abides in you. If you can enter and fall back upon your center of consciousness, know that alone to be the brahman – to be the ultimate, to be the real, to be the existence, and don’t fall a victim to all that which is worshipped by people here.People go on worshipping their own imaginations, people go on worshipping their own creations. Then fashions change, and when fashions change, imagination changes. Then you have to create new idols, new images, new places of worship. Hence, so many religions on the earth; otherwise, it is absurd. How can there be so many religions? If truth is one, then how can there be so many religions? Science is one, but why is religion not one? Why is science not Christian science, Hindu science, Mohammedan science? It is not possible, because science deals with fact. And if you deal with fact, then there can be only one science because fact is not a private thing. If you come upon a fact, then everyone has to accept it; there is no other way. You cannot go on denying it. And if you deny science, it will be at your own loss. If physics comes to know a law, then you cannot say, “I am an Indian and I cannot believe a man who is discovering a law in England. How can I follow an Englishman or a Chinese? We are of different nations; our cultures are different.” You cannot say that. A physical law is a physical law. It makes no difference who discovers it. Once discovered it is universal.Science is one, but why is religion not one? If it is the ultimate law it must also be one – more one than science, because science deals only with outer facts and religion deals with the inner truth. Why should it be so that there are three hundred religions? – how is it possible?These three hundred religions exist because of fictions, dreams, not because of truth. They can exist because they are your creations, not your realizations. You create your own mode of worship, you create your own temple. Your religions are artistic creations, not scientific realizations – artistic creations! You paint your own religion and you like your paintings and you cannot think that any other’s painting is better than your own. You like it, so you go on fighting that your painting is supreme; no one else can paint such a thing. All else is secondary. If you are a good man you can tolerate others’ paintings. You can tolerate others with a patronizing attitude thinking, “They are a little stupid, foolish. Just wait. They will come to the right thing.”Christians go on waiting for Hindus to come to their senses and become Christians. Hindus go on waiting for these foolish Christians thinking that some day or other they will be converted, they will become Hindus. How can they escape the truth? And Jainas go on thinking that all the followers of Krishna and Christ are following untrue masters. How can they follow a false master for so long? Some day or other they will come to the right master, Mahavira. They will follow him. Everyone goes on thinking inside that he is right and everyone else is wrong.This happens because for the masses, religion is imagination. They have their own imaginations; they have painted their own world. It is artistic. Nothing is wrong with it. You decorate your house in your own way; it is good. Who is there to say that it is wrong? It is no one’s right. You decorate your house in your own way, but you don’t fight about decoration. You don’t say, “My decoration is the ultimate truth.” Everyone is allowed to decorate his house in his own way.But you are doing the same thing with your mind. You decorate it with your own images, worship, prayer, your own Bibles, your own Gitas. You go on decorating your inner world and then you become part of it and you live in it. This is illusory.The sutra says: That alone is brahman which you realize when you transcend the senses, when you go behind the senses, when you can see the eyes, when you can hear the ears, when you can touch the hand from within.…that alone know as brahman, and not this that people worship here.What hearing fails to hear, but what hears hearing – know thou that alone as brahman, and not this that people worship here.What prana does not reveal, but what reveals prana – know thou that alone as brahman, and not this that people worship here.All temples are false, all mosques are false, all churches are false. I am not condemning them; I am simply stating a fact – because they are creations of the imagination. I don’t say destroy them, I say enjoy them – but don’t think that this enjoyment is leading you toward the ultimate. Enjoy the creations. It is a good game; nothing is wrong with it. People are going to the movies, people are going to dance halls. Why should they not be allowed to enjoy a religious fantasy? In their temples, in their mosques, in their gurdwaras, they should be allowed – they are free. And it is better to have a religious fantasy than not to have anything. But don’t think that you are realizing the brahman there; you cannot. It is not there, so you cannot do anything. You can enjoy yourself. You can enjoy your fantasy, your dream world.If this is understood, then temples can exist. They are beautiful, artistic creations, but don’t be lost in them. Go there, but don’t be lost there. Go on remembering that whatsoever is worshipped by the people is not the real brahman, because the real brahman is hidden in the worshipper. This is the emphasis. When I worship, I am there and the object of worship is there. Where is brahman? – in the object of worship or in the worshipper? The emphasis of the Upanishads is: it is in the worshipper, not in the object of worship. The object of worship is secondary, it is created by the worshipper. The value of what you feel there is projected by you; it is given by you. It is a gift to the object from you.You can put a round rock in your house and you can worship it as Shiva – it is a shivalinga. And the rock was lying in the street or just on a riverbed for millions of years. No one worshipped it; no one knew that this is Shiva. The river never cared; the animals passed by it, they never looked at it. And suddenly you transform the rock. Suddenly the rock becomes an object of worship, sacred, and now no one can touch it. And people were walking over it. Their feet touched it for centuries. Now you create a pedestal. You put the rock there. You say that this is a shivalinga, that this is the symbol of the god Shiva, and then you worship and you feel very good.Nothing is bad about it. The rock is beautiful and if you enjoy, then enjoy. But remember, the rock is simply a rock and Shiva is your creation. You have projected him; you have made that rock into Shiva. The god is created by you; the rock is not even aware. And if the rock could see you it would laugh: “This man has gone mad. What are you doing worshipping me?” The worshipper creates the worshipped, the devotee creates the god.The Upanishads say that there you will not find the real, you will only find the imagined. Move, rather, into the worshipper; penetrate into the worshipper. Forget the objects of worship and just try to know who this worshipper is – who is this who is worshipping? Who is this who is praying? Who is this who is going to the temple? And if you can find out who this is who worships, you have found the brahman.I have heard that once it happened that a Zen master, Huang Po, was delivering a sermon. Suddenly a man stood up. The man said, “I have been listening and listening for years, and everyone says ‘Know thyself,’ but I don’t follow the meaning. What do you mean by knowing thyself? Please try to explain it to me in simple terms. I am not a very learned man; I don’t know the jargon. Simply state the thing. What do you mean by ‘Know thyself’?”Huang Po said, “If you cannot follow the jargon, then I will not use language.” He said to the people who were listening, “Make way, so that I can reach that man.” Huang Po came down from his rostrum and walked to the man. The man became a little afraid, uneasy, because he never thought there was any need to come so near. Is this man going to attack? And Huang Po looked very aggressive – he was a man like a lion. So the man became afraid, and others also became uneasy about what was going to happen. And they knew about Huang Po. Sometimes he had slapped, sometimes he had thrown inquirers out of the door, and sometimes he had beaten… So what is going to happen? There was silence, dead silence; no one was breathing.Then Huang Po came near. He took the collar of that man in his hand, and he said, “Close your eyes.” So the man, just out of fear, closed his eyes. There was total silence. The man closed his eyes, and then Huang Po said, “Now know who is there.” So the man stood there, the whole hall silent, no one was breathing, and Huang Po just standing there.The man closed his eyes. He must really have been a simple, innocent man. He closed his eyes and he tried to find out who he is. He searched and searched and searched, and time went on.Then Huang Po asked him, “Now open your eyes and tell me who you are.”The man opened his eyes. His eyes were totally different; the quality had changed. The man began smiling, then he bowed down to touch the feet of Huang Po and he said, “I never thought you would throw me upon myself, but I was thrown. Now don’t ask me because I cannot say. I am not a learned man. But now I will never ask who I am. I have known it.”The Upanishads are trying to throw you to yourself. Forget the object of worship – just move within. And how can you move within? It is easy to forget the object of worship, but it is difficult to move within because there are objects still in the mind which go on clinging around you. Whenever you close your eyes, there is a world of imagination around you: dreams go on floating, images come up, thoughts move in a procession. Again you are in a world. The world of things is no longer there, but the world of thoughts is there. Unless this world of thoughts also ceases, you cannot know the worshipper.And how will it cease if you go on cooperating with it, go on creating it? You cannot destroy the world of things because you never created it. Remember, you cannot destroy the world of things. How can you destroy the hills, the earth, the moon, the stars? You cannot destroy them because you never created them. But you can destroy the world of thoughts because you are the sole creator there. No one else has helped you. You alone have done the whole work.Thoughts exist because you cooperate with them. Don’t cooperate – this is the only technique. Be indifferent. Just look at them without loving them, without hating them, without condemning them, without appreciating them, without saying they are good, without saying they are bad. Don’t say anything; don’t take any attitude. Just be indifferent, an onlooker.The clouds are floating in the sky; sit under a tree and just look. The clouds are floating; you don’t take any attitude. You don’t say, “Why are these clouds floating? They should not,” or “They should.” You don’t take any attitude. You are simply an observer looking at the clouds passing in the sky.In the same way look at the thoughts passing in the inner sky. Don’t take any attitude. The moment you take an attitude you have started cooperating. The clouds in the sky will not disappear if you don’t take any attitude, but the clouds in the inner sky will disappear. They only exist because of you. If you are indifferent, they simply go. They are invitees.You may or may not know it or you may not know it – they are guests you have invited before. It was very long ago, and you have forgotten that you invited them. It may have been in some other life that you invited them. But nothing happens to your inner world uninvited. Each thought has been invited, and now it comes and you still give energy to it. You can give energy in two ways: if you are for it, you will give energy and if you are against it you will also give energy. In both ways the thought will feed upon it.There is only one way to be disconnected, and that is to be indifferent. Buddha has called it upeksha. He said if you are indifferent to the process of thoughts, they will disappear.Insist on being indifferent. Don’t take any attitude, don’t choose. Just remain a witness, and thoughts will disappear. And when they disappear, suddenly the worshipper is revealed: suddenly you are revealed to yourself. That revelation alone is brahman, and …not this that people worship here.Now get ready for the meditation.

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The Supreme Doctrine 01-11Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Supreme Doctrine 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,In the morning you said that the brahman is not to be found through the worshipped, but in the worshipper himself. But the satgurus – the spiritual masters – have always been worshipped by their disciples as God. Please explain the significance of this.The masters have been worshipped as God, but this is only the beginning, not the end. The master is really a master if he makes his disciples ultimately free from all worship. But in the beginning it will not be so because in the beginning the relationship between the master and disciple is a love relationship, it is passionate. And whenever you are in love, the other appears to be divine.Even in ordinary love the beloved appears to be divine. And the relationship between a disciple and a master is a very deep love relationship: you fall in love with the master – and nothing is wrong in that. And when you fall in love with the master you start worshipping. But the master takes it only as a game. If he is also interested in it and takes it seriously or significantly, then he is not a master at all. To him it is just a game – but a good game, because it can help the disciple.How will it help the disciple? The more the disciple worships the master, the nearer he will come to him, the more intimate he will become, the more he will be surrendered, receptive, passive. And the more he is passive, receptive, surrendered, the more he can understand what the master is trying to do. When the intimacy comes to the last point, when only an inch separates, when just a minute separation remains, when the intimacy has become so deep that now the master can lead the disciple toward himself, then finally the master can help the disciple to become free from him.In the beginning it is impossible. You will not understand if the master starts trying to free you from himself – you will not be able to understand. In the beginning you need someone to lean upon, in the beginning you need someone to depend upon; in the beginning you need someone you can be totally a slave to. This is an inner need. You cannot be made a master from the very beginning; the beginning will be a sort of spiritual dependence.But if the master also feels happy that you depend on him, then he is not a master. He is harmful, he is dangerous; he doesn’t know anything at all. If he also feels gratified, then this dependence is mutual. You depend on him, he depends on you. And if the master depends on you in any way, he cannot be of any help. But if he rejects you from the very beginning there will be no intimacy. If there is no intimacy, the final step cannot be taken.When you trust your master so much that if he says, “Leave me,” you can leave him, only then will you be able to be freed. If you can trust your master so much that if the master says, “Kill me,” and you can kill him, only then will you be able to be freed – not before that. And this has to be brought about by and by. It is a long process. Sometimes the master goes on working with the disciple his whole life, and sometimes many lives.The disciple is not aware, he doesn’t know; he moves in darkness. But the master is leading him toward the point where the disciple will not be a disciple, but will become a master in his own right. When this need to depend has completely disappeared and you can exist alone, when you can be alone and there is no pain, no suffering, no anguish, when you can be alone and in ecstasy – when you become a master, only then are you free.Really, when a disciple happens to be near a master, the master appears to be a god. For the disciple this is a fact because such love flows from the master, such high vibrations flow through the master. He becomes a source and just in his presence, just by his presence, you are uplifted. Just by being in touch you are different. Just by being near him you vibrate in a different dimension altogether.So if the master appears to be a god it is a fact for the disciple and nothing is wrong in it. The master is a god. It is only wrong when the disciple is not aware that he himself is also a god. He is not wrong about the master, he is wrong about himself. And if the master says, “I am no god,” he is closing the very possibility of saying to the disciple someday, “You are also a god.” The master will not say it in the beginning because this has to be revealed.It is a great step when the disciple has come to feel that the master is a god. Now the second step will be the disciple comes to feel he himself is a god and when this happens the whole existence will become godly. Then there is no need to even say that the master is God. It is irrelevant because the whole existence is God, so what is the use of calling the master “God”? But in the beginning it is significant.Remember, for the disciple, truth has to be revealed in many steps. It cannot be revealed totally because you will not be capable of bearing it – it will be too destructive. It has to be revealed slowly, part by part. Only that much can be revealed to you which you can absorb, which can become your blood, your bones, your heart, which will not prove destructive.Hence, many things will be said later on. The master will go on saying things. The more you become capable, the more he will say. And when really you have become so capable that now you can be independent, the last thing the master will say is, “I am a bondage to you. Now leave this last fetter; now leave this last slavery.”When Zarathustra was going away from his disciples, moving to the hills to disappear forever, he said to his disciples, “Now the last message, and the last message is this: Beware of me; I am dangerous. You may become dependent on me and my whole effort is to make you independent. You may take my word as truth and my whole effort is to tell you that no word can be truth. Now beware of me.”The last message of any real master will be, “Beware of me” – but this cannot be said in the beginning. So masters have allowed their disciples to worship them. They must have been laughing within: they know what game is going on. The disciple is very serious; he thinks he is doing something very significant. But the master is just playing. It is just like when you are playing with your children, with their toys, and you also pretend to be serious: the master is really amidst children. They live on such different levels that if the master is to do something to be of any meaning he has to speak the language of the children. By and by he will drag the children toward a different world of a different language. This is going to be a long process.But the Upanishads are saying the last things; they are the essence of all religion. Really, they are not for the beginners, they are for those who have left the beginning far behind; they are for those who have been struggling for a long time – meditating, searching, inquiring. Only then can the Upanishads be helpful. I am speaking on the Upanishads because you are meditating. Through your meditation you may have a glimpse which will make the Upanishads easy to be understood. But if you are not meditating then the Upanishads will just pass over your head, they will not mean anything. Only with a meditative heart will you be able to make a contact with the message.The message of the Upanishads is the simplest, but the most supreme, the highest. The language used is very simple, the simplest possible, but the content – that which is said through that language – is the last word. It cannot be improved upon. Nothing can be said which the Upanishads have not already said. If even one Upanishad can be saved and all other religious scriptures are burned, nothing will be lost because all the seeds are there. Sow these seeds and you can reap the whole human religiousness through them. But you will be able to understand the Upanishads only if you are meditating deeply, moving with them into the heart, the innermost center, and not simply making an intellectual effort to understand.Someone has said that this Upanishad seems repetitive; it goes on saying the same thing about this sense and that sense – and again about eyes and about ears. Why does it go on repeating? Is there some significance in it? Yes, there is, because the master is speaking to children. Your memory cannot be depended upon. The truth has to be repeated constantly. Still it is only a hope that it may be understood.Buddha goes on repeating the same thing again and again. The Upanishads go on repeating the same thing again and again. They are talking to children – to children who are not attentive. They may miss many times. It is hoped that sometimes their attention may be caught, so things have to be repeated. You are not alert, that is why; otherwise the ultimate can be expressed even in a single word. And that too is too much. It can be expressed through silence. Not even a single word is needed to express it. But then you will not understand silence.Someone came to the Zen mystic, Rinzai, and asked, “Tell me only that which is the very essential, because I am in a hurry and I am a big official in the government and I have no time. I was just passing by your hermitage and I thought it would be good to go in and inquire. This has been on my mind for a long time. But tell me in essence: what do you think religion is? – basically, foundationally.”Rinzai remained silent. The great official felt uneasy. He said, “Have you heard me or not? You seem to be deaf. I am asking you to give me a key word about religion.”Rinzai said, “I have given it. Now you can go.”The official said, “But I have not heard.”Rinzai said, “That which can be heard will not be essential. I have given you the key; silence is the key. Now go. You are in a hurry.”But now the officer started being interested. This master looked interesting. He said, “Please elaborate a little more. It is too short, it is too condensed, it is too seedlike. A little elaboration will be helpful.”Rinzai said, “But that will be a repetition, because all that can be said I have said. Now you are forcing me to repeat.”The officer said, “Let it be a repetition, but elaborate a little.”So Rinzai said, “Dhyana – meditation.” It is again the same because meditation means silence. What else can it mean? Now it is a word. Before it was simple silence – that was more real. Now it is a word – meditation.The man said, “It is still difficult for me. I am a worldly man. Explain it to me; it is still a puzzle.”Rinzai said, “Now if I elaborate more, it will be false. The truth was given at first; now it is just a repetition in words. Already it has become half false, but now if I elaborate more it will be totally false. So don’t force me to commit a sin. Now you can go. You are in a hurry.”The Upanishads go on repeating for you because your attention is not reliable. Buddha has a very tedious way: he will repeat every sentence thrice – but only because of compassion. You may not have heard once, you may not have heard twice. The hope is that you may hear it the third time.Jesus goes on using parables. I myself go on using parables, anecdotes, stories. Not that they are essential – they are a sheer wastage of time – but I use them just for you because children can understand stories better than anything else. It is hoped that if nothing is understood, at least the stories will be carried in the mind, and just around the story some flavor of the real thing may also be carried unconsciously. But you might not forget the story, and if you can remember the story, then just by association something else may also be carried in remembrance. Jesus used so many parables because no other way is possible when talking to children. Buddha also goes on telling stories.It is because of you that the Upanishads repeat. There is no significance other than that. It can be said in a single sentence that senses will not lead to the ultimate, but the Upanishads go on saying that sight will not lead to it, hearing will not lead to it, the hands will not lead to it.A single thing has to be repeated because of you and still you don’t understand. This is the mystery: you hear it – and not only do you hear it, you feel it is a repetition. But no understanding happens yet. Try to understand; don’t try to analyze. Don’t try to think about the mind of the rishi – why he is repeating. Think about your own mind – why is he repeating? And be alert so that rishis won’t need to repeat.I have heard, once it happened…A Zen priest gave his first sermon, and the next week he again repeated the same sermon, and the third week also he repeated the same sermon, word for word. The congregation became uneasy; it was too much. Religious sermons are by themselves boring, but then he repeated the second time, he repeated the third time, exactly the same thing in exactly the same words. So the congregation thought something had to be done.A spokesman was appointed. He went to the priest and said, “What is the matter? Do you have only one sermon to preach?”The priest said, “No, I have quite a few.”Then the spokesman said, “Then why have you been repeating the same sermon three times? We are fed up with it.”The priest said, “But you have not done anything about it yet. Unless you do something about it, I cannot go to the second. I have got quite a few, but what have you done about the first? I have preached it three times – what have you done about it? You have not done anything. And unless you do something about the first, I cannot move to the second.”It is said that the congregation, by and by, stopped coming. And it is said that the priest went on preaching the same sermon. Even to the vacant temple, when there was no one, he would preach the same sermon. Then people stopped coming anywhere near the temple because sometimes, just passing by, they would hear the same sermon being taught. Then people started to be afraid, scared of the man. They would not greet him in the street or anywhere. If they saw him they would just avoid him because he would stop and ask, “Have you done anything about the sermon?” He became like a haunting phenomenon around the village.That is why the Upanishads go on repeating – because you have not done anything about the first thing. You have not done anything about the first so they repeat a second time, a third time. There are one hundred and eight Upanishads and they don’t say anything new; they go on repeating the same thing again and again. One Upanishad is repeated one hundred and eight times. But still, nothing has been done about it. You need more Upanishads.Don’t think about the mind of the master. Think about your own mind.The second question:Osho,You said that through chaotic breathing you want to destroy our old wrong patterns – to rebuild us in a new dimension. Please explain how this rebuilding in a new dimension happens after the old has been destroyed.You have misunderstood me. The chaotic method is to destroy the old patterns, not to create a new one. It is not to create a pattern at all. Just the old pattern has to be destroyed. The method, all meditative methods, just destroy your conditioning – without conditioning you in any way because that will be simply a change of fetters, a change of prisons. The new prison may look a little better, but it is still a prison.The unconditioned mind is the end – a mind which has no pattern around it. The old pattern has to be destroyed, and the new is not to be created because the new will become the old again. Nothing has to be created in its place; you are to be left alone without a pattern. But you have lived so long in patterns that you cannot conceive how you can live without a pattern. How can you live without conditioning? How can you live without discipline? How can you live without fetters? You have lived so long in slavery, in conditioning, that you cannot conceive of what freedom is. But you can live in freedom. Really, only then will you live.A conditioned mind is not alive. For instance, people come to me and they say, “You don’t give us any discipline: what to eat, what not to eat, what to do, what not to do. You simply give us meditation and leave us in chaos. You don’t give us something to live by. You just push us into chaos without any discipline.”I don’t give you any discipline because only those who are enemies to you can give you disciplines. I give you awareness, not discipline. Your awareness will give you spontaneous light about what to do and what not to do. Who can decide beforehand? And what is the need to decide it beforehand? When the moment arises, when the situation is there, whatsoever happens to you, you will be alert enough in your awareness to do what needs to be done.You don’t need any discipline if you are aware. Only people who are fast asleep need discipline because they don’t know what to do. They need a pattern to follow. Their whole life becomes a misery because no pattern can be helpful in a changing life. Every pattern will become a prison because life is constantly changing. This moment one act may be good, the next moment it may become bad because the situation has changed. And you go on following a dead pattern; you never fit anywhere.Look at your own lives: everyone is a misfit for life. Everyone is a misfit; no one fits anywhere. And the reason? – the pattern, the discipline, the conditioning. You carry it everywhere. Whatsoever the situation, you have a constant pattern around you. You will never fit. Life is changing, life is a flux; it is riverlike, it is never the same again. Not for a single moment is life the same. It goes on changing and you have a fixed pattern which doesn’t change. You are unfit for life.Everywhere in the world, human beings have become misfits. And when you feel that you are a misfit, you feel discarded, rejected – as if life is against you. Quite the reverse is the case: your conditioning is against life. Only an unconditioned mind can respond to a changing life – because it has no pattern. Life creates a situation: a wise man is alert; he behaves in a way which happens in that moment. That type of man will never regret but you will always regret. That type of man will never repent; you will always repent – whatsoever you do.You love a girl: now the alternatives are whether to marry her or not. Whatsoever you do, you will repent. If you marry her, then for the whole of your life you will think the other alternative would have been better. If you don’t marry, the same will happen: you will think that the other alternative was better. This happens because you have not been alert. Only an alert person can respond totally.You can respond only in parts, fragments, and when you are responding it is a fragmentary response – there are other parts within you which are against it. Sooner or later they will take revenge. They will say, “We were saying not to do this.” What does repentance mean? Repentance means you are divided. You do a thing and at that very moment something in you is against it. That part is watching you and that part is saying, “Don’t do it. This is wrong.” And another part goes on saying, “This is right. Do it.” And you do it.You will not fit because you can fit only when you are fluxlike, changing. A fixed entity cannot fit in a riverlike existence. You must be fluid. Only when you are liquid, fluid, flowing, changing, alert, aware, will you not repent. You will never feel guilty; you will never feel that something was better than what you did. Nothing can be better because you responded totally. That was all that could have been. Nothing else was possible.My meditation technique is not to give you a new pattern; it is simply to drop the old pattern, to destroy it and leave you completely free without any imprisonment around you – without any prison. Of course, you will feel a difficulty because the prison was also a shelter. Now there will be rains and there will be no shelter, and the wind will come and there will be no shelter, and the sun will be there, hot and burning, and there will be no shelter, and you would like to hide somewhere. Your eyes have become so accustomed to darkness that in the light you will feel uneasy. But this is what will make you free. You will have to get the feel of life under the open skies. Once you know the freedom and the beauty of it, once you have become aware, once you have come out of the prison, the old habit, you will not ask for any pattern or any discipline.And this doesn’t mean that your life will become a chaos – no. Your life will be the only ordered life possible. The life that you are leading is a chaos. It only seems to be ordered on the surface but behind it, underneath, there is disorder and turmoil. Only on the surface have you created the appearance of order. Look within yourself: there is disorder. A truly ordered life will be disordered; a disciplined life will be chaotic within. This looks paradoxical, but this is so, this is the truth. Only an alert life will have an order – not forced but spontaneous, alive. The order will go on changing with life. It must.A spontaneous life is just like your eyes. Do you know that your eyes go on changing continuously? And when they stop changing, then you need some technical help. When I am looking at you and you are ten feet away from me, my eyes have one kind of focus. When I start looking at the hills, which are faraway, my eyes immediately change. The lenses of the eyes change immediately. Only then can I see the hills. When I look at the moon, my eyes change immediately.You come into the house, it is dark; your eyes change. You go out of the house, it is light; your eyes change. And when your eyes become fixed, they are ill. They must be fluxlike; only then are you capable of seeing. The more fluxlike the eyes, the more liquid they are, without any pattern, just changing with the situation, the more alert your consciousness will be.Meditation will give you an inner eye which will be constantly changing, constantly aware of the new situation, constantly responding. But the response will come from your total being, not from a pattern. The response will come from you, not from conditioning.Now, whatsoever you do, howsoever you react, it comes from your conditioning. If you have been born in a Jaina family, then you feel revolted, you feel nausea just looking at nonvegetarian food. That nausea is not coming from you; that nausea is coming from the conditioning. It never comes to a Mohammedan; it never comes to a Christian – not that you are more nonviolent and others are violent: it is just a conditioning from the childhood, and that conditioning starts functioning the moment you see meat.Even the word meat and you will feel a subtle nausea. Just a word and the nausea will be felt. Is it coming from you? If it is coming from you, then your whole life will be a life of love. But it is not. You are as cruel as anybody else. The Jaina is as cruel as the Mohammedan and sometimes even more. He has to be crueler because he cannot express his violence through food. It has to be expressed from somewhere else.When you eat, you express your violence. If you eat meat, your violence moves through food – it is released. This is a common observation: people who are non-vegetarians are more loving than the vegetarians – more loving, kinder than the vegetarians. Why? This should not be so. Their violence is released through food.In your body, your teeth are the most violent part. Violent people eat more food than nonviolent people. Just crushing the food with the teeth gives release to violence, anger and hate. Persons who are eating meat and other such things have a natural outlet for their violence. I am not saying go and eat meat, but if you don’t eat meat simply by conditioning, if you don’t eat non-vegetarian food, don’t think that you have become loving and nonviolent. Your violence will find other ways, more subtle ways. Your relationships will become crueler, poisoned.But it is totally different if you are really not behaving according to a pattern. If love has arisen in your heart; if by yourself you have become alert to the cruelty of eating animal food – not by any tradition, not by birth, not by any teaching, not by any scriptures, but by your own meditative experience – if you have become alert that eating meat is stupid, that to kill an animal for food is stupid, idiotic; if you have become alert of this fact by your own meditation, then your whole life will be nonviolent and loving. Then you will not be obsessed with food; it will be an alive phenomenon and you will not be mad after any fixed rules. There will be no fixed rules, really; there will be only a constantly alive awareness.So I am not going to create a new pattern for you. I am a destroyer. I am not going to create anything, really. I am just going to destroy, because there is no need to create. You are already there behind the structure. If the structure is destroyed, you will be freed. If the structure which binds you is no longer there, you will be there. You are not to be created; you are already there. Only the walls of the prison have to be destroyed and you will be under the open sky.You have misunderstood me. I told you this chaotic meditation is to destroy your conditioning, your slavery, your mind, your ego – in a deep sense, you. It has to destroy and then the new will be born. I am not saying I will create it. Nobody can create it. And there is no need: it is already the case. It is there. Only the shell has to be broken and it will come out.All religion is destructive in this sense. The society is constructive, religion is destructive. Society constructs the conditioning. Society makes you a Hindu or a Christian or a Jaina. Society never allows you to be yourself. Because society is an organization, it gives you a pattern,. The society wants you to fit into that organization according to its own rules. The society doesn’t want you; the society only wants your efficiency. You are not the point, you are not the target. You must behave like a mechanical thing. The more mechanical you are, the more society will appreciate you because you will be less dangerous.No machine can be dangerous. It never goes out of the way: it never disobeys, it never rebels, it is not revolutionary. No machine is revolutionary; it cannot be. All machines are orthodox: they obey, they follow. Society tries to change you into a mechanical thing. Then you are more efficient, reliable, responsible – less dangerous. There is no fear, no danger; you can be relied upon.The society creates a mechanical device around you: that is the conditioning. And it allows you only certain outlets and closes certain things completely. It chooses some fragments from you and approves them, then rejects all else. It says that only a part of you is good and the other parts are bad, so deny those bad parts. Society doesn’t accept you as a whole, as a unity; it accepts only certain parts. Hence, the conditioning.Religion is always destructive; in a way, religion is always antisocial. But society is very cunning. It tries to convert religion also into its managerial system. It wants to make religion also a part of it.Jesus is rebellious, the church is not. Jesus is against society – has to be, because he is trying to destroy the mechanical part and he is trying to free your spontaneity. He is bound to be against the society; the society will crucify him. But you cannot destroy Jesus just by crucifying him. Really, if you want to destroy Jesus, crucifixion will be of no help. You will have to organize a church around Jesus; only then will he be destroyed.It is said that once it happened that the Devil was very much disturbed because one man had achieved enlightenment on earth. He called his advisers and he asked them, “What to do now? One man has again achieved truth, he has become enlightened, and our whole profession is now in danger. What to do? How to prevent people from going to this man?”The oldest follower of the Devil said, “Don’t be disturbed. We should go and we should organize a church around him. Don’t worry. Then the church will become the prevention, then people will not be able to come to him directly. The church will be in between, and whatsoever he says will not be heard by the people directly. The church will first interpret it, and through interpretation you can destroy anything.”Truth can be destroyed most easily if you order it, organize it. When religion becomes a sect, it becomes a part of society. Whenever religion is alive and not a sect, it is against society. Jesus is against society, Mahavira is against society, Buddha is against society. But Buddhism, Jainism, Christianity are parts of society. They are no longer religions. Religion has to be rebellious. And this is the rebellion: religion tries to destroy the mechanicalness because the mechanicalness is your hell. Spontaneity is your heaven; mechanicalness is your hell.I am not going to give you any new pattern – new or old. I am simply going to destroy the pattern and leave you alone to live without a pattern. A life without a pattern is a religious life. A life without any forced order is a religious life. A life without any discipline, but with inner awareness, is a religious life.The last question:Osho,The Kenopanishad told us in the beginning that nothing is to be denied and that there should be total acceptance. But in the morning you said that prayer, idol worship, temples, churches, are all based on falsities – on mental projection. This seems to be a denial.It is not. It is simply stating a fact. To say that a dream is a dream is not to deny it. To say that a projection is a projection is not to deny it. To say that a false thing is a false thing is just to state a fact. It is not to deny it. Total acceptance doesn’t mean that the falsity has to be stated as true, that the dream has to be called reality.Total acceptance means that whatsoever is, is accepted. If the worshipper’s mind is projecting deities, divine beings, this has to be accepted. It is a fact that worshippers have been doing that. And you are not told to go and try to destroy their projections; you are not told to go and destroy their idols and their temples. If you understand, the very understanding will change you. You will not create those projections. And if you want to create them, then you will know that these are projections and you can enjoy them as such.It is reported of Naropa, one of the greatest Tibetan mystics ever born… He was a very absurd personality. I say absurd because he would do things no one would expect of a master. He was found in a pub drinking.Someone said, “Naropa, what are you doing? You are enlightened, you have achieved the goal, and you are drinking?”Naropa said, “This is a game. And when it is a game, I don’t care this way or that. Once I have come to know that I am the eternal within, why be afraid of this alcohol? Why be afraid?”I say absurd personality – but he is saying that this is alcohol and that whatsoever is created by alcohol is a dream. He is not saying this is reality; he is saying this is a dream. But he said, “I am not obsessed for or against. It happened that a friend invited me and I didn’t want to say no. A friend invited me. For him this is real, for me this is a dream. But this is a dream for me, not for him. Why be bothered? It will be difficult for him.”I will tell you something else which will be nearer the point – less absurd.It happened that Kabir’s family became very much disturbed. The family was poor and whosoever would come to Kabir’s house, Kabir would invite him for food. And at least two hundred people would come every day for his darshan, to see him. And he would go on inviting everybody for food.Then his son, Kamaal, said one night, “Stop all this! We are poor. We have been begging, we have borrowed; now no one is going to give anything. What are you doing? You will reduce us to being thieves.”Kamaal was very angry. But Kabir laughed and said, “Why didn’t you think of it before? Be a thief. This is a good idea!”But Kamaal was also his son, Kabir’s son, so he looked at him: Kabir, a mystic, saying this – to be a thief? He must not be in his senses, or he doesn’t understand what he is saying. But Kamaal said, “Okay, if you say so, then I will go. I will steal, but you will have to come with me.” Kamaal was thinking that now Kabir would come to his senses. Kabir going to steal…?Kabir stood up and said, “Okay, I am coming.”Kamaal carried the whole thing to the very extreme. He was thinking that somewhere at the last moment Kabir would laugh and say, “I was just joking.” But no. Kamaal entered a house, pulled out some things from the owner’s treasure, brought them out, and Kabir was ready, waiting there. This was the point of no return; now there was no further possibility to change things. Now Kamaal asked, “What is to be done? Shall we take these things to the house?”Kabir said, “Okay, but first you must go back, awaken the people of that house, and tell them.”Kamaal asked, “What way of stealing is this?”Kabir said, “At least they should be told; otherwise they will be unnecessarily worried.”Those who write about Kabir have stopped narrating this story in their books because it is absurd. Kabir approving stealing? But what was the matter? In the morning Kamaal asked, “What is the matter now? Tell me the whole thing. You are in favor of stealing?”Kabir said, “Everything belongs to God. No one else is the owner.”Look at this mind. For this mind everything is acceptable. There is total acceptance. Even stealing is accepted. But he says, “Go and tell the people so that they are not unnecessarily worried.”Kamaal said to him, “But they will think we are thieves.”Kabir said, “They are right. We are!”Kamaal said, “But then the next day all your respect will go to the dust. No one will honor you.”Kabir said, “That’s right! Why should they honor thieves?”Total acceptance means not denying anything. When you accept, you accept with conditions. You say, “Okay, I will do this, if that is not going to happen. I can steal if God is not going to throw me into hell. I can steal if there is no sin in it. I can steal if people are not going to dishonor me for it.” But what people will do has to be accepted also. Total acceptance is the most alive way of life. But then everything is accepted; whatsoever happens as a consequence is accepted. There is no denial on any point. That is the last, the ultimate way of life. Really, that is what a sannyasin should be. What a sannyasin should have is total acceptance.But when we say that you can create dreams, we are not denying; we are simply stating a fact. If you like, you can create dreams. I can help you to create them easily. But remember, they are only dreams.The problem arises when a dream becomes a reality. You can play with your Krishna, you can dance with him; nothing is wrong with it. Dance in itself is so good. What is wrong about it? You are not doing any harm to anybody playing with your Krishna, dancing. Dance and play! It will be good for you. But remember that this is not real. It is a projected thing; you have created it.If you can remember this you will play the game, but you will never be identified with it. You will go on being aware that this is a game. A game is a game if you are not identified. If you are identified, it has become serious, it has become a problem. Now you will be obsessed.Now get ready for the meditation.

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The Supreme Doctrine 01-11Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Supreme Doctrine 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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If you think that you know brahman well, then you know little indeed, for the form of brahman that you see as conditional in living beings and gods is but a trifle. Therefore, you should inquire further about brahman.I don’t think I know it well, nor do I think that I don’t know it, yet I know too. He among us knows it who knows that it is other than the unknown and the known.Knowledge of the ultimate is paradoxical for many reasons. One, the very claim that one knows becomes a hindrance because the moment you say, “I know,” you are not only emphasizing knowledge; you are also emphasizing “I” – and the “I” is the barrier. The ego is the subtlest barrier, but also the strongest. So when someone says, “I know,” the “I” destroys the knowledge. The “I” cannot know him because he can be known only when you have disappeared completely. When you are not, only then he is. This is the first problem.It is said that the oracle at Delphi declared Socrates to be the wisest man alive. Those who heard it went to Socrates and said, “The oracle has declared you to be the wisest man on earth.”Socrates is reported to have laughed and said, “They should have done it earlier – then I would have been happy. Now it is too late. Go back and tell the oracle that now I am the most ignorant man on earth.“When I was younger and full of ego, I was also of the same opinion as the oracle – that I knew – because the ‘I’ was so strong, it couldn’t conceive that the ultimate mystery could not be known. The ‘I’ was so strong that I could not think that it was possible for me to be ignorant. Everything that was, was conceived by me as known, or at least as knowable. But as I grew in knowledge, in understanding, I became more and more aware of my ignorance. So now go back and tell the oracle that Socrates himself says that he is simply ignorant, that he doesn’t know anything.”The people returned. They said to the oracle, “Socrates refuses to accept what you say, and when he himself refuses it means something. He says he is the most ignorant man.”The oracle laughed and said, “That is why I have declared him to be the wisest man – because only the wisest can know that he is ignorant.”This is the paradox: those who are ignorant always think they know. This is part of ignorance. To think that you know is part of ignorance; it comes from ignorance. If you are ignorant you will think that you know much. The more ignorant, the more you will think that you know. Ignorance is filled with knowledge. Ignorance, really, lives on knowledge, feeds on knowledge. The wiser you become, the more aware and understanding, the more you will feel how ignorant you are. And a moment comes when you feel that you don’t know anything. Simply, you are ignorant. All the burden of knowledge is thrown away. There is no heaviness of knowledge on you. You have become so weightless that you can fly.Knowledge is a burden. When you feel that you don’t know, ego disappears; it cannot exist. It can exist only with knowledge. Really, whenever you claim knowledge, it is a claim by the ego: “I know.” The emphasis is not on knowing, the emphasis is on I. When you say, “I don’t know,” the emphasis is not on ignorance; now the emphasis is on egolessness. The moment you say, “I don’t know,” where are you, where is the I? It is no longer there. Now it is simply a word to be used. Now there exists nothing corresponding to it within you. This is the first problem.One Christian mystic, Tertullian, has divided humanity into two classes. He said that one part of humanity is in one class – that of ignorant knowers; and the other class is of those who are knowing ignorants. The whole humanity is divided in two. There is an ignorance which knows, and there is a knowledge which is ignorance. If you claim knowledge you are ignorant. If you accept ignorance you become knowing, because in ignorance the I cannot exist. And when the I is not there the door is open: you can look at reality directly. You are the only barrier. When you are not there the barrier is not there; this is the first thing.The second thing: the ultimate is not only the unknown; the brahman is not only the unknown – it is unknowable also. You can know it, but you cannot know it totally. That creates again a new puzzle. You can know it, but you cannot know it totally because you are just a part of it and the part cannot know the whole. How can the part know the whole totally? But also the part cannot be totally ignorant either because it belongs to the whole, it is part of the whole. So it knows in a way, it feels in a way, it understands in a way, but it cannot comprehend the total because the total is so vast.A river dropping into the ocean comes to know the ocean; it feels the ocean, it lives in the ocean, it merges in it, but it cannot merge into the total ocean. It cannot spread to the total ocean; it cannot know the total ocean. It only knows a part of it.When your consciousness falls like a river into the brahman, into the ocean of the ultimate, you will know him, but you will not know him in his totality. You cannot; there is no possibility. So the brahman is unknowable because the whole remains unknowable to the part; hence, the problem when someone comes to know. Someone becomes ignorant, egoless, and comes to know; then, too, he cannot say, “I have known the whole.”He cannot say, “I have not known,” and he cannot say, “I have known.” He can say, “In a way I know, in a way I don’t know. In a sense I have entered into him and he has entered into me, but I am just a drop and he is the ocean. I know him, but still the total remains a mystery.” Because of this, those who have known through their ignorance, through dropping themselves, are also in a difficulty over what to say about it. They cannot deny the knowledge, they cannot declare the knowledge. This has to be so. Because of this many have remained silent.Buddha would never answer any question about the brahman. Wheresoever he would move, his disciples would spread the word: “Don’t ask anything about the ultimate because Buddha is not going to answer anything about it.”Someone asked Buddha, “Why don’t you answer?”Buddha said, “If I answer, it is going to be false in some way or other. If I say, ‘I know,’ it is wrong – because how can a drop know the ocean? If I say, ‘I don’t know,’ it is wrong, because the drop knows the ocean. The drop is just an atomic part of the ocean. The whole ocean is in the drop also. Really, knowing a drop of water totally, you know the ocean, because nothing else is there. The drop contains everything, but still it is a drop. So if I say, ‘I know,’ it will be wrong, because I am only a drop. If I say, ‘I don’t know,’ it will be wrong, because I know. I am also an ocean – a minute ocean. So it is better to keep silent.”But even silence can be misunderstood, and it was misunderstood. People who were against Buddha started saying, “He is not saying because he doesn’t know. He is silent because he has not yet entered the brahman; otherwise he should say.” Look at the difficulty: if he says, “I know,” then there will be difficulty; if he says, “I don’t know,” then there will be difficulty. If he keeps quiet, then people will misunderstand.The ultimate cannot be conveyed in any way; whether you are silent or saying something, it remains unconveyed. It cannot be transferred; it remains untransferred. It cannot be communicated, it is beyond communication.A third difficulty comes and makes it a problem again and that is: brahman means the ground, the source of everything. The source must remain a mystery; it cannot be decoded. Who will decode it? No one can stand outside it. For decoding you need someone who can be an observer – separate, neutral, looking at a thing from a distance. We cannot be at a distance from the ultimate. We are in it just like fishes swimming in a pool. Those fishes cannot stand aside, cannot observe the pool.Kabir used to say that once a fish heard two scholars talking on the bank of a river, talking about what the ocean is. The fish became very much mystified; she started inquiring. It became an obsession for her – what the ocean was. She inquired from elders, and they said that they had also heard about it, but they didn’t know what it was. They had never seen it – and they all lived in the ocean. But how can you see a thing if you live in it? They were born in it, but how can you know a thing if you are born in it? You are so much a part of it and it is so much a part of you that there is no distance, so you cannot know. Then the inquiring fish went on inquiring, moved on inquiring. No one could answer her, but everyone said that they had heard that there was an ocean.Kabir says that this is the situation of man who goes on inquiring what God is, where God is, who God is. We are in him; hence, the difficulty. For a fish it is possible to jump out of the river or out of the ocean. Even for a few seconds the fish can jump out of the ocean and be on the bank and look at the ocean. But for man there is no such possibility. You cannot jump out of the brahman; there is no bank beside it. You cannot jump out; there is nothing out of it. Everything is in and nothing is out. That is what is meant by infinity.You cannot go out of existence, or can you? – because the moment you go out of existence you are no more. You cannot go out – all is existence, everywhere is existence. Wherever you go existence is there, so no distance is possible. You cannot become an observer; you cannot look at brahman. The mystery cannot be decoded. The mystery is so basic, so ultimate, so universal, and you are just a fish in the ocean. The brahman cannot be known the way we know other facts because other facts can be observed by us.Science decodes; science goes on decoding. But science can decode because science never takes on the ultimate question. It only takes on non-ultimate questions. It can come to know what hydrogen is; it can come to know what atomic structure is. You can observe. You can go into a lab and you can observe and you can penetrate into the mystery of things because no thing is ultimate. But how can you observe and experiment with the brahman? Where, how, is it to be penetrated? Wherever you go you are part of it, in it. The mystery cannot be decoded. The brahman remains mysterious – and if the brahman is an ultimate mystery, how can you say you have known? You can know something only when it is demystified. The moment you know, there is no mystery. That is why science is a mystery killer. And the more science grows and the more people are trained scientifically, the more they lose contact with mystery.Science is a sure mystery killer, it goes on killing mystery. That is why the world has become so poor while science has made it so rich. The world was never so rich and so poor before. Everything has become richer. You are living in better houses, wearing better clothes, eating better food. Everything has become richer. Even kings would become jealous if they could be revived from the past. Even Ashoka and Akbar would feel poor before you because an Ashoka cannot have the shirt you are wearing, the bathroom you are using. These would be luxuries even for Akbar.The world has become richer as far as things are concerned, but man has become poorer and poorer because there is no mystery. Life has become non-mysterious, dead. Only a mystery can be alive.Look at children – they are more alive. Why? Why is an old man not so alive? It is not only a question of aging. The basic question is deeper. The child is alive because the child is living in a mystery: everything is mysterious for him – everything. The seed is sprouting. The child looks at the seed sprouting: it is so mysterious that he cannot believe that it can happen. A bird has alighted on a branch and is singing: it is so mysterious. The clouds moving in the sky and the rain falling, everything is mysterious. The child lives in a wonderland; hence, the aliveness – because everything is a challenge. Life is not flat, life has nooks and corners that are undiscovered. The child goes on jumping, inquiring, looking at everything. Everything is so mysterious because the child is ignorant.Back in the days of the Upanishads everyone was so alive, everything was mysterious. There was wonder, and when there is wonder you are alive because there is a challenge to penetrate the mystery outside. Science goes on killing mystery; it goes on explaining everything. Whatsoever you do, there is an explanation – and once explained the mystery is gone, everything becomes flat. With nothing to discover there is no challenge. And when there is no challenge, life subsides; it cannot dance, it cannot explode. There is nothing.For these last three centuries, humanity has been made so poor – unimaginably poor. Science has explained the world of things and psychology has tried to explain the world of the mind. If you fall in love it is a mystery. But go and ask Freud and he will explain the whole thing. He will say that this is nothing, just hormones in the body, and “Don’t get too serious about it. It is just chemicals working – just particular hormones forcing you to be in love. This is nothing to get worked up about. Those hormones can be taken out of your body and the love will disappear, or an injection of those hormones can be given and you will fall in a deeper love. So it is hormonal. Don’t get too much into it.” And once explained, the mystery of love is gone.Now they are teaching sex all over the world. It is good in a way, but only as an antidote. Because of the Victorian puritanic teachings it is good, as a reaction, to teach children about sex. But on a deeper layer it is very dangerous because once explained, the mystery of sex is lost. And this is happening particularly in America where now everything is known about sex. People are becoming disinterested in it. They will get disinterested when everything is known.Masters and Johnson, two experimenters, have penetrated the mystery of sex through electronic devices. While a couple is making love, electronic devices inside the vagina go on recording what is happening; a graph is made. While a couple is making love, devices go on working which are recording what is happening to the blood, to the breathing, to the body, to the hormones. Then the whole mystery is clear, and then they say, “This is just a mechanical thing. It happens because of these causes.”Once the mystery about sex is gone your life will be just boring. While making love to your wife or to your beloved, you will know what is going on. The blood pressure is changing, the hormones are running: you will know everything. And then there is no need, really, to be involved in love, because love can be done by devices also.Masters and Johnson have devised electronic penises and vaginas. And now they say an electronic penis, an electrical device, can give a deeper orgasm than any man can because it goes on vibrating – and it is only a question of vibration. Man has limited energy, but an electronic device has unlimited energy. Turn it on and it goes on vibrating. It can give a deeper orgasm to the woman. It can give multiple orgasms. And once a woman knows that an electric penis can give such a height of pleasure, then all lovers will be just pale before it. But this is dangerous. It is a penetration into a very dangerous terrain – once the mystery is known, the romance is gone.Science has tried to demystify life in every way. I am emphasizing this fact so that, because of this background, you can understand the meaning of religion. Religion is to mystify life and science is to demystify it. Religion says that the mystery is so ultimate, nothing can be known about it. Whatsoever you know is just temporary and whatsoever you know is just shifting the problem. It is never solved; you only shift it a step back. Nothing is solved. All your explanations are just artificial – because the ultimate remains hidden and no explanation explains it. The why cannot be answered even if you answer the how.For example, science can say that there is no mystery in water: it is just that hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms meet and water is created; H2O, and the mystery is solved. Two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen and the mystery is solved, but religion says this is only an answer to the how; the why is unexplained. Why do two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen make water – why? We have come to know how – if we arrange two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, water will be created. We know the how, but the why remains unexplained and the why is the brahman.Why is it happening that two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen make water? Why not three atoms of hydrogen? Why not four atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen? Science says we are not interested in the why, we are only interested in the how. Religion says how is a superficial inquiry, because unless you answer the why, the how can be used but the mystery remains; the mystery is not destroyed. The why of existence is the brahman.So science ultimately is reduced to technology because it is how – know-how. Science always goes on being converted into technology. You know the how, then you know the technique: you can use it, and the technology is created. So science just becomes a forerunner of technology, just a pilot to technology.Religion is based in mystery, believes in mystery and believes that mystery is ultimate. You cannot destroy it, you cannot decode it, and that’s the beauty of it. Once you feel that the mystery is ultimate and undecodable, you are like a small child filled with wonder. And when wonder grips you, only then are you alive to the maximum. When the wonder is not there, you are alive to the minimum.You pass through life without wondering eyes; hence life appears so boring. It is not life that is boring, it is your eyes without wonder: they create boredom. You can regain the insight if you can regain a wondering mind, which goes on wondering to the very end, where it meets the ultimate mystery. There you can go on wondering and wondering and you can never solve it. A puzzle is not a mystery because a puzzle can be solved. A mystery is a puzzle which cannot be solved. Science is interested in puzzles which can be solved, which are solvable. Religion is interested only in the mystery which cannot be solved. And the more you penetrate, the more you know that it is impossible to solve.Greek philosophers have said that philosophy is born in wonder. The Upanishads say that philosophy is born in wonder, and religion ends in wonder. Philosophy is born in wonder, but to the Greeks it is against wonder. It is born in wonder, but then tries to destroy it, tries to find answers, tries to find answers and explanations. Because of this attitude of Greek philosophy that philosophy is born in wonder, and the effort to overcome wonder, Western science was born. The source remains in the Greek mind. Western science is just the success of Greek philosophy. Philosophy is born in wonder, but ends in explanation: then it becomes science. Philosophy starts with wonder and ends in explanation, system, solution: it becomes science. When science experiments, comes to know the how, it becomes technology.The Upanishads say religion ends in wonder, not that it begins. Wherever you begin, religion ends in wonder. The mystery remains there; it is never solved. This is the basic difference between the Indian mind and the Greek mind – and these are the two basic minds in the world. Because of the Greek mind Western science came into being and because of the Indian mind no science came into being: religion came into being.All the greatest religions were born in the East. In the West there has never been a birth of any religion at all. All the great religions were born in the East and the deepest were born in India. Others that were born around India, but not exactly in India, are just echoes of the Indian. Christ was basically a Hindu; that’s why Jews could not understand him, they had to kill him. All the deepest religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism – were born in India. And science basically originated from Athens; it is Greek.The Greek attitude is that when you become aware of life you feel wonder. Then it is the duty of the human mind to destroy this wonder and to find explanations. The Upanishads say that wherever you find any explanation, penetrate deep into it – sooner or later you will come to the base where mystery is.Explanation is only on the surface; nothing can be explained: this is the attitude of the Upanishads. Everything remains unexplained and will remain unexplained. It is only the human ego that thinks that explanations have to be found. Why the Upanishad’s insistence on mystery? – because if there is mystery, only then can you be ignorant. Remember this: if there is mystery, ultimate mystery in the existence, only then can you remain ignorant. With mystery, ignorance inside the heart is possible. If everything can be explained, you will become knowledgeable. Then you will cling to knowledge. Then you will cling to knowledge and knowledge will become very, very important.In the Western universities they have been teaching knowledge for centuries. Now in the East also, universities are teaching knowledge because they are nothing but copies of the West. Basically, originally, Eastern universities never taught knowledge. Nalanda and Takshashila were not teaching knowledge, they were teaching meditation. They were teaching a deep ignorance and a deep mystery around it. Now there exists no Eastern university. All of the universities are Western wherever they exist, whether in the East or in the West. They go on stuffing the mind with knowledge.Whenever a student comes back from the university he is a stuffed being. He has no soul, he has only knowledge. And then he creates problems. He will create them because the university has given him only the ego – nothing else. He has not learned a single piece of humanity or humbleness. He has not touched a single point of non-ego. He has not looked from that window from where life is mystery. He is ignorant; he has not looked from that window. He has been stuffed with knowledge. Knowledge gives him the feeling that he is very significant and very important because he knows. The ego is strengthened, then the ego creates every problem that is possible.The ego creates politics, the ego creates ambition. The ego creates jealousy, the ego creates a constant struggle, violence, because the ego cannot be satisfied unless it reaches to the top. And everyone is trying to reach to the top. A cut-throat competition arises in every arena of life. In economics, politics, education, everywhere, there is cut-throat competition. No one is interested in himself; everyone is interested in the ambition to reach to the top and no one thinks where he is going when he reaches to the top. What will you achieve just by reaching the top? Nothing is achieved. You simply waste your life.Eastern universities were teaching a deep ignorance: the basic ignorance that man cannot penetrate the mystery because the mystery is ultimate. It is basic to nature – and man is just part of the same mystery. When these two mysteries meet – the mystery within man and the mystery within existence – when these two mysteries meet, there is ecstasy. Life becomes beautiful. It becomes an eternal music; it becomes a dance. You can dance only if there is mystery. The dancing god is needed – a god who can dance. And existence is dancing all around. Look! This is not a theory. Look at existence! It is dancing all around. Every particle is dancing. Only you have become stuck to the ground. You cannot move, you cannot dance because you know; your knowledge has become poison.Now we will enter the sutra:If you think that you know brahman well, then you know little indeed…Really, you don’t know at all – not even a little, because you are still there claiming. The ego is still being maintained; the ego still remains the center. The ego is still asserting, saying, “I know.” If you think that you know brahman well, then you know little indeed…And if you say such a thing, it is only a thought, not an experience. You can think that you know, but this is not an experience. If you experience, then you will not be capable of saying “I know.”It is so vast: how can you know it? It is so endless, beginningless: how can you know it? The claim seems to be absurd – obscene. To know brahman seems to be just a stupid claim. Only idiots can claim it. The claim can come only out of ignorance because you don’t really know anything, you just claim it.If you think that you know brahman well, then you know little indeed, for the form of brahman that you see as conditional in living beings and gods is but a trifle.Even if you have come to feel the brahman in the manifested world – in the trees, in the hills, in man, in animals, in birds – if you have come to feel this life to be brahman, that too is a trifle, this is just a minute part of the unmanifested. The Upanishads say the brahman has two forms – the manifest and the unmanifest. The manifest has become the world, the unmanifest remains unknown. Many worlds have been born out of it, many have disappeared in it. This is not the first world, remember.Christianity used to say just two centuries ago that the world was created four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ. Then there was great conflict between scientific investigation and this claim, because science came to know that this earth has been in existence for at least millions of years. There was conflict. Now, the more scientists know, the further back goes the beginning. But the Upanishads say that this is only one of the worlds: many have existed before it and have disappeared.Existence is an infinite process. So there is no beginning, really, and there cannot be any end. How can there be a beginning? – because a beginning means that there was nothing before it. And how can this world come out of nothing? Only something can come out of something; something cannot come out of nothing. That is absurd. How can something come out of nothing? If it comes at all, there must have been something preceding it.The Upanishads say that this is not the first world, this is not the first creation. It is only one chain in a long, beginningless, endless procession of existences. Worlds have been in being and then they have disappeared. Just as a child is born, then he becomes young, then old, and then dies. And the child is born of parents and those parents were also born of other parents. And this goes on and you cannot find the beginning.The Upanishads have no concept of Adam and Eve, the first man and the first woman. They say there has never been a first woman and a first man. The first is just nonsense: we are always in the middle. The beginning was never there and so the end is not going to be there.Just like a child, the earth is born out of parents. There may have been a collision between two big stars. When two parents collided, the earth was born. Now scientists say that something like this must have happened: a collision of two stars. The Upanishads seem to be true. When two stars, one feminine and one male, collide, the earth is born. The earth is alive; it is not dead. There are dead earths also. Now scientists suspect that the moon may be a dead earth. It may have been alive some time back.This earth is alive. The greenery of the trees is just part of its life. Your consciousness is just a part of its growth. It has been evolving. It is young; it will become old. It will die, but somewhere else life will erupt. Now scientists say that there is at least a mathematical possibility of fifty thousand earths being alive in the whole of existence – fifty thousand planets alive! This is just a mathematical possibility. We have no contact with other living earths, but when one earth dies another is born. Somewhere birth happens, somewhere death; somewhere death happens, somewhere birth. Life goes on continuing. It is a continuity – an eternal continuity.Whatsoever we know is always a very small, atomic part. Backward, it spreads to a beginningless beginning; forward, it spreads to an endless end. We are always in the middle. Only a particle of existence is known. And this whole existence, so vast, is still a part. The whole is also a part because it is the manifested.Look at me: I am communicating something to you. Whatsoever I communicate is just the manifested part. There remains in my heart much that is uncommunicated: that is the unmanifest part. My silence is the unmanifest part; my words are the manifest part. In my words a part of my silence is being communicated, but my words are not my whole being. My words are just a part, and behind that part a deeper silence is hidden.A poet is singing a song – a Rabindranath or a Shelley or a Yeats is singing a song: that song is just a manifest part of the poet’s being, but thousands and thousands of songs can be born out of that being.The Upanishads say this whole world, this universe, is just a song which has become manifest. In the heart of the divine infinite songs are waiting to be manifested. He has been singing many songs which have disappeared. He is singing this one right now; he will sing many. We can be acquainted only with one song, but not even with the one song in its totality – just with a part of its tune, just a fragment, just a word, a gesture. The infinite remains unknown around it.The sutra says:…for the form of brahman that you see as conditional in living beings and gods is but a trifle. Therefore, you should inquire further about brahman.Really, there comes no end to this inquiry. It goes on and on and on, and the more you inquire, the more abysses open. The more you inquire, the greater the doors that open and the mystery is not demystified: it deepens. The more you know, the more of what is to be known is before you. The wider your focus, the wider becomes your consciousness. Greater possibilities to be known open before you and this goes on and on and on; this play is endless.So wherever you feel to stop, beware. There is no point to stop at. Wherever you feel, “Now I have achieved,” beware. You are falling a victim to the ego again. There is no point where one can say, “I have achieved.” The point is always being reached and reached, but it never reached.That’s the meaning of the infinity of the brahman. You never come to a point where you can say, “Now the journey is finished.” The journey goes on and on and on. That journey is infinite life. You finish somewhere, but the journey never ends. Your ego is no more at a point. Really, at that point the real journey starts. But then it goes on infinitely. There is no end to it; there cannot be any end to it. You drop somewhere. When you come to realize that you are just a burden to yourself, you drop yourself and you move on. This movement is eternal.I don’t think I know it well…The master says:I don’t think I know it well, nor do I think that I don’t know it…This is the mystery. I cannot say that I know it well because much more is still to be known and much more will be there always to be known. This knowing of brahman is always a beginning and there is no end to it. You begin it once, then it goes on and on. So I cannot say that …I know it well: that claim will be wrong. …Nor do I think that I don’t know it… But the opposite is also true. I cannot say that I don’t know it – I know it also.This is the difference between the Greek and the Indian mind. The Greek mind cannot conceive of this sentence. Impossible for Aristotle to conceive of this sentence! Aristotle will say that this is a basic law of logic: that if you know, you know. If you don’t know, you don’t know and there can be no middle to it. If you are alive you are alive; if you are dead you are dead. There cannot be any middle to it – or can there be? Can you say, “I cannot say that I am alive and I cannot say that I am dead”? Then Aristotle will say you have gone mad. Either of the two is true; both cannot be true. Aristotle says both cannot be true; two opposites cannot be true. One will be true.This seer of the Upanishads says, “I cannot say I know.”Then Aristotle will say, “Stop! This is finished. If you cannot say you know, drop the matter.”But the seer goes on and says, “I cannot say that I don’t know.”This, Aristotle cannot approve. The founder, the father of Western logic, cannot approve. He will say, “Now you are going crazy.” Can you say that you are in the room and out of the room? You cannot say this. You cannot say that you are in and out of the room. Either you are in the room or you are out of the room: both cannot be true. Can you say, “I cannot say I am in the room and I also cannot say that I am out of the room”? To us, also, Aristotle appears right, he appears true. To the common mind, to ordinary logic, he is exactly right, logical.Indian seers are illogical in this sense. They go on saying opposites simultaneously, but they have something to convey through it. They are not really wrong; they have something to say and that something is so mysterious it can be conveyed only when opposites are used together. The mystery can be conveyed only through contradictions, through inconsistencies.I don’t think that I know it well, nor do I think that I don’t know it, yet, I know too.I know in a sense and I don’t know in a sense. I know because I am part of it; it is impossible not to know it. And I don’t know it because I am only a part and it is impossible for the part to know the whole. Both are true, and if you can feel that both are true, then just between the two contradictions a new meaning will arise. You will feel what the rishi is trying to express and you will feel how difficult it is to express it. Too much is felt and the words cannot carry that much, so both the opposites have to be used to carry it.For example, the Upanishads say the divine is very far, then immediately they say he is very near. How, if he is very far, can he be very near? Or if he is very near, how can he be very far? But they have something to say and it is very significant. Through this absurdity they are trying to convey something which is not easy to convey or which is even unconveyable. He is very far because you have forgotten him. That forgetfulness creates the distance. And he is very near because whatsoever you do, whether you forget him or remember him, you cannot be alive without him. He is the very beat of your heart. He is breathing in and out; he is you. You can forget him, but you still remain him. Hence, this contradictory way of expression: “He is far and near,” and “I know him and I don’t know him.”The Upanishads will not agree with Socrates. I told you that Socrates said, “Once I knew; now I say I don’t know.” He is again following the Greek trend of mind. He is very consistent. He says, “Once I felt that I knew. Now I feel it is wrong. Now I don’t know.” The Upanishads will say both are wrong. A third possibility is there when you say, “In a way I know; in a way I don’t know.”First Socrates was claiming absolute knowledge, now he is claiming absolute ignorance – but in both the cases he claims the absolute, he clings to the absolute. He is not contradictory. Once he said, “I know”; now he says, “I don’t know.” Upanishadic seers say both simultaneously: “I know and I don’t know.” Try to feel the thing that is just in between the two, between the lines, just in the gap.He among us knows it who knows that it is other than the unknown and the known.The known is your knowledge; the unknown is your ignorance. If you say, “I know,” you have made him known. If you say, “I don’t know,” you have made him unknown. And he alone among you knows, who knows he is neither the known nor the unknown, but the unknowable. He is the mystery.Only one who knows him as the mystery, as the mysterium, as the ultimate mysterious which cannot be solved, only he knows it.Now get ready for the meditation.

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The Supreme Doctrine 01-11Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Supreme Doctrine 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,In the fourth step of the morning meditation, in the effort to keep the body frozen or dead, one tends to become tense. As this is the step of relaxation and total let-go, how is one to relax and also be frozen at the same time? Rather than ecstasy, it becomes a tension.A dead person is totally relaxed. He cannot be tense. A dead person cannot be tense – or can he? He is relaxed because there is no ego to be tense. Only the ego can be tense. When in the fourth step I say be dead, it means to be so relaxed that you are just like a dead man. You are not to try to be frozen and dead. If you try, then you will get the reverse result. Don’t try to be frozen; don’t make any effort to be dead. Simply relax and be dead.These are two different things. If you try to be dead, then your whole body will become tense. And when you are tense, you cannot be dead, you cannot relax. Simply relax the body as if it is no more, as if it has gone dead. Don’t make any effort to make it dead. Simply relax, and feel that the body has gone dead: you don’t have to do anything about it.I have been telling you that even if you feel that a sneeze is coming, don’t sneeze, don’t cough. But if you feel an irritation in the throat, what can you do? If you try to prevent it, it will become more and more irritating. If you try to block it, it will become stronger because this is a sort of suppression. Then you will have to cough. If you feel a sneeze is coming, what should you do? If you hold it, it will become more forceful, it will come out with a greater force.But there is a way: if you feel that your throat is irritated and you want to cough, relax the throat. Don’t prevent it. Simply relax the throat; be indifferent to the irritation and relax the throat. Don’t make it tense because the tension will create more irritation. Relax the throat and be indifferent. Feel as if you are not concerned, and within seconds the irritation will go. If you feel that a sneeze is coming, just be indifferent to it; don’t do anything about it. Relax the part where you feel that the sneeze is hitting, and be indifferent.In that indifference, out of a hundred times, ninety-nine times the sneeze will disappear. Out of a hundred times, there is only one possibility that the sneeze will come – but that too will not disturb you because you will be so indifferent that even if it happens you will feel that it is happening to someone else. You will be so unconcerned that even if it comes it makes no difference. You will remain unperturbed within.And I am not saying to you don’t sneeze because others will be disturbed – no. I am not saying don’t cough because others will be disturbed. That is not the point. You will be disturbed. You will lose the whole point of the effort; the whole endeavor will be lost.In the morning meditation, relax. After the third step, relax. One thing more you should remember is when I say “Stop!” in the morning meditation, or when the music stops, don’t make your body comfortable. Don’t try to take a posture; don’t lie down. Leave the body as it is. Stop then and there, even if it is inconvenient and uncomfortable.You were jumping and the posture is uncomfortable: remain frozen in that posture, don’t change it. The moment you hear that the music has stopped, you stop. Become dead. You can make your body comfortable, you can lie down, but this gap will have already disturbed the energy; this gap will have already changed the direction.In the three steps you have created a vital force, a floodlike force. Now, just making your body comfortable, you have forgotten it: your attention is diverted. Don’t do that. When I say, “Stop!” stop immediately, then and there. And don’t try to deceive. Don’t say to yourself, “No one is looking at me, so why not make the body a little more comfortable? It is no one’s concern.” Then you are deceiving yourself.One thing more. In the second step, when you are expressing all the suppressed emotions, when you are going completely mad in catharsis, do one thing emphatically: contract your facial muscles and relax. Contract and relax. Your body is not as tense as your face is because your face is the focal point of all suppression. And your face is the most expressive; that’s why the face becomes the most suppressive. It is through your face that you express or suppress. In the second step – remember it – go on expressing through the whole body, but remember also to make the face tense and relaxed, tense and relaxed. In that way, much suppressed emotion will be released more easily.Relaxation is not something to be done; you cannot really do it. No one can do it because relaxation is against doing. You can simply stop doing and relaxation happens. So when I say “Stop!” and the music stops, stop completely as you are; don’t do anything. Simply stop, stop all doing – not even a single movement. Then a very deep silence will happen to you and you will feel the difference. You have been making yourself comfortable; from now on don’t make your body comfortable.In the afternoon meditation also, after kirtan, when the music stops, stop as you are. Suddenly all the activity stops, and the whole energy moves only inward; there is no opportunity for it to be diverted anywhere. And the same in the evening meditation we will do just now. When I say, “Stop!” stop completely as you are. And when the music starts again and you begin to express your ecstasy, only then start moving again. For the gap in between, remain in nondoing and the relaxation will happen.The second question:Osho,Why is the ultimate experience so hard to attain?It is not! It is not hard to attain. It is very easy. But because it is so easy, it has become hard. The ego is always interested in whatsoever is hard to attain because then the ego feels a challenge. The ego is not interested in doing whatsoever is easy; this is the problem. The ego is not interested in doing meditation; that is the only reason it appears to be so hard.It is so easy – but so easy that there is no challenge in it. No ambition can be fulfilled through it; you cannot attain to any worldly power through it; you cannot attain to any worldly prestige through it. Really, you don’t attain anything which is visible in the world. Rather, on the contrary, you go on losing and finally you lose yourself. It is hard because you are not ready to lose yourself; it is easy if you are ready to lose yourself. In a single moment it can happen. Otherwise, you will take lives and lives and lives and it will not happen.The question is not of time; the question is deeper. The question is whether you are ready to lose yourself. But you can ask, “Why is it so hard to lose? Why are people not ready to lose more easily?” There is a reason, and the reason is that losing oneself appears to be deathlike and no one wants to die. Everyone wants to live – to live more. Everyone wants to avoid death.Of course, no one can avoid it. No one ever succeeds in avoiding it. Death occurs. Death is the only certainty. All else is uncertain in life. Only death is certain. Death will happen whether you are trying to avoid it or not. You cannot escape it. In a sense it had already happened the moment you were born. Half of it has already happened and the other half will follow. And these two halves cannot be divided.Buddha says again and again, “Once born, you will have to die” – because you have entered death with your birth, it is an entry. You are already dead in a way. You have started to die. The moment you are born, you have started to die. Your death process has started.But we are afraid to die and we cling to life. Why do we cling to life and why are we afraid of death? You may not have thought about it. The reason why we cling so much to life and why we are afraid of death is just inconceivable. We cling to life so much because we don’t know how to live. We cling to life too much because really we are not alive. And time is passing and death is coming nearer and nearer. And we are afraid that death is coming near and we have not yet lived.This is the fear: death will come and we have not lived yet. We are just preparing to live. Nothing is ready; life has not happened. We have not known the ecstasy which life is; we have not known the bliss life is; we have not known anything. We have just been breathing in and out. We have been just existing. Life has been just a hope and death is coming near. And if life has not yet happened and death happens before it, of course, obviously, we will be afraid and we would not like to die.Only those persons who have lived, really lived, are ready, welcoming, receptive, thankful to death. Then death is not the enemy. Then death becomes the fulfillment. If you have really lived and known what life is, then death is not the end of life. It is the fulfillment, it is the peak, it is the climax, it is the last thing that life can offer to you – and the best.Life offers only two things: one is love, another is death – and both are dangerous because in both you will have to die. In love you will have to dissolve yourself. In death also you will have to lose yourself. And you are so afraid of death, of losing yourself, that deep down you have become afraid – afraid of love also. You go on talking about love, but no one is ready to love because love is deathlike. Love and death, these are natural phenomena.If man simply lives naturally, love will happen and death will also happen and both will be peaks. Love is dying into the other person and death is dying into the universe. But love is not ultimate death; you will come out of it. You will come out of the other person again, there will be a resurrection. And death is also not ultimate because you will be reborn. You will come out of the universe again and you will enter a body and you will become embodied.Meditation is ultimate death: it goes beyond both love and beyond death. You cannot come out of it; that is why it is the most dangerous thing. Even in death there is the possibility you will be reborn, that you will come out of it. You will dissolve and you will again integrate, you will again evolve. So death will just be a passage of change, but meditation is final death – ultimate, absolute death. You cannot come out of it; hence, the fear. And it looks so hard because of the fear; otherwise it is as easy as anything can be. But love is difficult, so meditation will be difficult. Death is difficult, so meditation will be difficult.To me, therefore, love is very significant: if you can love, you can meditate easily. But the whole society is against love, the whole culture is against love. They take every precaution so that love should not happen. They have created marriage so that love should not happen. Through marriage they have tried to close the very door. Before you get involved in love – a death process – they have protected you. They have created all types of teachings, all types of nonsense in your mind, to make love immoral.Basically, you are also afraid because in love you will have to lose your identity. You want to remain yourself so you go on protecting yourself. Even if you move in love, you move in a very protected way, very carefully. You remain an individual even in love. You remain an ego. So two egos meet, but the meeting is going to be only an appearance. They can come near, but the meeting never happens. They never dissolve into each other; they never lose themselves into each other.If you can love, meditation will be very easy. The world will be more religious if love is accepted, helped along, and love becomes a natural milieu around you. Then meditation will be very easy because through love, you will know a taste of what it means to be dissolved – even if only for a single moment. Then you can dare to be dissolved for longer moments.And if you can love, you will not be afraid of death. Lovers are never afraid of death. If a person is afraid of death, you can be certain that he has not loved and he has not been loved. The fear of death shows that the life has been without love. Lovers are ready to die very easily. They can die for each other. They don’t care much about so-called life because they have known a higher quality of life; they have known a higher life. They don’t care about this life very much.But look at persons who have never loved. They will always be afraid of death. Look at misers: they will always be afraid of death. And misers are those persons who have not loved anyone because if you can love a person you will never love money. Money is a substitute. When you cannot love an individual, when you cannot love a live person, you love dead money.Misers, those who go on clinging to their possessions, are not even acquainted with what love is. Their whole love has gone to dead money. And why has it gone? There are deeper connections. A person who is too much attached to money will be afraid of death. Really, a person who is afraid of death will love money too much because money seems to be a protection against death. If you have money you feel protected. If you don’t have any money you feel unprotected. Death can occur and you cannot do anything. With money you feel you can do something. Money will be helpful.A person who loves will not love money because a person who loves will not be afraid of death. And if a person is not afraid of death, there cannot be any clinging, attachment, and mad obsession with money. It is impossible.If you can love, then you will accept death very easily. It will be a deep relaxation, a long sleep, a beautiful dissolution into the existence. And if you can be receptive to death, meditation is as easy as anything. The problem arises because love is not there. When death has become a fear, then meditation will be difficult because it is love plus death: both. It is death as far as your ego is concerned; it is love as far as the divine existence is concerned.I can define meditation in a mathematical formula: meditation is equal to love plus death – love of existence, of the total, and death to the ego. They are two aspects of the same coin because you can love the total only if you are ready to lose the individual. If you are ready to die, only then can you be reborn as the existence, as the brahman.Jesus says, “Only if you lose can you survive. And those who try to survive will be lost.” It is hard because you have not loved; it is hard because you have not lived. It is not hard by itself. Meditation by itself is very easy – a spontaneous phenomenon. If a human being evolves naturally, falls into love, knows what love is, knows what type of death and what type of life love is, comes out of it, knows the taste of being, of moving into death, then he will love death as it is – not as against life. Death changes the quality then. Then it becomes the last point in life, the highest peak, the climax of life. Then meditation is very easy.Those of you who are ready to lose can understand it; it is very easy. Those of you who are not ready to lose… One friend came to me today. He said, “Whatsoever you say appears to be absolutely true. I am totally satisfied; my mind is in complete agreement with you. But don’t tell me to do this meditation. Is it not possible,” the friend asked, “that just by total agreement with your thoughts I can achieve enlightenment? Is it necessary to move into this meditation?”What is the fear? You can agree with me intellectually, but you are not losing yourself. And, really, if you go deep and penetrate more, you will find the whole process is just the reverse. You agree with me intellectually because you have always been feeling that whatsoever I am saying is true. But really, you are not agreeing with me; I am agreeing with you. You feel me agreeable, so your ego is fulfilled. “Right!” you say inside your mind, “This is what I have been always thinking. Right! You are right, because this has been my idea.” You feel fulfilled, satisfied. Your ego is strengthened. This is not going to lead you to enlightenment. Rather, it may lead you to deeper ignorance – because the ego…What is the fear? Moving into meditation, the fear is you will have to lose the ego; you will have to lose your identity. And this is a sort of mad meditation. If I say to you just sit in a buddha posture and close your eyes, you can sit easily because you are not afraid. You can sit easily because nothing is expected, really. But in this mad, chaotic meditation in which you have to lose yourself, your identity, your image, then you become just crazy and you feel you are losing control, and sooner or later the group mind takes possession of you.Then you are dancing, but you know very well, deeply, that you are not dancing. The whole group is dancing, and you have just become a part of it. You cannot stop it, really. A moment comes when you cannot stop it; you are no longer in possession. Something greater than you has taken the grip, something greater than you has taken control: that is the fear.If you sit in a siddhasan – in a buddha posture, you are in control. But my meditation is throwing you out of control – really pulling the ground from beneath your feet. You are being pushed into an abyss, into a whirlwind where you are no more. Something deeper, something greater, something powerful has taken possession. Now it is not that you are dancing, something else is dancing; you are just a part in that greater dance. This gives you fear. This makes everything difficult.So I will tell you: be ready to lose and it is easy. Resist, and it is difficult and hard. Resistance makes it hard; let-go makes it easy.And the same friend has asked something more. He says, “It seems to me that it is part of nature’s intention to make it very difficult and to require man to go through ages of development before he reaches it. Isn’t there a divine purpose behind why it takes him so long to reach?”Man’s mind is very cunning. You can go on throwing responsibility on someone else: “It is nature’s way to make it hard.” You are making it hard; it is not nature’s way. Nature’s way is always simple and easy. Nature means natural, spontaneous, easy. In nature, nothing is hard. Only man complicates things, makes them hard and difficult. Nature is very easy-flowing. But you can deceive. You can say it is nature’s way that meditation is difficult. Then you are relieved, then it is nothing on your part and you cannot do anything. It is nature’s way, so what can you do?You can just wait, or you can go on doing whatsoever you are doing. You need not meditate – you have thrown all responsibility on nature. But if this is really true, then meditation will happen. If you can really throw all responsibility on nature – remember, all – then meditation will happen; then there is no need to do anything. When you feel miserable don’t ask anyone for advice. Feel miserable and know that it is nature’s way. When you feel in pain, don’t ask for remedies; know this is nature’s way. If you can do this totally, there is no need for meditation; meditation has already happened.But you are cunning. Only with meditation will you say this is nature’s way and with nothing else. With everything else you will struggle, you will make effort. If you are poor then you will make every effort to become rich, and you will not say it is nature’s way. You will not say, “When I become really capable, nature will make me rich.” You will not wait for nature.If you are really honest, then leave everything to nature. You need not meditate then, because this itself, this leaving everything to nature, has become the deepest meditation possible. But if you are not honest, then you can deceive yourself so that whatsoever you want to do you will do, and whatsoever you don’t want to do you will throw on nature’s shoulders. Beware of this trick. You are doing it here.But I am ready. If you are totally throwing it on nature, then for you nothing is needed. But if you are not ready to throw it totally, then be kind to yourself: don’t throw meditation. Don’t say that nature must have some inner work and so nature makes it hard. Nature is not making it hard.The same friend asks, “Isn’t there a divine purpose behind why it takes so long to reach?” Not only are you throwing it on nature: you are trying to make it look very good and divine, as if there is some divine purpose behind it – that’s why you are not reaching the goal; that’s why you are not attaining to meditation; that’s why samadhi is so difficult. No. You are creating barriers for some divine purpose. And in a way, there can be no divine purpose because existence is purposeless. It is a play.Purpose is human: you have purpose. But existence cannot have any purpose. There is no sense in having any purpose. Existence is flowing – overflowing with its own energy. It is a festivity, not a purpose. It is a constant celebration. Existence is enjoying itself in so many forms. There is no purpose, and existence is not worried if you are not reaching to ecstasy, it is only your worry. If you are not reaching, you will suffer. Existence is not suffering because of your not reaching and existence will not force you to move into ecstasy. It is up to you.Existence is a deep freedom. If you want to be in suffering, be in suffering. If you want to be in bliss, be in bliss. It is your own choice. But it is too much for our minds to think that everything is our choice because then we become responsible. If you come to think that you are the cause of your suffering, then you will feel very bad. It always feels good to make someone else the cause of your suffering.But, remember, if someone else is the cause of your suffering, you can never become free. Then there is no liberation. But if you are the cause of your suffering, then liberation is within your hands; you can do something and change it.I tell you: you are the cause of your heaven and of your hell. If you are in hell, you have chosen it to be so. And the moment you decide, you can come out of it. No one is even going to prevent you; no one will say to you, “Don’t go.” The gates are not closed against you. Really, there are no gates, and no Devil is standing at the door. You need not even have a passport to move out. It is simply your decision to be there.You are in suffering because you have decided to be in suffering; you can come out of it the moment you decide to come out. You can be in bliss if you decide to be in bliss. Your decision is your being. You choose whatsoever you are. You have chosen it to be so; that’s why it is so. Don’t go on throwing responsibilities on something else – on nature, on God, on faith, on destiny. Don’t go on throwing them.But if you really feel that you cannot do anything, that you are helpless, then I say throw the total responsibility. These are the two ways. The first is: throw the total responsibility. Then you have nothing to do and everything will happen, because the moment you throw the total responsibility, the ego is also thrown, the ego cannot exist. If you give total responsibility to nature or to the divine force or to xyz, your ego is no longer there. And when the ego is not, the thing happens. But, if you cannot throw total responsibility, if you cannot surrender totally, if you cannot feel that you are totally helpless – remember the word total – then do something to dissolve this ego. Then effort will be needed. You will have to do either this or that, but don’t move in between. And don’t try to travel in two boats. You will be in difficulty; you will never reach anywhere.This is my observation: if I say to people, “Leave everything to existence,” they say, “How can I leave? How can I surrender? I don’t know what existence is. Unless I know, how can I leave everything to it?” They say, “It is difficult.” They say, “Please show us some way that we can follow.”But if I say to them, “Do this, follow this method and you will achieve,” immediately they bring some objection. They say, “Man is helpless. What can we do? We are so helpless – just puppets in the hands of a destiny which is unknown.”If I say to them, “Leave everything to destiny,” they say it is impossible. If I say, “Do something,” they say it is impossible. The mind is cunning and always tries to escape. Be alert about it; only then can something happen to you. Otherwise, you can go on just wavering your whole life and nothing will happen.You have wasted so many lives before. You are not here for the first time hearing about meditation; you have listened to it many times. It is not only that you are clever with me; you have been clever many times before. You have listened to Buddha, you have listened to Jesus, you have listened to Krishna. You were there – with different faces, of course, but you were there. You are very old, ancient ones, but your cunning is so deep that Buddhas fail; Christs come and go, and you remain unperturbed. No one can push you off your road. You continue; you bypass all.While talking to you or while leading you into meditative states, I never think that you are new ones. You have done many things before, but never with your full heart. And unless you are total in something, nothing can happen. Be either totally with destiny, with the divine force, and then you are no more; or be totally with a technique, with a method, so that the ego can be destroyed by and by, slowly. Method is a slow thing; surrender is total and final. Surrender is possible in a single moment; method will take time. I am giving you method because I know you cannot surrender.The last question:Osho,I have always heard you speaking about surrender, and it seems to me that surrender is the only important factor in achieving transformation. Then how to surrender? What is the meaning, method and process of it? And what contribution does the active meditation make in reaching the state of surrender?The first thing to be understood about surrender is that you cannot ask how, because “how” brings the method, “how” brings the technique. Surrender is enough unto itself; it needs no technique. Asking how to surrender is asking how to love. And if you ask how to love, one thing is certain: love is not for you. How can you ask how to love? And if someone is trained, whatsoever he comes to know about love will be false. Training will make everything false.It happened that one young man used to come to me to learn how to love and I used to tell him, “Go and do this and say this to the girl.” And he would go and he would come and report back to me what had happened. But he was always a failure. He tried and tried with many girls and he was always a failure because something would always go wrong. He was ready and I would train him for something, but life never happens in that way. The girl would say something different and he was not ready to answer. Then he would be in difficulty. He would come back and he would say, “You told me to answer this, but she never asked.”So I told that young man, “It is going to be very difficult unless I train you both. But then it will become just a drama.”You cannot learn surrender. If you can do it, you can do it, and there is nothing more to it. If you cannot do it, leave it completely; then follow some method. Method doesn’t need any surrender; method is a substitute. You want to do something because you cannot surrender, and by doing something the same phenomenon will happen in a long process that can happen immediately in surrender.Surrender means you are feeling that you are not capable of doing anything, so you surrender. It is a total helplessness. You say, “I don’t know.” You say, “I’m not capable of doing anything, so I surrender. Now lead me wheresoever you would like to lead.” And remember, this is going to be total. You cannot ask, after following two or three steps, “Where are you leading me?” You cannot say, “You are leading me up some wrong path,” because you have surrendered. Now you are no more.Surrender has its own beauty, but only very rare souls, very strong souls, can surrender. Remember, ordinarily it is the feeling that weaklings surrender. This is absolutely wrong. To surrender you need to be a strong person, very strong, because it is going to be such a total decision. And you cannot move backward. You cannot take it back; you cannot say, “Now I take my surrender back.” It is unconditional. Surrender cannot be conditional; you cannot say, “If this happens, only then will I follow you.” If I take you to hell, to the very hell, you will follow me because it has been unconditional. You have given up your own decisions, now you are not going to decide.Surrender needs very strong, absolutely strong souls. If the master says, “This is day,” and you see it is night – but you have surrendered, you don’t see now from your own eyes, you see from the master’s eyes – he says, “This is day,” you say, “Yes sir, this is day.” You don’t allow your ego to come in; you don’t allow your intellect to come in. You put aside everything. If you can do this – there is no “how” to it, remember – it happens.Surrender is not a doing; doing is contradictory. You cannot do it. Doing is contradictory to surrender. Surrender is a happening. You can ask, “How does it happen?” Don’t ask me how it is done. You can ask me, “How does it happen?” It happens when you have tried and tried and failed and failed; when you have tried every path and it has led nowhere; when you have tried your intellect in every way and it has always led to some cul-de-sac; you have tried to do whatsoever you can do and nothing has happened – and you have come to a conclusion that you are not enough, that you are helpless. When you have come to conclude this, that you are helpless, in this helplessness surrender happens. Then you can surrender.So the first thing: surrender has no “how” about it – no. It has no technique. It is the technique itself; it has no other technique. If you can do it, you can do it. If you cannot do, forget it: it is not for you. But don’t be worried, don’t feel hopeless, because there are techniques and you can try them. And if you try techniques, there are two possibilities: either you will succeed – if you succeed there will be no need to surrender – or you will fail, and then it will not help you.Buddha tried for six years. He tried every method. One of his contemporaries, Mahavira, was also trying – in the same days, at the same time, in the same part of the world, in Bihar. These two greatest souls were working for their enlightenment in the same period. Mahavira was working on certain techniques for twelve years. Buddha was also working on similar techniques for six years. After six years Buddha came to conclude that no technique can be helpful. Everything failed, so he surrendered. He surrendered to the universe. He said, “Now I have nowhere to go. Now I have nothing to achieve. Now I end my search. Whatsoever happens, now I am not interested in the future in any way. I am neither for life nor against.”He was in such total frustration that you cannot even say that he was hopeless because you can be hopeless only when a certain hope is still hidden. You can feel hopeless because you still go on hoping. He was not even hopeless. Hope was gone, even hopelessness was gone. He was simply without hope. The future was no longer there; he was a total failure. Buddha was a total failure after six years and in that total failure surrender happened. He relaxed under the bodhi tree that night without any desires, not even for nirvana, samadhi, ecstasy, godliness – no desire at all.You still desire, you still hope, you still feel something is possible, because your desire shows that you are still not totally a failure. But Buddha came to conclude that nothing was possible. He relaxed under the bodhi tree because now he could not be tense. When you are really a failure, how can you be tense? A man who is successful can be tense, a man who is trying to succeed can be tense, a man who has failed but still hopes can be tense. But a man who has failed so totally that now there is no hope, who doesn’t even feel frustrated, hopeless, who has simply left the whole game, cannot be tense. For Buddha, there was no worry. How can worry exist? There was no ego because ego exists only when you are trying to succeed.Suddenly in the morning, when he awoke from the night, there was no dream, no desire, no idea of the tomorrow. And in the morning he opened his eyes – his eyes were totally vacant. There were no clouds of desire and dreams. He saw the last star setting and as the star disappeared, he disappeared. And when there was no star on the horizon he was also not there. It is said that he laughed. He laughed within himself because he had tried so much and nothing had happened, and now he was not trying at all and everything had happened. He was in ecstasy. He was in such ecstasy that he is said to have said, “Nirvana has happened, enlightenment has happened – and such an enlightenment that has never been known before.”Then he tried to preach effortlessness, but no one would listen to him. How can you believe that without effort everything can happen? And it had not really happened without effort. Effort had been there. Through the effort happened the failure, and through failure happened this ultimate state of consciousness.Mahavira also succeeded – the other seeker in the same part of the world. He was doing certain techniques and he succeeded. He succeeded in dissolving his ego through techniques. That’s why Jainas and Buddhists are bonafide enemies. They cannot come to any reconciliation, they cannot come to any compromise, because they are so absolutely opposite. Mahavira succeeded through technique, so the whole teaching of Mahavira is of method. Buddha succeeded through failure, so his whole teaching is of effortlessness: “Don’t do anything.”These are the two dimensions. Both are good, but my suggestion is: first try to follow technique. If you succeed, it is okay. If you fail, then surrender will be possible. Then too it is okay. I am for both; that’s why I look contradictory.One young man came to me today and said, “You are so contradictory that it is impossible to follow you, and you contradict yourself so much that you just confuse me.” So I told him not to listen to me. “Just close the eyes and don’t listen to me. Just meditate.” Because if you feel that whatsoever I say is contradictory… And you will feel! Your intellect will feel. It is contradictory.Unless you come to know that all the contradictory ways can lead to the same point, you will not be able to feel the inner consistency within the contradictions. They are contradictory, and they are not. They are because what Buddha says is consistent, what Mahavira says is consistent. But I am saying both things simultaneously. It has never been done really; it looks contradictory. But you need not think about it; just follow one thing.If you can surrender, surrender; don’t ask how. If you ask how then you are not meant to surrender yet. You are asking for a method – then follow the method. Either you will succeed or you will fail: both are good. Through both you will reach.Now get ready for the meditation.

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The Supreme Doctrine 01-11Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Supreme Doctrine 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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He knows it who knows it not, and he knows it not who knows it. To the man of true knowledge it is the unknown, while to the ignorant it is the known.Indeed, he attains immortality who realizes it in and through every bodh – pulsation of knowledge and awareness. Through the atman he obtains strength and vigor and through its knowledge, immortality.For one who realizes it here, in this world, there is true life. For one who does not so realize it, great is the loss. Discovering the atman in every single being, the wise ones, dying to this world of sense-experience, become immortal.Knowledge of the brahman is impossible, but knowing is possible. Knowledge and knowing are basically different. A very subtle difference has to be understood. Knowing is always in the present, knowledge is of the past. Whenever you say, “I have known,” it means the experience has become past, it has become part of your memory. When you say, “I am in a process of knowing,” the experience is still continuing; you are still in the experience. It is not part of your memory. Your being is still involved in it.When you think about the world, the knowing stops. It becomes knowledge. That accumulated knowledge is known as science. Whatsoever man has known becomes science. Science is knowledge. Religion never becomes science because religion is an eternally continuing process of knowing. You never come to a point where you can say, “I have known.” The brahman never becomes the past; it is always the present. The ultimate cannot be reduced to the past; it cannot be reduced to knowledge. It is always a riverlike flow of knowing.So you cannot say that you have experienced godliness because that means it is now a past thing and that you have transcended it – you have already experienced it and gone beyond. You cannot go beyond godliness, so you can never say meaningfully that you have known, that you have experienced. You cannot put it in the past; it cannot be made part of your memory. You can be in a process of experiencing – but it is never experience, it is always experiencing: a lived process, never a dead memory.It is just like this: you cannot say, “I have breathed.” You are breathing. Breathing cannot become past. If it becomes the past you will be no more. There will be no one to say that he breathed. Breathing is always a process, continuous. You are always breathing – it is in the present. You cannot say, “I have lived,” because then who are you? You are life, but you cannot say, “I have lived.” Life is a continuous process. It is always here and now in this very moment. The ultimate means the ultimate life, the ultimate breathing, the ultimate experiencing, the ultimate knowing.So the first thing to be understood is that the brahman cannot be reduced to knowledge. So whosoever says, “I have known,” the Upanishads say is ignorant. He is insensitive to the great mystery of life. Whosoever says he has known has not known. He may have known through the scriptures; he may have known through others; he may have gathered information. But he has not known, because one who knows will know that God can never be reduced to knowledge. It remains a process.God is not a thing. A thing can be known. God is a process. A thing means something which has stopped. A process goes on and on and on. In the ordinary mind we always think of God as a thing. God is not a thing, it is a flow, a continuum. It goes on eternally, never stops, never can stop. Nonstopping is the very nature of it, so how can you know a process? The moment you say, “I have known,” you have stopped – and the process goes on. You have stopped in your knowledge and the process goes on: you are lost, your contact is lost. Now you are no longer in touch with the process.You will have to move with the process. You cannot stop. Stopping is not possible with the divine. You can stop, but the divine cannot stop. And when you stop and the river goes on, you have lost contact with it; you are no longer in living touch.So those who say they have known have lost contact. Really, they have not known. They have gathered information. Intellectually they have conceived, but they have not lived, because one who lives will come to know that this is a river, eternally going on and on. You have to flow with it. A single moment of stopping and the contact is lost. You can never say, “I have known.” You can only say, “I am knowing.”Knowing is an open thing; knowledge is closed. Knowledge has come to a full stop. Knowing is a growing thing, it grows. Knowledge is dead, it has already stopped. It is not breathing now, the blood is not flowing in it; the heart has stopped beating, it is dead. Knowledge is a corpse, and if you carry knowledge you are carrying a corpse, a dead body. That is why pundits, scholars, those who think they know, are dead men. Even sinners have entered the divine, but it is unheard of that any pundit has ever entered the divine. A sinner can enter, but a man who is knowledgeable, who thinks he knows, cannot enter.In the eyes of the Upanishads the real sin is knowledge, because that is the only barrier. But it is very subtle, and you have to understand the meaning. Knowing is allowed; knowledge is not allowed. Move with the divine moment to moment, alive, in touch, open. Don’t say, “I have known.” Simply say, “I am aware, experiencing, knowing. Everything is open, and I don’t know what is going to be revealed the next moment, so I cannot close, I cannot say now it is finished, the end has come.” There is no last chapter, there is no last page. The scripture is endless. You cannot close it and every moment something new is revealed because the divine or existence or brahman is every moment new, fresh, young. Only we get old, and we get old because of knowledge.It is not simply the body which gets old. The body will get old, but your consciousness need not get old. If it gets old, it means you have gathered knowledge. Then the weight of knowledge makes you old. Otherwise your eyes will remain innocent, virgin. You will be open; that openness is virginity. You will be seeking and searching. You will be inquiring and meditating and contemplating – and you will be always ready for the new to happen because it is happening every moment. Existence is never old. If existence is old then some day it will have to die because oldness leads to death.The brahman is always young, evergreen. Old age is not known there, that is why there is no death to it. Existence is always green, alive, pulsating. With knowledge you become old. The moment you say, “I have known,” you have stopped knowing. You think you have experienced and the experiencing stops. From that moment on you are not growing. You are a dead seed.The Upanishads believe in knowing, not in knowledge. What is this knowing? – and what is the process of knowing? With knowledge you gather the past. In knowing you disperse it – you go on dispersing it. Whatsoever is known must be thrown away so that you are open again to know anew. You must die to the past; only then can you be alive to the present.We all live in the past – that which is no more, that which has gone, that which is dead. We live in that past; that’s why we are so dead. Life is always in the present and mind is always in the past; that’s why mind cannot know life. There can be no meeting ground. There is no common ground where mind can meet life. Hence, the Upanishads are against mind.Mind is always the memory – that which you have lived, that which is past, that which is no more. Mind is just the past dust gathered upon you. Throw it away. Wash it away so that you are fresh, young, and you can meet the present, the ever young – the ever-young brahman.In knowing, the past has to be constantly renounced. This is the basic renunciation. Die to the past so that you can be alive in the present. You cannot do both. If you are alive in the past, then you will be dead in the present. If you want to be alive in the present, be dead to the past. Each moment go on throwing the past dust. Don’t allow it to gather. Go on renouncing it, go on throwing it. It is of no use. You have already used it, now it is just a dead shell. The bird has flown away from it. Don’t go on collecting dead shells. They will become the imprisonment; they will hamper you. They will become so weighty that they will not allow you to move.To me, a sannyasin, one who has renounced, means not that he has renounced wealth, not that he has renounced his house, not that he has renounced family, but one who has renounced the past – because that is the basic burden. That is your family; you go on living with the dead.I have heard…Once it happened that Jesus was walking on the road. It was just morning and the sun was just about to rise, and he saw a fisherman throwing his net on the lake. So he said to that fisherman – he came near him and said, “Why are you wasting your life just catching fishes? Follow me. I will show you how to catch the kingdom of God in your net.”The fisherman looked back. There was a different type of light in the eyes of Jesus. The fisherman was hypnotized. He threw down his net and followed Jesus. But just as they were passing out of the village a man came running and asked him, “Where are you going? Your father has died.” His father was ill, very old. Any moment it was expected that he would die.So the fisherman said to Jesus, “Jesus, allow me a few days so I can go back and pay my respects to the old man who is dead and do all that is needed and expected from a son.”Jesus said, “You need not go. The dead will bury the dead.” To Jesus the whole village was dead. So he said, “They will bury the dead; you need not worry about it.”Why did Jesus say that the dead will bury the dead? Because all those who live in the past are dead. Only those who live in the present are alive. Life means the present, the here and now. It is a very fleeting moment. You can catch it only when you are totally unburdened; otherwise you will miss. If your mind is moving toward the past you will miss the fleeting moment of life. It is so momentary, it is so fleeting, that if you are attached to the past you will go on missing it.And this is happening. Even when you are not thinking of the past, you are thinking of the past reflected in the future. But you are never in the present, that much is certain. Either you are in the past which is no more, or in the future which is yet to be. Both are not, both are nonexistential. One is dead and one is not yet born. And whatsoever you think of the future is just a reflected past, a projected past, because what can you think of the future? You can think of tomorrow only in terms of yesterday because you don’t know any other language.You loved someone yesterday, now you think to love him tomorrow. It is going to be just the past again repeated with some modification. And those modifications also come from past experience. But nothing new can be projected into the future. Only the past can be projected. So you move like a shuttle between the past and the future, and in this constant movement the fleeting present, that which is life, is missed. And only through life can you enter the brahman.The Upanishads say don’t be attached to knowledge, don’t be attached to memory, don’t be attached to the past. Go on dying to it so that you are ever young, fresh, virgin. Again and again you are open. No past becomes an imprisonment around you. You always move on and leave the dead shells to the past.The sutra says:He knows it who knows it not…He knows it who knows it not… He who has not made it a knowledge – only he knows it who is still in the process of knowing, who is still searching, inquiring – who is still not closed, who is still going onward, still flowing. And this is going to be eternally so. No one ever reaches the goal; no one can reach the goal. Life really has no goal. It is just an eternal play – beginningless, endless. Man creates the goal. Why?Man creates the goal because then he can be at ease. The goal is achieved – now you can relax. Now you can be dead; now you are not needed. But life has no goal. Rather, it creates many goals, but those goals are just temporary. Every goal is just a means to a further goal, and ultimately there is no goal; otherwise the brahman would have stopped at any moment, because the goal had been reached.Existence has been existing beginninglessly. You would think that at any time the goal might have been achieved, everything would have stopped. But it has not happened so; it will never happen. The goal is a human creation. Life is goalless; that’s why it is eternal. If there is a goal then life cannot be eternal, because when the goal is achieved life is dead. All goals are just temporary. When you can realize this you have realized the brahman – the purposeless energy moving goallessly, moving everywhere, but not moving to somewhere – moving toward nowhere. The movement is beautiful in itself; it is blissful in itself. The bliss is not somewhere in the goal, it is here and now, just in the movement, just in the pulsation of being alive.When you look at a Buddha sitting under a bodhi tree, or you look at a Jesus on the cross, or you look at Mahavira standing under the skies, a question must arise in your mind: “What are they doing?” It cannot be conceived that Buddha is thinking about some business – he has no business. He is not thinking about his family – there is no family. Thinking about the future? – what can he think about the future? What is a Buddha doing under a bodhi tree? He is not doing anything. He simply is. The very happening of life, the breathing in and out, the very pulsation of being alive, is blissful. He is not doing anything else. He is simply in bliss.But whenever you think about bliss, you always think as if bliss is something which he possesses in his hand. It is not something, it is just a way of existing – the right way of existing. There is no past and no future. Just under the bodhi tree, this very moment, the Buddha is simply alive. The heart is beating, the breath is coming in and out, the blood is circulating, and everything is alive, pulsating. He is not moving anywhere, he simply is. In this isness is bliss.Hence, the continuous emphasis that when you don’t desire you will be blissful. Why? – because desire leads you somewhere else. Desire doesn’t allow you to be here. Desire says go on somewhere else; the goal is there in the future. Desire creates the future and forces you toward the future. When you are nondesiring, when there is no desire, you are here and now. You are under the bodhi tree, you have become a buddha.A buddha means a state of consciousness – a state of consciousness which is not going anywhere to achieve any goal. Because of this realization, Buddha said, “There is no God.” Just because he was so compassionate toward you he said there is no God, because if he says that God is, then you will make a desire out of him. You will want to achieve him. You would like to reach God, you would like to know God, so you will create a desire.So Buddha says there is no God: drop all spiritual desire. Not that there is no God, but he says this just to help you drop all desiring and all future. Otherwise you go on changing the future. Sometimes the desire is worldly and sometimes it becomes spiritual, but the desiring remains the same.Buddha says there is no moksha; there is no state of total freedom somewhere in heaven. There is no moksha. Not that there is no moksha, but he says this just to help you drop it; otherwise you will start desiring moksha, the liberated state – and desiring is the bondage. So when you desire moksha, liberation, you are still in bondage. He says this just to help you to drop all desiring so that you can be here and now.People go on coming to Buddha and they ask, “What will happen when we die?”Buddha says, “Nothing will happen. You simply die.”They are asking him to create a future even beyond death. They are not satisfied; this much future in their lifetimes is not enough. They want some future beyond death so they can project their minds more and they can desire and they can plan what to do after death. They go on insisting. In every village where Buddha moves they go on insisting, “What will happen to the enlightened one, to you, when you die?”Buddha says, “Nothing will happen. I will simply die. As the flame of a lamp ceases to be, I will cease.”They are not satisfied; they feel uneasy. They say, “But where will the flame go? Will it meet the brahman? Will it become cosmic? What will happen to the enlightened soul?”Buddha is hard. He says, “Nothing. Just a flame is put out. Do you ask where the flame has gone? No one asks where the flame has gone because everyone knows it has just ceased.”The word nirvana means cessation of the flame. Buddha never uses the word moksha, he never uses heaven, he never talks about paradise, he never uses any word that can create future. He simply says nirvana. Nirvana means the flame has ceased. Don’t ask what happens, “Why? Does the flame really cease to be?” It never ceases to be, but just through his compassion he is telling a lie because the truth will create a desire in you.If he says there will be bliss – sat-chit-anand – if he says there will be bliss and existence and consciousness, or if he says that there will be a kingdom of God, then a desire will be created. And if the desire is there, there is not going to be any kingdom of God. Cessation of desire will bring you here and now. There is no possibility to move into the future; you are thrown back to the present. And once you are thrown back to the present you are in paradise. You will be in the divine, you will become one with the brahman.The Upanishads say: He knows it who knows it not…Don’t create any memory; don’t help create the past. Go on dropping it. You have used it, why go on carrying it? Don’t make it a knowledge.People come to me and say, “Yesterday the meditation was just wonderful.” You have become non-meditative because of yesterday’s meditation. Now that man will go on looking for yesterday to be repeated today. He will wait. He will not be meditating; he will not be totally in it. Part of his mind will be looking backward to see when that will happen again – and it will not happen. In the meditation, his mind was totally in the moment; now it is not. Now he is looking backward; he has brought in a new thing. Now the situation is not the same. He is not totally in it; he is expecting a result. It will not happen and then he will come to me and say, “What has gone wrong? Yesterday it happened, but today it didn’t happen and I am feeling very frustrated.”The mechanism is simple. Yesterday it could happen because you had no past about it. Remember, you had no past about it, no expectation about it. You couldn’t project any future because you didn’t know anything. You were ignorant, so it happened. You were simple, innocent, in the moment – just doing it without any expectation for a result because the result was unknown.Now it is known. It has happened, it has become the past. Now it is your knowledge. Now this knowledge will become the barrier. Now you can do whatsoever you like, but it is not going to happen. Knowledge becomes the barrier; the past becomes the barrier to the present. So if it happened yesterday, forget it. Drop that yesterday.Remember one thing more: you will be frustrated if it is not happening. And you will be frustrated even if it happens again, because it will be just a repetition. You will get fed up. You will get fed up even with your meditation if it goes on repeating, being the same. Drop the past, because if the past is there it is not going to happen. And even if sometimes it happens, it is going to be just a repetition of the past and you will get bored. In both ways the past goes on interfering with the present.Why do you feel it is a repetition? You feel it is a repetition because you go on comparing with the past. If you drop the past it is always new; it is never a repetition. Repetition means you are constantly comparing it with the past experience. Drop the past completely and you will be open to the present; whatsoever happens will be new and you will never get bored.Everyone is bored because of this nonsense going on – bringing in the past again and again. You kissed your beloved yesterday and now you kiss her again and you compare. The very beauty of the kiss is gone because it is just a repetition. Sooner or later you will get fed up. Sooner or later you would like to escape from your beloved. She will look like an enemy because now she has become a situation in which everything has become a repetition. Forget the past. It is killing you. It is killing your love, it is killing your life, it is killing every possibility. Drop the past. Don’t make it a knowledge. Be fresh again and again. Every moment move and don’t carry the past.He knows it who knows it not, and he knows it not who knows it.He knows it not who knows it, who says, “I know.” This is the indication that he has stopped knowing. Knowledge is complete; the book is closed. This man is dead. A dead man cannot be in contact with a live force.To the man of true knowledge it is the unknown, while to the ignorant it is the known.Go anywhere on the earth: there are churches, temples, gurdwaras, mosques. There, everyone is worshipping; the whole earth seems to be religious. Everyone “knows” about God and life is such a misery, such a suffering. Everyone “knows” about God – not only knows: everyone argues about him.There are two types of ignorant people: one who says there is a God and they argue for it, and another who says there is no God and they argue against it. But both believe that they know. Theists, atheists, both believe that they know. In one thing they both agree – that they have knowledge. Not only this: they try to prove that they have the true knowledge.The Upanishads say that only ignorant people can claim that they know: the divine has become known, the mystery is solved; now there is no mystery but a theory, a philosophy, a scripture; now there is no mystery and everything is known. Only ignorant people can do this. They can kill the mystery by asserting that the ultimate is known. Those who are wise will insist that the mystery remains a mystery. Even if you come to face it, encounter it, even if you come to meet it, the mystery is not solved. On the contrary, it is deepened more. It becomes more mysterious, it goes on becoming more and more mysterious. The more you know, the more it becomes unknown.This is the mystery of religious knowing. The more you know it, the more it becomes unknown – the more you feel how it is impossible to know, difficult to know. The more you know it, the more you become aware of your incapacity, your helplessness, your ignorance. The more and more God becomes unknown, the nearer you approach. And when someone really enters the divine, he comes to know that it is unknowable – not only unknown. Then he comes to realize there is no possibility to know. What does it mean? It means there is no possibility to be finished with it. It is going to be an eternal concern. You cannot finish, you cannot say, “Now I will drop this religious inquiry, I can drop this religiousness. The thing is finished.” No, it cannot be finished.People come to me and they go on asking, “When will it happen that the search ceases, that we reach, that the ultimate happens?” They are in such a hurry. It is not going to end anywhere, remember. It is not going to end. This quest is eternal. You will go on growing. You will go on growing into deeper awareness, into deeper bliss. But still something always remains hidden, and you go on uncovering it. But it is never uncovered completely; it cannot be so. This is how the very nature of the ultimate reality is.But teachers have been saying, “Don’t worry. Sooner or later you will reach.” I myself go on saying it. People come to me and they say, “We have been meditating for so long. When will it happen?” I say, “Wait! Soon it will happen.” But these are all lies. If I say that it is not going to happen ever, you will simply drop the whole effort; you will feel hopeless. So I will go on saying it is going to happen.It is happening already, but it is not going to happen in such a way that the journey ends. And one day you yourself will become aware of the beauty of this non-ending process. Then you will feel what an ugly question you were asking. You were asking how to end all this. The very question is ugly and absurd. You don’t know, but what you are asking is against yourself – because if it ends, you end with it. If there is no search, nothing to be revealed, nothing to be loved, nothing to be known, nothing to be entered, how can you be? If you were in such a state, you would want to commit suicide.Bertrand Russell has somewhere joked. He said, “I cannot believe in the Hindu conception of liberation – of moksha – because,” he says, “in moksha, the Hindu conception of liberation, you will be freed of everything: nothing is to be done, nothing will happen. You will be sitting and sitting and sitting under bodhi trees, and nothing will happen because everything has ceased.” So Russell says, “That will be too much. It will become a burden, and the liberation will become a new type of bondage. Everyone will get fed up, and everyone will start praying: ‘Send us back to the earth or even to hell.’ Even hell will be better because there will be something there to be done, there will be some news. But in moksha there will be no news, no events, no happenings. Just think: eternally no happenings, no movement – what type of moksha will this be?”Really, when Hindus talk about this moksha, or Jainas talk about this moksha, that doesn’t mean that such a moksha exists or such a state exists. This is just to help you, because you cannot conceive of the eternal process. So they say, “Yes, don’t be worried. Sooner or later everything will stop and then you will not have to do anything.” But you don’t know what type of misery this will be. This will be more miserable than the earth is.Moksha is not a static thing. It is a dynamic process. And moksha is not some geographical place. It is a way of looking at things, it is an attitude. If you can be alive moment to moment, you will never ask when all this is going to finish. The very question shows that you are not alive and you are not enjoying life as it is. If you enjoy life, you will not ask when it is going to end, you will not ask when you are going to be freed of it. Then you are already free. In the very enjoyment the freedom has come. Whether it ends or not is not a concern at all. If it ends it is good. If it doesn’t end it is also good. Then you accept it totally.The sutra says: To the man of true knowledge it is the unknown, while to the ignorant it is the known. It is only ignorance which can claim such a thing. And the more stupid the mind, the more arrogant will be the claim, the more dogmatic will be the claim.But even that dogmatic claim may impress you. There are religious fanatics all over the world who go on claiming. And their claims impress people because just by their aggression, their dogmatism, their absolute definiteness, you are overpowered. You think this man must have achieved because he is claiming so boldly. You are so uncertain about yourself that anyone, any stupid man, can claim anything with certainty and you will be impressed. But remember this: only for ignorance does such certainty exist. A man who is wise cannot be dogmatically certain. He cannot assert anything absolutely; he cannot assert anything in an imperative way.For example, if you ask Mahavira anything he will look very uncertain. He is not, but he is a wise man. If you ask him, “Is there God?” he will say, “Maybe, maybe not.” This is the mind that doesn’t claim – because if he says, “He is,” it becomes a claim; and if he says, “He is not,” it still becomes a claim. He says, “Maybe, perhaps.” Syad is his word – perhaps, maybe.You will not be impressed by him. That is why such a great man has so few followers; Jainas are not more than thirty lakhs. Twenty-five centuries have passed. Even if one Adam and Eve were converted by Mahavira they would have created such a number. Only thirty lakhs, three million people in twenty-five centuries – and they too are Jainas only by birth, because to be a Jaina means to be in the attitude of perhaps, maybe.Why does Mahavira go on saying maybe, whatsoever you ask? Even if you ask if there is a soul, he says, “Maybe, maybe not.” Why this insistence? Because he never claims knowledge and he allows everything to remain unknown – that is why the insistence on maybe, because then things remain unknown, uncertain, vague, and you can inquire. When everything is certain, inquiry ceases. If he says, “Yes – there is a God,” or, “There is soul,” or, “There is bliss,” inquiry has stopped.Now what can you do? Either you can follow him or not follow him, but he says, “Maybe.” He leaves everything open. That is the meaning of syad: everything is open. He doesn’t force anything upon you. He doesn’t say yes dogmatically, he doesn’t say no, because his aggression may impress itself upon you, it may become fatal to you – just listening to him. And Mahavira is such a person that you will be impressed, you will be magnetized just listening to him. If he says, “There is,” it may become knowledge to you and you may go on believing that there is. That will be destructive: to create knowledge is to be destructive.But only those who are very sensitive can understand Mahavira. Those who are insensitive, ignorant, stupid, will think, “This man doesn’t know. Our village pundit is better. At least he says, ‘Yes, there is a God, and I can prove it. I can give you proofs from literature – from the Vedas, the Upanishads. I can argue that there is a God and I can convince you.’ And this man Mahavira says, ‘Maybe.’ What does he mean? Has he known or not?” People go on asking Mahavira, “If you have known, then why not say yes? Or if you have come to know that there is no God, then why not say no? Be clear.”Why do you ask for clarity? You ask for clarity so that you can follow blindly. You ask for clarity so that nothing is left for you to work out. You are lazy, so you ask for clarity. Mahavira will not give you clarity. Really, whenever you come across such a person as Mahavira he will create more confusion in you because out of confusion inquiry is born. Out of certainty comes only ignorance.This sutra says that the ultimate is the unknown to the wise, to those who know, …while to the ignorant it is the known. Don’t be too certain. Remain uncertain. Uncertainty means fluidity; uncertainty means every alternative is possible. You are not a fixed entity. The future is not going to be just a repetition of the past. Something new is possible every moment. Remain vague. Don’t insist on consistencies. Even if there is apparently a contradiction, don’t try to choose in haste. Wait, weigh, and even in the contradiction try to find something which joins the two opposites. That third thing will be nearer to truth than any polarity.The whole emphasis is to remain in a state of receptivity for the unknown to happen to you. Be sensitive, fluid, impressionable, as if some guest is to come and you are waiting. The door is open. Even the breeze passing through the trees or the breeze passing through the dead leaves – and you jump to the door. The guest may have come; you are alert.The guest has not come yet. You are simply waiting. In this alertness, one comes to know the ultimate core of reality. The guest never comes really. He is always coming, he is always coming – coming and coming and coming. He is always nearer and nearer and nearer, closer and closer, but he never really comes. You always remain in waiting. This waiting is beautiful. It is bliss – if you can wait. But then you need a very sensitive mind. Mediocre, stupid minds won’t be of any help there because a stupid mind will say “Now come in; otherwise I am going to close the door and rest. I have waited long enough.”There is a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, one of the most beautiful ever written. The poem is known as “The King of the Night”:There is a temple, a big temple, with hundreds of priests to serve the deity there. One night it happens that the chief priest has a dream. He dreams that the king, the deity, has appeared to him and he says, “Tonight I am coming.”He awakes feeling very disturbed. He is very worried whether this dream is just a dream or a vision: “Is this just dreaming, my mind dreaming? Or is it really an intimation? Is the deity, the god of the temple, really to come? Or is it just my own imagination?”He is afraid to tell the others because they will think he has gone mad. They will say, “The deity has never come. We have been worshipping the stone deity since the temple was built and he has never come. You have been dreaming. You have fallen prey to your own imagination.” But then he is also afraid that if he doesn’t speak up and suddenly the deity comes and they are not prepared to receive him, then what will happen? So he thinks it is better to be foolish and speak.So in the morning he gathers all the priests and he says, “The deity has appeared in a dream and he says this night he is coming: ‘Wait and be ready to receive me.’”They all start laughing, and they say, “This is a dream. Don’t believe in dreams; don’t be foolish. If the news spreads, then people will laugh if the deity doesn’t come.”So they decide that they should not tell anybody, but they should prepare just in case. So they clean the whole temple. They prepare everything. But they know that it is just a dream, so it is half-hearted, it is just in case. They do everything – but it is not done with love, it is not with waiting. They already know it is a dream. The dream has not opened them. They are knowers and they know the history: it has never happened. They know the scriptures, they are great scholars, so they say, “It has never happened and it is not going to happen.”Scholars always think that the future is just the past repeated again and again, it is never new. But still, not to take a chance, the priests prepare. They clean, they decorate; much food is prepared for the coming god. But they know that this is for them also. This is for them only; the god is not coming. So their hearts are not ready, only the temple is ready. And when the hearts are not ready, what can a temple do? So they wait. Night falls, it becomes dark. The road is dead, no one is moving, everyone around has gone to sleep.Then they say, “It is enough. We have waited long just for a dream. We are foolish. Now we must eat the food we have prepared. The whole day has been an unnecessary fast.” So they eat and they enjoy, and then they fall asleep. They are tired from the whole day’s work of cleaning and decoration, so they fall asleep.Just at midnight they hear in their sleep that a chariot is coming near the temple. The noise comes; one priest hears it and he says, “It seems the king, the god, has come. I hear the wheels of the chariot making noise.”Somebody else says, “Don’t be stupid and don’t disturb our sleep. We have been waiting too long; it is enough. Now don’t disturb.” So they fall asleep again. Then someone hears footsteps. Someone is coming up the steps of the temple – the temple has many steps.Someone again says, half asleep, “It seems the king has come. Someone is coming up to the door – and the very sound of the feet is so qualitatively different – it cannot be that of a man.”But then the chief priest himself says, “Don’t be foolish! Don’t disturb us the whole night. We have been working the whole day. If he had to come he should have come by the evening. No need – it has never been heard that he comes at midnight.”Then someone knocks at the door and someone hears again that someone is knocking on the door. Then a priest becomes absolutely mad and says, “Stop completely! This is nothing but a breeze striking on the door.” So they sleep.In the morning they all weep and cry and scream because the chariot had come. There are marks on the road, and the god had come up to the temple. On the steps in the dust there are footprints. But now nothing can be done. The moment, the opportunity, is lost.This is the whole situation. Really, he is always coming, his chariot is always near the door. He is knocking continuously, but you are closed. Be open – that is the basic message of the Upanishads. Don’t be knowledgeable. Don’t cling to the past, to the history, to the memory. Be open and wait for the unknown to happen. And whenever it happens don’t try to make it known. Whatsoever happens, throw it away and be ready again. Something new will happen again. The brahman remains unknown continuously.Indeed, he attains immortality who realizes it in and through every bodh – pulsation of knowledge and awareness.No knowledge is ultimate. Every knowing is just a pulsation – just a pulsation, a vibration. Don’t make any vibration the ultimate. In deep meditation you will come to feel a great silence: this is just a pulsation. Don’t think this is brahman. Brahman is always more. Whatsoever happens, he is always more. Don’t identify any happening with the brahman; otherwise you will stop.In meditation, many times a deep bliss will happen to you; you will be washed away. But don’t say this is the brahman because the moment you say this is brahman you are closed. It is just a pulsation of bodh, just a pulsation of knowing, just a pulsation of consciousness, but just a wave. Never transform any wave into an ocean. Remember, when you make a wave into an ocean it has become knowledge and then you are closed. Let every wave be just a wave and wait for the ocean.And remember, the ocean never comes; it is always the waves which are coming. The ocean comes through the waves, but it is always the waves which are coming. The ocean never comes. So don’t fix yourself and don’t say that this wave is the ocean. The moment you say it you are closed.Many people have reached deep ecstasies and then they stop because then they say, “This is brahman; the ultimate has been achieved.” Remember, it is never achieved. It is simply achievable but never achieved; approachable but never approached.The journey remains, and it is beautiful that the journey remains. Whatsoever knowing comes to you, the Upanishads say it is just a pulsation of knowledge and awareness. And if you can feel this pulsation of knowledge and awareness, you will attain immortality. Why? You become mortal, you become prone to death, because you cling to the dead – the dead past. If you don’t cling to the past there is no death for you, it cannot happen. The body will disappear, but that is not death. It becomes a death because you have become too much obsessed with the body – because you have lived in the body in the past.When a person has lived a hundred years in his body, in that hundred years’ experience of living in the body he has become obsessed with the body. Now he thinks he is the body. A hundred years of routine, habit, has created this false notion that he is the body. That is why he feels that death is coming.Children are less afraid of death than old men. Why? – because they are still new to the body. It has not become their experience and knowledge. They are fresh. Children can play with snakes without any fear. They can play with poison, they can move into any danger. They are not afraid. Why? – because they are still fresh to this new abode. They are not clinging to it too much. It has not yet become a past. But sooner or later, when they have lived in it for many years, they will cling to it. Then they will be afraid. Then they will be afraid of death because in death the body will die and they have come to feel that they are the body.A person who lives moment to moment, who goes on dying to the past, is never attached to anything. Attachment comes from the accumulated past. If you can be unattached to the past every moment, you are always fresh, young, just born. You pulsate with life and that pulsation gives you immortality. You are immortal, only unaware of the fact.Indeed, he attains immortality who realizes it in and through every bodh… Through the atman he obtains strength and vigor and through its knowledge, immortality.The more you know life, the inner life, the atman, the more you know that you are immortal. There is going to be no death: you are deathless.For one who realizes it here, in this world, there is true life.For one who realizes it here, in this world, there is true life. So don’t hanker after any other life; don’t hanker for something to happen after death. If it cannot happen here it will not happen ever. If it can happen it can happen here and now. This earth, this life is the present. Don’t condemn it for another life. There is no other life. Life is always here; life is always in this moment. Don’t postpone it because through postponing you may miss the opportunity.For one who realizes it here, there is true life. For one who does not so realize it, great is the loss. Discovering the atman in every single being, the wise ones, dying to this world of sense-experience, become immortal.Go on dying to the past, and you will not have any world around you with which you are attached, obsessed. Dying to the past, you die to this world. Remember, this world is created through your experience; it is your experience. Dying to experience, you are so young that you don’t create any world around you. The real world is not the problem – the world around your mind is the problem.I have heard…Once it happened that a house was on fire. The master of the house was weeping and crying, and beating his chest. His whole life was destroyed. Then suddenly a man came and said, “Why are you weeping? Don’t you know? Your son has settled yesterday; the house has been sold.”The tears disappeared – the man even started smiling. He said, “Is it so?” The house was still burning, but now his inner house was not burning. This house was not the problem, but an inner attachment.Then the son came and said, “Yes, we were just going to settle, but it is not settled yet.”The man’s tears started flowing. He was weeping and beating his chest, but the house was completely unaware of what was happening to this man.Within minutes everything changes – the inner world changes. If the house were not his, then he would not have any problem. The problem was not the house, but that “the house is mine.” That “mine” creates the inner world.If you go on throwing the past away, then nothing is yours. Then nothing is your possession; you always remain without any possession. That is what sannyas is. Not that you will not use a house, not that you will not use clothes, not that you will not live in this world – but nothing will be your possession. The world of the inner mind disappears. Then the real world is beautiful. All ugliness is projected by your mind, by the dead past; then life becomes ugly.With the living present, life is just beautiful and blissful.Get ready for the meditation.

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The Supreme Doctrine 01-11Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Supreme Doctrine 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You said that to live moment to moment, one must throw away one's dead past and dead memories. Does it mean that all the memories have to be dissolved and destroyed to transcend the mind? But one needs a strong mind and an intense and sufficient accumulation of memories to function in this world.To die to the past does not mean that you will not be able to remember it. It does not mean that all your memories will be dissolved or destroyed. It only means that now you don’t live in those memories, you are not identified with those memories. You are freed from them. They will remain, but now they will be just a part of your brain, not part of your consciousness.The brain is a mechanism, just like a tape-recording machine. The brain goes on recording everything. The brain is the physical part. It will go on recording, and your memories cannot be destroyed unless the brain is destroyed. But that is not the problem. The problem is that your consciousness is filled with memories. Your consciousness goes on identifying itself with the brain and the brain is always stirred by your consciousness – and memories go on flooding you.When it is said, “Die to the past,” it means don’t be identified with the brain. You can use the brain; then it is just an instrument. When you need it you will use it – and you will need it. You will have to go back home; you will have to remember where you live – where your house is, what your name is. You can use these memories, but use them; don’t be used by them. That is the problem.While you are here you need not think about the house where you live in your town, but you go on thinking about it. You need not remember your wife while you are here, but you go on talking with her even though she is not here. When you go back home you must recognize that she is your wife, but there is no need to be bothered with her now. She must not come into the mind; the mind must not go on functioning unnecessarily. It must not bring in the past; it must not flood the present with the past.The memory remains. It is not being destroyed. Through meditation the mind is not destroyed. You simply start transcending it. It remains a storehouse; you need not live in it. If you live in the mind then you are mad. You need not live in a storehouse. When you need something, you go into the storeroom, bring that something out and use it. The storehouse is not a living-room, but you have made it one. Your storehouse of memory has become your living room; you live there. Don’t live there, that is the whole meaning. Be in the present and whenever the past is needed, use it. But don’t allow it to go on continuously overflooding you. That overflooding of the past makes your consciousness dim and dull. Then you cannot see with clear eyes, you cannot feel with a clear heart. Then nothing is clear, everything becomes confused.When you are not identified with the mind you will have a very clear memory. Right now you don’t have a really good memory because you are not your master. Your mind is just a mad mechanism. When you need to remember something it doesn’t come, and when you don’t need it, it goes on coming: you are not the master. You cannot be the master if you become identified with the slave. If you become too much attached to the slave, the slave will start mastering you.So if you die to the past you will not become less efficient in the functioning of your mind – you will become more efficient. A master is always more efficient. When he wants to remember, he remembers; but when he doesn’t want to remember, he doesn’t remember. When he says to the mind, “Function,” it functions. When he says, “Stop,” the mind stops. I have to use memories. For instance, I have to talk to you; I have to use words, I have to use language. But I use them only when I am talking to you. The moment I am not talking the mind stops. Then there is total vacuum – void. Then there is no cloud.It is just like your legs: when you want to walk you use your legs. But if you go on moving them while just sitting or standing, people will say you are mad. Then you may say, “What can I do? My legs go on moving; I cannot do anything.” And if someone says to you, “Stop this,” you will say, “If I stop, then when I want to walk what will I do? I will become less efficient. If I stop, then I will lose the capacity to walk, so I have to use them constantly.” Remember, if you use them constantly, when the time comes to walk, you will feel tired. You are already tired.While sitting there is no need to use the legs. While not talking there is no need to use words. Don’t verbalize within. While not using the past there is no need to allow it to flood you. Dying to the past means becoming master of your mind. Then you will be more efficient. But that efficiency will be of a different quality – a totally different quality. There will be no effort in it.Whenever you want to remember now, you have to make an effort because you are so tired; your brain is so tired, continuously working. There is no stop for it, no relaxation. Even while you are asleep and the body is resting, the mind continues to work. Dreaming, it is working – constantly working. It is a miracle that you are not mad. Or maybe you are already mad but you are not aware; or maybe, because everyone is mad like you, you cannot compare and you don’t know what is happening to you.Don’t be afraid, your efficiency will be increased. And the quality will be different because there will be no effort. When you need, you can use your mind. It is just an instrument; just like your hands and legs it is a physical part of you. Memory is a physical thing, remember; so if your brain is destroyed you may be alive and conscious but you will lose your memory. If a particular part of your brain is destroyed, then a particular type of memory will be lost.One of my friends, a doctor, fell from a train. He fell on his head and something was destroyed. For three years all memory was lost; he couldn’t even recognize his father or mother. He was alive, fully alive, conscious; but he couldn’t read, couldn’t write, because all memory was lost. He started from ABCD again, and only after three years was he able to use his brain again. But then he was just a child of three years; all the medical knowledge, all the degrees that he had were lost because particular tissues, particular nerves in the brain, were destroyed and with them all memory was lost or cut off.Now, in China, they use brainwashing. They give some electrical stimulation to particular parts of the brain; just by electrical shock they destroy the inner memory. So if you are a religious man they will give your mind a shock treatment and all your memories – that you are religious, that you go to this church or you read this holy book, or you belong to this sect – will be destroyed. Then you can easily be converted into a communist because then you don’t know who you are.And now these techniques have become available to the whole world. Every government has the secrets. And the most dangerous thing that is going to happen soon all over the world will be not physical violence, but, rather, psychological violence. You need not murder a man; you simply destroy a particular memory in him. He is brainwashed, now he will have to learn from ABC, so he cannot fight with you. If you want to convert him into a communist or an anticommunist, first destroy the memory; then he becomes like a child, helpless. Then start the training again. Now a new memory will be created, a new learning, a new conditioning.The atom bomb is not as great a danger as these secrets because the very soul of man can be enslaved through them. If Jesus is born now in Soviet Russia or communist China, they will not crucify him; first they will try to destroy his memory. They cannot be successful with Jesus, but they can be successful with you. They cannot succeed with Jesus because he is already unidentified with the memory. If you destroy the memory nothing is really lost because he lives in his consciousness, not in his memories. But you don’t really have any consciousness separate from the memories, so if your memory is destroyed your consciousness is destroyed. You don’t know how to function without the memories.So for the new generation, the coming world, meditation is a must because only that can protect you from political dictatorship – nothing else. They will not put you in jail or send you to Siberia – no, those things are just out of date now. They will simply put an electrical instrument around your head. They will give particular electric shocks to the brain, and you will become just like a child. They will wash away the memories, just as you can erase on a tape recorder. There, just electrical stimulation is used, and whatsoever is recorded is erased; then you can record again. The same is possible with the brain because the brain is a mechanism.And when I say die to the past, I mean don’t get so attached to the brain that you don’t know that you can exist without the brain. Knowing this, realizing, “Without the brain I can exist; I am consciousness and not the memories; memories are just my instruments,” you will become free from your own mind. And once you are free from your mind, no one can make a slave of you. Otherwise, everyone is trying to manipulate you to make you a slave.Religions, so-called religions have done that. They go on manipulating your mind. When you were just a child they started teaching you that you are a Hindu or a Christian or a Catholic or a Protestant. They went on teaching you from the very childhood when you didn’t know anything; when you were not alert; when you were not aware; when you couldn’t recognize what is true and what is false. When you could not think, they started to teach you, to condition you. They made a Christian out of you or a Hindu or a Jaina or a Mohammedan. These are slaveries.Now there is no need to get hold of children; even an old man can be made a child again by just washing his mind. Then he will have to learn from ABC. And when you learn from ABC you cannot argue, when you have to learn from ABC you cannot disbelieve. That is why every religion wants to get hold of children and every religion tries to force some type of religious education because only in childhood…Really, if you cannot get hold of a child before seven years of age, you will never get hold of him. Only before seven years of age can you make a slave of him. Then he will never know that he is a slave because slavery goes deeper than his awareness. You cannot think that being a Christian you are a slave or being a Hindu you are a slave – or can you?Society has played a trick upon you. When you were not fully alert they conditioned your mind. Now when you think, the conditioning has gone deeper than thinking. Whatsoever you think, that conditioning colors it. Even if you become anti-Christian and you were taught to be a Christian, your anti-Christianity will carry your Christianity with it. Even your anti-Christianity will be colored by the conditioning that was given to you. You will be obsessed with the same thing in the reverse order.Friedrich Nietzsche was against Christianity, particularly against Christ. But he was brought up as a Christian. His whole life he struggled; his whole life he went on writing against Christ. But he was so much obsessed with Christ that as he was going mad, in the last stage of his life before he became mad, he started signing his name “Anti-Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche.” That conditioning had gone so deep. You can become anti, but you cannot be indifferent.Die to the past. Be alive to the present, to the moment you are in – it will not destroy your mind. Really, it will give a rest to your restless mind. Your efficiency will grow, and there will be no effort. You will not need to remember. You will simply remember because it is the functioning of the mind; you need not make any effort.I have been traveling all over this country for fifteen years, and I have known thousands and thousands of people. Even after ten years when I return to the same town, I remember the faces, I remember the names. Even I was surprised: What is the reason? – and I had not made any effort. But I am interested in people, that is all. If you are really interested in something you will remember it; there is no need to make any effort.Remembering is a mechanical functioning of the memory. If you are really interested in a person you will remember the face even after many lives. I remember many faces after many lives. You cannot forget them because there is no question of forgetting. The mechanical part of your brain just goes on recording everything. The only thing that is needed is your interest.When you are interested, your mechanism is focused on the person; it records just like the lens of a camera. If you are interested in a face the camera moves, it records. If I am interested in what you are saying my mind is focused; it records, it goes on recording. There is no need to make any effort. If you are not interested, then it will not record because then it is not focused.So if you forget things it is because you are not interested. If you forget things it is because your mind is confused. If you forget things and cannot remember and are not efficient, it means that while you are seeing a face many memories inside go on moving. Your mirror is not vacant; your lens is already overcrowded.Someone is saying, “My name is Ram,” and you nod your head, yes, as if you have heard it. But your mind is filled with so many things you have not heard. And then you say, “Why have I forgotten the name?” Really, you never heard the name. You were not interested in the person – not so interested that your mind became silent.Whenever you are interested the mind is silent – your whole being is open. The memories go on being recorded and, whenever you need something, it will come up. But it is not so easy with you. Whenever you need something everything gets entangled because your mind is so full. Nothing is clear-cut; everything penetrates, trespasses, every other thing. Nothing is clear. The clarity is not there; only confusion is there. Because of that confusion you are not efficient. You will be more efficient – and without any effort – if you become alert to the moment and don’t allow the past to go on overburdening you.The second question:Osho,I feel and realize the futility of desiring. There seems to be no ambition in me. But yet there is a thirst, a yearning, and an inner sense of unfulfillment. Please explain whether this too is a part of desiring.Yes, this too is a part of desiring – the negative part. Everything has two parts, the positive and the negative. The positive part of desiring is to desire something, to be ambitious. To be aware of the object of desire is a positive desire. The negative desire is: one is not aware of the object of desire, but one is aware only of the thirst of desire – the yearning.These are the two parts. The subjective feeling of unfulfillment is the negative part of ambition and being obsessed with an object of desire is the positive part of ambition. Both are ambition. And if you intellectually understand that desire is futile, the negative part will remain with you – if you intellectually understand that desire is futile and this is not an existential experience.You have been hearing, you have been listening and you have been reading. And buddhas and christs have been talking to the world and they have been saying you are in misery because of desire, that you are in suffering because of desire – and they say they are in bliss because of desirelessness. And you have seen them: you have seen their eyes, you have seen their faces, you have seen the grace, the bliss, the ecstasy that just moves around them. Even in their shadow the ecstasy, the dance is there. You have seen them and you have heard them and they say if you desire you will be in suffering, if you don’t desire you will be in ecstasy and bliss.Now intellectually you can understand this, that desire creates tension, desire creates the future, desire creates expectations, and when desire is not fulfilled you are in misery. Or even when it is fulfilled you are not in bliss. When it is fulfilled you feel that this is nothing – this is nothing compared to the dream, compared to the hope. You fall in love with a person, a girl or a boy, you fall in love with a house, you fall in love with a car, and you think, “If this woman is achieved I will be in absolute bliss.” But this is your dream; no woman can fulfill it.This is just fantasy; no real woman can fulfill it. Every real woman will be just a faint thing compared to it. But there is no fault on the woman’s part. This is your mind which goes on fantasizing. You create a fantasy, a romance, and you move high in the heavens. Then you meet the woman. If you cannot achieve your desire, if you cannot get possession of her, you will be in misery, because you had a dream and the dream remained unfulfilled. You will feel a constant pain in the heart.But I tell you, if you meet her, if you can get her, you will be in a deeper misery, because at least the dream remains intact if you have not met her – you can go on dreaming. But if you meet her you will see that no woman lives in heaven. As you live on earth, she lives on earth. She is as earthly as you – even more. Woman is more earthly than man. She will shatter all your dreams. And when you awake from your dreaming, you will be in misery. Whether your dream is fulfilled or not, misery will be the result. Out of dreaming only misery results.This you can understand. Your experience can also be helpful. Intellectually you can understand, and then you can come to conclude that it is futile to desire – to be ambitious is futile; it leads to misery and hell. But this will stop only positive desiring; the negative will remain. Really, you are still desiring – you are now desiring the state of non-desire. You are still desiring – now desirelessness. Desirelessness has become the object of desire. You will feel a yearning, a search, a thirst and an unfulfillment.What is to be done now? What can be done? Intellectually nothing will happen to you, you will go on changing the object of desire and the negative part will go on pushing you into new desires. Live it. Don’t believe in Buddha, don’t believe in Jesus, don’t believe in me. Live it. Desire and live, and experience desire in its totality. And don’t hurry, don’t make any haste to conclude. Your misery is because you make such hurried conclusions.You are so susceptible to believing anything because you don’t want to go through experience. Experience may be painful – let it be. But only experience can help you. Premature conclusions, premature beliefs, will be of no help. You are simply wasting opportunities. Desire and desire intensely, I tell you: desire intensely and suffer!Buddha comes to his conclusions not because of previous buddhas. The Upanishads were in existence; he could have read them. He was well educated, well cultured, he knew all the scriptures, but they didn’t help him. He moved through desire, he moved through experience; he suffered, he went through the fire. And only through his own experience did he come to conclude that desire is futile.Your conclusion is not your conclusion; that is the problem. Your conclusion is borrowed. You are really afraid to go through suffering, so before going through suffering you start believing. But suffering is a discipline. The only real discipline is suffering. Nothing real can be achieved without it.And you are acting like small children: in their books, the answers are given in the back. Small children will just look at the answers. They get the answers, but they don’t know the process. The problem is given and the answer is given in the last chapter. They look at the answer and they know the answer, but this is not their answer. They know the problem and they know the answer, but they don’t know the process – how the answer is achieved.You have been looking at the answer without going through the process. Answers are there. Buddhas have existed; they have said everything that can be said and you can memorize the answers, but without the process you will not be transformed. So forget the answers; that is what the Upanishads say. Knowledge is the barrier: forget knowledge. If you are ignorant, then you are ignorant. Start from your ignorance; don’t start from anybody else’s knowledge.It is better to start with your ignorance because then that can lead you toward knowledge. But you always start with somebody else’s knowledge. Then you move in a false world, then you go on accumulating conclusions – you know everything without knowing anything. You are in such a hurry. You say, “I don’t want to go through the process; I want the answer.”The answer can be given to you – but unless you move through the process, the answer will not be a lived answer. Unless lived, it is futile. You know desire is futile, you know anger is poison, you know greed leads to misery – you know everything. But that knowledge is of no use. Throw it. It is rubbish.Just be aware of your state of mind: the yearning is there, the thirst is there, the unfulfillment is there. That means you are ready to desire. Now desire, and don’t listen to the buddhas: they are dangerous. Desire! Move! You will have to move your own way; you will have to suffer your own way. Nobody can escape suffering. The law is universal. Nobody can come to shortcuts; there are none. You will have to move your own way, you will have to pass through your own hells.When you have passed through them, transcended them, have become richer, experienced them and a maturity has happened to you – only then will desire fall. Desire will disappear and then there will be no negative part to it. Then the total desire will disappear because you will come to realize that this is nonsense. “I have been creating my own hell.” And this is not intellectual, this is not in the mind. Your total being, your whole being, will come to conclude and this conclusion will be through your experience, not through anybody else’s.Then desire disappears without giving birth to another desire in a different guise. Otherwise you will go on changing the object. Sometimes you desire wealth and then you feel misery. Then you conclude desire is misery, so you start desiring godliness or you start desiring heaven or you start desiring liberation or you start desiring meditation, ecstasy – but you go on desiring. And if you go on desiring, you are simply changing the shape of the desire, the object of the desire. But the desire remains the same: you are not changing, you remain the same. You are moving in a pattern, in a circle. You are not moving anywhere.Hence, I go on saying again and again, be aware – beware of buddhas, christs, krishnas. Beware of me, because I go on saying things to you which you can believe and then it is dangerous. When I say something try to understand it; don’t conclude through it. Conclusion must come through your own life; only then will it be a mutation. And don’t be in a hurry. There is no hurry; time is eternal.Experience! Be authentic to your experience and allow the conclusions to come only through your own individual particular search. The truth will happen to you, but it will not happen to you if you go on borrowing it from others. That becomes a substitute truth. It creates more problems than it solves.Your problems, as I see them, are ninety percent because of your borrowed knowledge. Only ten percent of problems are true. Ninety percent are false because they don’t belong to you at all. First you start believing in a thing and then problems arise out of that belief and this is a problem. This is a borrowed problem because you have believed, you have concluded intellectually, rationally, that desire is futile. If this is really your conclusion, then how can unfulfillment exist there? – unfulfillment is the seed of desire.When you are unfulfilled it means desire: you want to seek fulfillment somewhere – desire is there. When you are unfulfilled it means you are not that which you would like to be, you are not there where you would like to be. Then desire, find, seek, move! Unfulfillment means discontent with yourself. Fulfillment means: I am what I am; I am where I should be. Or whatever I am, I am absolutely content with me – fulfilled. Then there is no movement of desire.Movement is there, but that movement is of life, not of desire. I will go on moving; each movement will happen through my life energy, not through desire. Desire is through mind. Life goes on moving and I will move like a river. The very energy of life will create movement, but the movement will not be according to desire. I will not desire first and then move. Try to understand this distinction.I am speaking to you. This speaking can be of two types: it can be a sheer movement of life energy, or it can be part of a desire, a plan. If I desire it, then I will have to rehearse it. Then before coming to you, in my mind I will desire you to be present. Then in my mind I will think what to say, what not to say, how to say, how not to say. Then I will plan – then I have moved into the future. Then I will repeat it. Then if it is not up to the standard I had planned I will feel frustrated.I have heard…Once Mark Twain was coming back from a lecture hall where he had spoken. When he came back, his wife asked him, “How was the lecture?”Mark Twain said, “What lecture are you asking about – the one I rehearsed before, or the one that I actually delivered, or the one that I wanted to deliver and was delivering in the car while coming back?”If I think about it beforehand it is desire. If I simply come to you and it is a response, not planned, not thought about – it is a sheer movement of life energy, there has been no planning for it – then it is life moving. If there has been planning, then it is mind, desiring.Movement will be there, but it will be unplanned, spontaneous. Desire cripples movement. It doesn’t allow life energy itself to move. It plans, it chooses, it decides beforehand. You have decided before the actual situation. You will always be in difficulty because it is never going to be exactly the right response – because you cannot conceive of the situation beforehand. It always remains unknown. You will feel frustrated.A mind which desires will always feel frustrated. A mind which doesn’t desire, which simply moves wheresoever the brahman, life, leads – whether right or wrong, whether to hell or heaven… Wheresoever the life energy leads, the one who is desireless moves within. Nothing can frustrate such a being. How? How can you frustrate him? And nothing can make you fulfilled. How can anyone make you fulfilled? With desire there is no meeting with fulfillment. With nondesire there is no meeting with frustration.Be true and authentic to yourself, and if you have not overcome desire don’t believe that you have overcome it; that is not going to help. Know that you have not overcome. Know that ambition is there; know that as you are, you are unfulfilled. You need something else. That need for something else – whether vague or not, whether you know it or not – makes no difference. You are not at this moment whole and total, at ease with yourself. You are not at home. Your home is somewhere else; you are searching for it.Know it because this knowing will be good and helpful. Know it and move into desire. Suffer it! Feel the pain of it, the frustration of it, and allow life itself to come to a conclusion. Please don’t conclude; allow life itself to come to its conclusion. And when life comes to its conclusion, desire falls without any substitute desire being created there. It simply falls. Just like dead leaves fall from a tree, desire falls from you – desire in total. Then there is no negative part hidden behind it. And when you are in that state of nondesiring, all that is blissful happens to you, all that is ecstatic happens to you. You flower for the first time, you bloom for the first time. And when there is no unfulfillment, you are fulfilled as you are.But before that happens, if you go on borrowing it will be difficult: you are creating unnecessary barriers for yourself. The conclusions may appeal to you, but that appeal is of no meaning. I can convince you about something, but that conviction carries no meaning because it has been forced by me. I can argue, I can convince, and you may feel that it is right. But that feeling will not help unless your life energy concludes it, unless it is an inner conviction that arises within you – not forced from without.That is why I say buddhas are dangerous – because they are so convincing. When you move around them there is every possibility you will become a victim, every possibility you will get convinced. Their very being is convincing. That is why so many religions are created, so many sects are there – because whenever a buddha happens, an enlightened one, necessarily you get convinced, you get hypnotized – and you borrow conclusions. And then for lives together you go on with those borrowed conclusions; they become a burden.Die to that burden. Be authentic to yourself and try to find out where you are. Even if it is hell, accept, “I am in hell.” The very acceptance that you are in hell will create the situation where you can move out of it. But you live in hell and you go on believing that you are in heaven. This is sheer nonsense and nothing can come out of it.The last question:Osho,Last night you said that sometimes you lie and offer condolences for our frustrations. Then when are we to believe you and how are we to know if you are talking to us in truth or in trick?Never believe me; don’t believe me at all. Be alert. Whatsoever I say may be all lies; it may all be just tricks to give you consolation – just to help you to take a step ahead. Don’t believe me! And it is difficult for you to decide when I am speaking truth and when I am speaking a lie. That is why I say wholesale: Don’t believe me – because how can you decide? You don’t know what truth is; hence, how can you decide?If you know the truth already, then there is no reason for me, no use in telling you any lies. But because you don’t know and you cannot understand the language of truth, it will be absurd for you. You can understand only the language of lies.But lies are of two types: lies which can lead you to further lies, and lies which can lead you beyond them. For example, we are sitting here. If you have not known the outside ever, you don’t know flowers are there, trees are there, and the moon is in the sky. And if I tell you, “Come out. The moon has risen and it is a full-moon night, so come out” – you will not believe me. You will say, “What is night? What is the moon? What is the full moon?”And there is nothing in this room by which I can show you that it is like this. I have known the moon, and I have known the flowers and the open sky, and I want to share my bliss with you. I want you to also come out, so I create a device, I use a lie: I say the house is on fire; you can understand that. You become afraid, you start trembling. And I create such a conviction in you that the house is on fire, that you start escaping from the room.Of course, outside you will understand me. You will not say, “You lied.” You will be grateful; you will laugh. You will say, “There is no fire, but now we can understand.” Only fire could have brought you out – nothing else – because that language you can understand. Suffering you can understand, bliss you cannot understand.Hence, buddhas go on saying life is misery. It is not! They go on saying it is dukkha – misery, suffering, anguish. They are saying that the house of life is on fire: escape from it. And they convince you because they have that freshness which comes to persons who have come out of the house. They have that perfume that comes to persons who have come out into the open sky; they bring that flavor. You get convinced because you see that they must be true and that they have attained something. That attainment creates conviction, and when they say the house – the life – is on fire, you try to escape out of this house.When you get out, you know it is a full-moon night – life was not a suffering. Life appeared to be a suffering because you became imprisoned in a cage.Life is vast, so you cannot know when I am lying or when I am saying the truth. And if you ask me to tell you when I am lying or when I am saying the truth, then the whole point will be lost. And even if I say that this is a lie and this is a truth, how can you believe me, whether I am still lying or not?So it will be easier for you, if you can believe me, to believe totally. Or if you cannot believe me, then don’t believe me at all. This will be easy: either think that whatsoever I am saying is true or whatsoever I am saying is a lie. These are the two possibilities. Both ways you will be helped. I say that both ways you will be helped. You will not be in confusion.If you believe me totally: “Whatsoever this man says is true,” it will help you. Not that whatsoever I say will be true, but ultimately you will find that it was the only thing that could have been helpful to you. But this you will come to know only afterward.If you don’t believe me at all, that will also be good. That too is not easy. The easier course would be to believe some things and not to believe some things. But if you believe me totally, or not at all, in either case you will become total. In one case you are surrendered to me and you say, “Whether you lie or not, that is your business: I believe.” You become total; you are not divided. Or if you say, “Whether you say a truth or a lie, I don’t believe you – you are a liar,” then too you are total, and totality helps.The easier course is to believe in some things and not to believe in some things. Why is it easier? It is easier because with whatsoever you want to believe you will think, “He is true,” and with whatsoever you don’t want to believe you will think, “He is lying.” That will not be of much help – of no help really. So don’t choose. My advice is, don’t believe at all – but if you think that the other will be good then believe totally.Now get ready for the meditation.

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The Supreme Doctrine 01-11Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Supreme Doctrine 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The story goes that brahman obtained a victory for the devas. Though the victory was due to brahman, the devas became elated by it and thought: “This victory is due only to us; this glory belongs only to us.”Brahman came to know this, their vanity. He verily appeared before them, but they did not understand who that Yaksha – demi-god – was.They addressed Agni: “Oh Jataveda, please find out who this Yaksha is.” “Yes,” said Agni.Agni hastened to the Yaksha. The Yaksha asked him who he was. Agni replied: “I am verily Agni; I am also known as Jataveda” – near-omniscient.“What energy do you possess, you of such fame?” asked the Yaksha. “I can burn everything – whatever there is on this earth,” replied Agni.The Yaksha placed a straw before him and said: “Burn this.” Agni approached it with all speed; he was, however, unable to burn it. So he withdrew from there and returned to the gods saying, “I could not ascertain who this Yaksha was.”Then they addressed Vayu: “Oh Vayu, please ascertain this, who this Yaksha is.” “Yes,” said Vayu.Vayu hastened to the Yaksha. The Yaksha asked him who he was. Vayu replied, “I am verily Vayu. I am also known as Matarisva” – carrier of the atmosphere.“What energy do you possess, you of such fame?” asked the Yaksha. “I can verily blow away everything – whatever there is on this earth,” replied Vayu.The Yaksha placed a straw before him and said, “Blow this away.” Vayu approached it with all speed; he was, however, unable to blow it away. So he withdrew from there and returned to the gods saying: “I could not ascertain who this Yaksha was.”Then the gods addressed Indra: “Oh Maghavan – rejoicing one – please ascertain who this Yaksha is.” “Yes,” said Indra, and hastened to the Yaksha. But the Yaksha disappeared from his view.And in that very spot he beheld a woman, the wondrously effulgent Uma, the daughter of the snow-clad mountain, Himavat. And of her he asked: “Who could this Yaksha be?”In deep silence there is no ego. It exists only when you are disturbed. It is part of disease. When you are deeply silent, you are, but there is no feeling of the “I.” It cannot exist in silence. When you are totally calm and quiet, the “I” is not there. But when you are disturbed, the more disturbed you are, the more you will have the feeling of the ego.The ego is a disturbed, diseased state of the mind. The ego is not healthy. It is an illness. You become aware of it only when you are not in total harmony. When you are in harmony, you are, but there is no I, no feeling of I. “Am-ness” is there, being is there, but without a center.This is one of the most significant phenomena to be understood. For instance, you become aware of your body only when it is ill. If you are really healthy you don’t have a body at all; a healthy body is bodiless, there is no feeling that it exists. Your head exists only when there is a headache: if the headache is not there, the head is not there. Can you feel your head? If you can feel it, it means there is some heaviness. Something is disturbed, something is ill. You become aware of your stomach when it is disturbed.This is the definition of health: that if the body is not felt you are healthy, if the body is felt you are unhealthy – because only pain is felt. Whenever there is some pain, you feel it. Pain is needed to feel the body and pain is needed to feel yourself. And that pain creates the I, that suffering, anguish, anxiety, creates the I.So if you are egoistic, remember, that shows that your inner harmony is lost. You cannot do anything about the ego directly – unless you regain the inner harmony. If you start doing something about the ego directly, nothing will happen. On the contrary, you may get more disturbed. All the religions say, be egoless. They mean, be harmonious. Their insistence to dissolve the ego is an insistence to dissolve the disturbance – become a rhythm, become an inner silence. They insist for health.The Sanskrit word for health is very beautiful: the word is swastha – it means to be in one’s self. When you are in your self, there is no ego. The English word health is also beautiful from a different viewpoint. It comes from the same root as the word whole comes from – wholeness. When you are whole, you are healthy; when you are fragmented, divided, split, you are unhealthy. When you have a feeling of wholeness – no division, undivided, one – you are healthy. The word holy also comes from whole. When you are really whole, you are holy, you are pure, innocent.The ego exists when you are fragmented, divided, split – when you are not one. When your parts are in conflict and there is a disharmony within, turmoil, anguish, the ego exists. The greater the anxiety, the greater will be the ego. If you try to fulfill your ego you will get more and more disturbed – and the last state of ego is madness. If you really try to fulfill the ego you will become mad.In the East, madness is not such a problem as it is in the West because the whole Western mind depends on the ambition to fulfill the ego. American psychologists say that now three persons out of four are mentally ill. This is too much – unbelievable. And if it is true, then the fourth is just on the boundary line, because the fourth is a part; he lives among these three. He cannot be really healthy – just so-so, just on the boundary line. Any moment he can fall into madness.Many modern psychiatrists are of the opinion that the whole of humanity is mad and the difference is only of degrees. If you are not mad, that only means you are simply normally mad – not abnormally mad. You are just within the limits – mad within limits. You can function, that’s all, but any moment you can cross the boundary. Any happening, any accident – your wife dies, your money is lost, your bank becomes bankrupt, your house is on fire – and you can cross the boundary in a single moment. There is not much distance to travel and you can go mad. You were already mad, but just waiting for the boiling-point. It can come any moment.Why is this happening so much in the West? Why is everyone going for psychoanalysis? Really, those who cannot go for psychoanalysis are thought to be poor now. Those who are rich, those who can afford it, go for it of necessity. It is a very costly affair. It is a luxury because psychoanalysis takes years – two years, three years, even five years, and it is a very costly treatment. Only the very rich can afford it. But the profession is growing, and now psychiatrists are very rich. They are getting richer every day.The human mind gets more and more disturbed if you try to fulfill the ego because for a greater ego to exist you need greater disturbance, greater illness, disease, greater fragmentation, division. When your fragments of being are in deep conflict they create the tension. In that tension ego can exist. Fight is needed for the ego – a battleground: your being must become a battleground.This can happen in two ways: either you can fight with others or you can fight with yourself. You can fight with others in a competitive world. You are ambitious, others are also ambitious. You want to be fulfilled as an ego, others are also on the same route. Then you fight with them. This is the worldly way to achieve the ego – the political way or the economic way.But there are religious ways also. You stop fighting with others; you divide yourself and you start fighting with yourself. You fight with sex, you fight with anger, you fight with the body, you fight with the world – this world of “sin” – you divide yourself. You divide yourself into body–mind, body–soul. Not only that: you also divide your body into the lower body and the higher body. Through these divisions you can fight with yourself.So remember, there are worldly egos and there are spiritual egos. A man who achieves riches, achieves prestige, becomes powerful, has ego. But don’t think that a person who is struggling spiritually doesn’t have one. He may have a subtler ego – a deeper, a more refined ego, but he has one. Your so-called saints are all egoistic. They achieve their egos through austerities – through tapa, through arduous effort. They have their own victories over themselves. They have no enemies outside, but they have created the enemy within. And then they fight with it, and when they win over it, they have a very egoistic feeling. They feel power.The second thing to be understood: whenever you feel powerful, remember you have attained a crystallization of the ego. And whenever you are powerful, you cannot meet the divine, you cannot meet the truth, because power exists in conflict, power exists in fight. Power is created through war, through violence, through aggression. Power is against love, power is against silence, and power is against the total.You cannot meet the brahman, the absolute, if you feel yourself to be powerful. You can only meet the total when you feel yourself to be totally powerless, helpless, no one, nobody. If you are feeling powerful in any way, you are creating a barrier. When you are powerful you are blind to the total. And you will be so much disturbed through your power, so much in inner turmoil, that you cannot have that silence which can become a meeting, a communion with the total. Hence, the emphasis of all religions on dissolving the ego: only then can you enter the divine.Jesus says: “Only those who are like children will enter my kingdom of God.” Why “like children”? Children are helpless; they are not powerful. Children are still part of the cosmic whole. They have not yet become egos. They don’t yet have a crystallized center of the ego; they are still undivided. That is why children are so beautiful. It is difficult to find an ugly child and it is difficult to find a beautiful old man.Why? Every child is born so beautiful. Why does every old man go on becoming ugly? Something goes wrong somewhere. Every child is beautiful. The beauty comes from wholeness. The child is whole, undivided. He has no fragments, no division. He is not schizophrenic, he is not fighting anything. He is simply living, breathing, with no fight. The world is not yet a struggle. And he is not fighting with himself either – he is not yet religious. He is simply a natural being just like animals, birds, trees, rocks. He is part of the cosmic whole.He will come out of it. We will bring him out of it; we cannot leave him like that. And even if we leave him he will come out of it, because he has the potentiality to be divided, he has the potentiality to become an ego. And it is part of the ultimate education that he must become an ego, because unless you have an ego you cannot lose it.The child is pre-ego. His innocence is natural, but a natural innocence can be disturbed any moment. When he becomes knowing, he will become cunning. When he becomes more alert about his individuality, he will become egoistic.This is the meaning of the biblical story, that Adam and Eve were innocent in the Garden of Eden and God prohibited them from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Why was the fruit of the tree of knowledge prohibited? – because the moment you know, you are separated. Knowledge separates.The child is innocent because he is ignorant. He doesn’t know where he ends and where you begin. Child psychologists say that in the beginning the child cannot even feel where he ends and where his mother begins. He feels everything as one. For nine months in the womb he exists as one with his mother. He breathes through his mother, he lives through his mother. Even after being born, when he has come out of the womb, deep in his mind he goes on existing as one with his mother. He has no ego and he cannot feel that he is separate yet. By and by he will know that he is separate, by and by he will become aware of you.Remember, the consciousness of the “you” comes first, and then he becomes aware of “I.” When he starts feeling “you” as separate, then reflectively he becomes aware that he is separate, he is not you. The mother goes away and he is still there. Now he becomes aware of the distance and now he starts feeling the I. But that I is not very solid. In the beginning children always address themselves in the third person. If the child’s name is Ram, he will say, “Ram is feeling thirsty.” He will speak in the third person; he will not say, “I am feeling thirsty.” The I is not yet solid, it is not yet assertive. He still feels that “Ram” is feeling thirsty – as if Ram is a “you,” not an “I.”Children always speak in the third person. They say, “Ram is feeling sleepy. Do that – Ram will feel good. Don’t do that – Ram will feel bad.” They address themselves as if they are addressing someone else. The I is not yet solid. It will become more and more solid the more they come to an awareness of others. The others exist first and then you start existing. It is a reflection. “I” is an inverted “you.”Adam and Eve were prohibited from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but they had to eat it. It is part of maturing. They were innocent: the moment they ate the fruit they became alert and aware. Suddenly they started hiding their bodies. Now Eve was aware of Adam, Adam was aware of Eve. Clothes came into existence through the ego. They became aware of themselves as separate. Before that they were just part of each other; they never knew that they were separate. They became separated. And this happens to every Adam and Eve. It didn’t happen only once: whenever a child is born, he comes out of the Garden of Eden.In the mother’s womb a child is in the Garden of Eden, one with existence, with no responsibilities, with no worries, with no ego. He exists, but without any center. Then he is born. Really, the story, this biblical story of Adam and Eve, is the story of every child’s birth. He is thrown out of the mother. Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden and every child has to be thrown out. Then the ego grows; it goes on growing. And with it the pain goes on growing.Hence, every old man goes on thinking in terms of childhood as paradise. It was! In this sense it was a paradise because you were not yet an ego. You had not tasted the fruit of knowledge; you had not come to know yourself as separate. With separation problems arise: you become anxious. With separation, death arises.It is said in the biblical story that death didn’t exist before. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, death came into existence. Before that they were immortal. Every child is immortal. He is not aware of death because death can become meaningful only to the I, to the ego. When you have a conception that you are separate, immediately the problem arises whether you are going to be here forever or whether you will die. The trees are immortal. Not that they don’t die – they die, but they have no awareness of death. The animals are immortal. Not that death is not going to be there – death will be there, but they are not aware of it. They have no egos, so how can they feel, “I am going to die”? I must be there before I can feel that I will die. Death is part of the ego.So now, let me tell you: death arises out of disease, illness. And death is the last thing, the climax – where ego ends. Ego creates death around you, and the fear. And this is the paradox: the more fearful you feel about death, the more you try to be powerful, because you think that if you are powerful, then you can do something about death. At least you can postpone it; you can push it away a little.But the more powerful you grow, the more death becomes significant. The more powerful you grow, the more you become afraid of death, because with the power grows the ego. If you are rich, politically powerful, you will be more afraid of death. If you are poor, with no power, you will not be so afraid of death.Western people, when they come to the East, simply cannot understand why people in the East are so indifferent to death. They are so powerless. They don’t have very fixed and solid egos so they cannot be so much afraid. You become more afraid. You become afraid in proportion to what death is going to take away from you. If you don’t have anything, what can death take away from you? A poor man is not so afraid of death. Really, death cannot take anything away from him. He may attain something through death, but he cannot lose.The richer you grow, the more afraid you are because all your riches will be taken away, and whatsoever is achieved will be taken away. The more power you have, the more you feel powerless before death because it will make you impotent again. All the glory and all the power will go and you will die like any beggar.Death is absolutely communistic: it equalizes all. The lowest, naturally, cannot be much afraid. The highest will be afraid because he will be pulled down. Death will take your presidentship, your prime-ministership. All death will take from the beggar is his beggary. The president and the beggar will become equal in death. Of course, the president will be more afraid. He has a deeper fear than a beggar can have.The West has become very much afraid of death. It has become an obsession – bound to be because now the West is more powerful; they have something to lose. And when Westerners see the indifference in the East, they cannot understand why people are so indifferent to death. This is the reason: they don’t have much to lose. They are existing on the lowest rung, so death cannot be a fall to them. They are already fallen; they are already existing in their graves.What I intend to say is: power gives you ego, ego creates a lust for more power and this becomes a vicious circle. And when you are powerful you become afraid of death. When you become afraid of death you cannot enter the divine, because the divine is a sort of death. Really, to enter the divine, to enter the whole, means to lose yourself as an individual – to become a child again.But this childhood, this second childhood, is qualitatively different from the first. The first childhood was animal-like; the second childhood is godlike. The first childhood was bound to be disturbed; the second childhood cannot be disturbed. By “second childhood,” I mean a state where you have consciously – through understanding, through meditation, through surrender – lost yourself again into the total. The circle is complete; you have become a child again. Hindus have called such a person in second childhood dwij – twice-born. This is a new birth. The old is dead. The man is again a child.A saint, if he is really a saint, must become a child again. And Jesus says that only children can enter into godliness – can enter into the kingdom of God. Unless you become like Adam and Eve again, unless you throw the fruit of knowledge that you have eaten out of your system, you cannot enter the garden. If you can understand this, then this parable will be easy for you to follow.This is a parable – one of the most loved. This parable is easy, but the implications are very complex. First I will read the parable, and then we will discuss it.The story goes that brahman obtained a victory for the devas. Though the victory was due to the brahman, the devas became elated by it and thought: “This victory is due to us only; this glory belongs to us only.”It always happens so. Whatsoever you attain is attained by your inner spirit, not by your ego. But the ego always exploits the victory. It says, “I have done this.” And, really, nothing is ever done by the ego. The ego is the exploiter – exploiter par excellence. Even things like birth are exploited by the ego. You say, “This is my birthday” – as if you have done something about your birth. “My birthday! I was born on this day,” as if “I” did something. The birth happened. It is a happening, not a doing. But your ego exploits even that.You say, “I breathe.” It is absolutely wrong. Breathing happens; you are not breathing. Breathing goes on without you. You can interfere, but you cannot breathe. Breathing is a natural thing. The brahman breathes through you. If it was so, as we say, that “I breathe,” then death would become impossible – because if you can go on breathing, what can death do?But you cannot go on breathing. If the breath goes out and doesn’t come back, what can you do? You cannot do anything, because really, if the breath goes out and doesn’t come in, you are no longer there to do anything. You don’t exist; you are out of existence. Breathing is not something which you are doing. It is something which is happening to you: a greater force – life, you may call it. The Upanishads call it brahman, the élan vital of Bergson – call it whatsoever you like to call it.Life breathes through you, but the ego goes on exploiting everything and goes on saying, “I am breathing.” You fall in love and you say, “I love.” Really, it is never anything on the part of you. Or can “you” love? If I say, “Love this woman,” you will say, “How can I love if I have not already fallen in love?” What will you do? You can imitate love, you can act, but you will not be involved in it unless the life force has thrown you into it. Unless it happens to the life force that you are in love, you cannot love.The whole of life is really a happening. Birth, death, love, all that is significant, is a happening. And if you move deeper, then even trivial things are happenings. You say, “I have built this house,” but even birds are making their nests. Really, it is something that the life force is doing, not you. Don’t think yourself very intelligent, very powerful, very clever, because you have built this house. Even birds are making such beautiful nests – without any training, without any knowledge, without going to any college. It is instinctive. Life makes its abode.You go on accumulating riches and you think you are doing it. No. The life force goes on accumulating. Even animals accumulate. Even they try to possess; even they make arrangements for the rainy season.If you look deep, then you will find a subtle phenomenon happening within you. Everything is done by the life force, and everything done by the life force is exploited by the ego. And ego says, “I am doing this,” and then feels very elated.This is the parable: The story goes that brahman obtained a certain victory for the devas… For the deities. In Indian mythology all the forces of nature are deities. Fire is a deity – a natural force; air is a deity – a natural force. Every natural force is conceived as a devata – as a deity. …the brahman obtained a certain victory for the devas… For the deities.Though the victory was due to brahman, the devas became elated by it and thought: “This victory is due to us only, this glory belongs to us only.” And this is a constant parable – the story that is happening to you.The air, the fire, all the natural forces, are also working because of the deeper original source of the brahman. Otherwise they cannot work. Nothing can exist and nothing can be active unless the élan vital, the brahman, is active in it – the substratum, the original force.But you are not aware of it. On the surface you go on doing things and you go on thinking that you are doing it: “I am the cause of it, I am the source of it.” You are not the source of it. It is just like the Ganges flows to the sea. The Ganges must be thinking that she is flowing to the sea. Is she really flowing, or is she just part of a greater circle? She will flow to the sea, and then through sun rays the water will rise again and the water will become clouds. And the air will take those clouds to the Himalayas and they will rain there on the Gangotri – on the source of the Ganges. And the river will be created and it will move; it will flow, moving. It will fall into the sea because it is natural for water to move downward.It is not the Ganges flowing to the sea. It is just a natural law, part of the divine, that water moves downward. So from the Himalayas, the water will move downward – not that the Ganges is moving; the Ganges cannot have an ego, cannot be allowed to have an ego. It is part of a great circle. Again the water will fall into the sea, and again the clouds will come, and again they will pour water down the Ganges, on the Gangotri, and the river will go on flowing. It is a great circle. Clouds, Gangotri, Ganges, the sea – clouds, Gangotri, Ganges, the sea: it is a great circle. You are also just a part of a great circle. That great circle of energy is called brahman.But the part goes on thinking, “I am doing it.” So the devas became elated and they thought: The “…victory is due to us only, this glory belongs to us only.”And one more point, by the way: whenever you get defeated you never say, “This defeat is due to us only.” Whenever you are dishonored you never say, “This dishonor belongs to me only.” This is strange. If glory belongs to you, then why not dishonor? If victory belongs to you only, then why not defeat? Whenever you are defeated you say, “Circumstances, situation, the way things are, destiny, the gods, are against me.”Whenever you are defeated, why do you throw the responsibility onto something else? – because through defeat ego cannot be fulfilled. Only through victory can it be fulfilled, so defeat has to be thrown onto the brahman. If the gods were defeated, they would certainly have said, “The brahman is against us, destiny is against us, fate is against us. That is why we have been defeated.” But you are victorious, then it is because of you.Look at the trick of the ego. Neither is because of you, or both are because of you. Decide and the ego will die. If you say, “Both are not because of me: a greater force is working and I am just a particle, an atomic thing, just a cell, just helpless. Things are happening to me – I am not a doer, so whether victory comes or defeat, both belong to the ultimate,” your ego will dissolve. Or say, “Both belong to me. Victory and defeat, honor and dishonor, both belong to me.” – then too your ego will disappear, because both are contradictory. They negate each other. Victory will give you a little ego and defeat will take that little ego away, and you will be just without the ego.These are the two ways. Hindus have followed the first. They say victory and death and everything belongs to the divine, to the order of the cosmos. Jainas and Buddhists have followed the second. They say there is no God: “Everything belongs to me – the defeat and the victory, the loss and the gain, the birth and death, everything belongs to me.” Then these two contradictory things negate each other and the ego is dissolved. In both cases the happening is the same. The ego can persist only if you go on giving all the victories to it and go on giving all the defeats to the world or to the destiny or to the brahman. Then the ego can exist. This is how the ego exists.The parable says:Brahman came to know this, their vanity.He came to know about their egos, that now they are feeling very elated and they are saying they are victorious. It is because of them – victory belongs only to them.He verily appeared before them, but they didn’t understand who that Yaksha – adorable spirit – was.The second part of the parable: whenever the original, the cosmic source, feels that you are feeling elated, you are feeling egoistic, it appears before you – but you cannot recognize it. The ego will not allow you to recognize it; it will close your eyes. This force comes to you also, not only to those devas. This is a human story, a very psychological parable. Whenever you feel elated, there are happenings around you which, if you can recognize them, will pull you back down to the earth. But you never recognize them, you cannot. Your eyes are not now in reality. Now you are living in a fiction.So the devas couldn’t recognize who this adorable spirit was. The brahman was standing before them, the ultimate energy was standing before them, but they were closed. They were in their heads, they were in their egos, enclosed, encapsulated. They couldn’t see, they couldn’t understand. Whenever you are in some egoistic mood you cannot see anything: you are blind. Whenever you are victorious you cannot see, you cannot understand. You lose all your senses. Even your common sense is lost. You are really mad in your victory, in your success.They addressed Agni…The deities addressed Agni, and they said, “Please find out who this spirit is, who has appeared in this form.”“…who this Yaksha is.”Agni said, “Yes, I will try to find out.”Agni hastened to the Yaksha.To the spirit who had appeared. The Yaksha is the form the brahman had appeared in.The Yaksha asked him who he was. Agni replied:Agni means fire.Agni replied: “I am verily fire – Agni; I am also known as Jataveda” – near-omniscient.”“What energy do you possess, you of such fame?” asked the spirit.“What energy do you possess, you of such fame?” Fire has been very significant and in the old days, fire came to be the top deity, because man lived in darkness, lived in caves, lived in forests – it was dangerous. There were animals, and in the dark they would attack and the night was very fearful. And then Agni, the fire, helped them to come out of the darkness. Even night became not so dangerous. So Agni came to be the top deity. Fire was worshipped all over the world; fire became the symbol of God.Hence, the deities asked fire to go first and inquire, “Who is this spirit who has appeared before us?” And the spirit asked: “What energy do you possess?” The emphasis is on you. “What energy do you possess, you of such fame?”“I can burn everything – whatever there is on this earth,”replied the fire. The emphasis is on “I can burn everything.”The Yaksha placed a straw before him and said, “Burn this.”The brahman placed a straw before him and said, “Burn this.”Agni approached it with all speed…With full vigor, with totality, with whatsoever he had.…he was, however, unable to burn it.Because it is not Agni that burns: it is the cosmic force through Agni that burns. Without the cosmic force, Agni cannot burn, fire cannot burn. And when the brahman was standing there before him, Agni was impotent because the source was not behind it. Now there was only ego; the source had disappeared. Only the exploiter – that which has never done anything but which goes on thinking, “I can do this and that.”Agni could not burn the straw:So he withdrew from there and returned to the other gods saying, “I could not ascertain who this spirit was.”He didn’t say that he had been a failure, that he couldn’t burn it. He simply said, “I couldn’t ascertain who this spirit was.”This is how the ego functions. Even if the divine is standing before you, you will go on saying: “I couldn’t ascertain who this spirit was.” Even if life reveals to you that your ego is impotent, you will not realize it. Life goes on revealing to you that your ego is impotent – is it not so? Every moment life goes on saying to you, “Don’t claim. You are not the doer.” But you never look at it.Then they addressed Vayu…The air force, the deity of air.“O Vayu, please ascertain this, who this Yaksha is.” “Yes,” said Vayu.Vayu hastened to the Yaksha. The Yaksha asked him who he was. Vayu replied, “I am verily Vayu” – air. “I am also known as Matarisva” – carrier of the atmosphere.“What energy do you possess, you of such fame?” asked the spirit. “I can verily blow away everything – whatever there is on this earth,” replied Vayu.The Yaksha placed a straw before him and said, “Blow this away.” Vayu approached it with all speed; he was, however, unable to blow it away.…with all speed… Your ego can act with all speed, but nothing will happen out of it. Your ego can do something with all speed, all effort, but nothing will happen out of it. Remember this; it will be helpful.People come to me and they go on saying, “I am making such an effort to meditate, but nothing is happening.” Nothing will happen because the “I” is making the effort. You are not allowing the divine to happen within. You are trying to do something.You are impotent. Whatsoever potency you have comes through the original source, from the cosmos, from the brahman. It doesn’t belong to you. You are just a vehicle. So when the I starts trying something, then nothing happens.In Zen monasteries they teach the seekers only one secret, and the secret is: do something without bringing the I into it. If you can do something without bringing the ego into it, everything will happen.Herrigel, one German thinker, was in a Zen monastery in Japan. He was learning archery there, and the master said, “Allow the life force to aim and allow the life force to release the arrow. You don’t do anything.”It was difficult, really impossible – and particularly for a German mind that is basically intellect-oriented. That is why the experience of Germany has proved so fatal: too much intellect, too much ego, too much effort. Finally the ego came to a point where it said to the German people, “Now you can be victorious all over the world.” Hitler was just the expression of all the whole German mind – ego-oriented.Herrigel was unable to understand: “If I don’t release the arrow, how can the arrow be released? If I am not making an effort, then there will be no effort at all.”And this is how we would also feel. For three years he was there with the master. He learned the art completely – as completely as possible. His aim was a hundred percent accurate. The arrow would always reach the target. But the master went on shaking his head. He said, “This is nothing.”A hundred percent results, and the master would say, “This is nothing; you have not learned anything. You are still releasing the arrow. And we are not interested in the target, we are interested in you. We are not interested in the other end, we are interested in you. You are the target. That target is not the target. When the arrow is released without you, when the life force has taken possession of you, only then…” – because archery is not the point: meditation is the point.“Even if you miss,” the master said, “even if you miss the target completely – that is irrelevant. But you should not miss the original source.”Herrigel was desperate. And the more desperate he was, the more effort he made. The more he tried, the more the master would say, “You disappoint me.”Then a day came when Herrigel thought, “This is impossible, this cannot happen. Three years is too long a time, making so much effort every day.” He felt frustrated. He said to the master, “Now allow me to leave. I think this is not for me. It seems impossible to conceive. I have done whatsoever I could but nothing happens.”The master said, “Because you were doing whatsoever you could, you were not allowing the life force to do anything. You are the barrier.”Herrigel decided to leave. The day he was leaving, he came just to say good-bye to the master. The master was training another disciple. Herrigel just sat there. For the first time he was indifferent because now he was leaving, and he had left the whole effort, and there was no point in it. So he sat silently and just saw the master without the eyes of desire, ambition, achievement; just saw the master, and for the first time in three years he realized that the master was not releasing the arrow. It was the life force. The arrow was released by something which was not coming from the ego. It was coming from a deeper energy.He stood as if hypnotized. He came near the master, he took the bow from his hand and he released the arrow, and the master said, “Right! You have done it.” And Herrigel writes, “I now know the difference between when the life force releases it and when you do it.”“What energy do you possess, you of such fame?” asked the Yaksha. Vayu tried to show his energy.Vayu approached it with all speed; he was, however, unable to blow it away. So he withdrew from there and returned to the gods saying, “I could not ascertain who this Yaksha was.”And it was so clear. There was no need to ascertain. The whole thing was so clear. Vayu tried to blow away a straw and he could not. And the fire tried to burn a straw. He could have burned the whole earth, and a single straw was not burned. The thing was so clear: the Yaksha was the original source of energy.But they couldn’t recognize that the energy had been taken away, that now they were just vehicles – empty. The fire could not burn a straw, Vayu could not blow a straw. It was so clear to realize that the original source had withdrawn. But they couldn’t recognize it.Ego is really so blind that it never recognizes its impotency. Even when the source has moved away, it goes on thinking in old terms. Even when everything is defeated and everything is a failure, it goes on thinking in old terms.Then the gods addressed Indra…Indra is the chief of the gods in Indian mythology. Then they asked Indra:“Oh Indra, please ascertain who this spirit is.” “Yes,” said Indra, and hastened to the Yaksha. But the Yaksha disappeared from his view.When Indra approached the Yaksha, the Yaksha disappeared from his view. The word indra is very meaningful; it comes from the same root as the word indriya. Indriya means the senses, and indra means the chief of the senses – the head. What is the chief of the senses? The mind. All the senses – your ears, your eyes, your hands – are just subordinate to the mind. Mind is really Indra in the body, so mind is the chief deity.Eyes belong to fire and all your senses belong to some deity, but your mind belongs to Indra. Indra means the chief of the indriya – of all the senses. So when all the deities, senses, failed, they asked the head, the brain, the mind. But what happened? This is beautiful, this parable is just wonderful. When the senses approached the deity, the ultimate, the brahman, he was there – but when mind approached, he disappeared.With mind you cannot see him, with mind he is not approachable. When mind tries to find out who the ultimate source is, it becomes invisible. It is not visible for the mind. For the intellect, the ultimate becomes invisible. That is why science never finds any divine element. Science cannot find it because science is the Indra – the mind, the intellect, the reason.The spirit disappeared from Indra’s view. If you bring your mind to find, there is nothing to find. It disappears. One more point is to be understood. You can feel godliness through the body, you can feel godliness through taste, you can feel it through smell, but you cannot feel it through the intellect – through the reason. Even through the senses it is approachable. If you become more sensitive you can touch it. But through the intellect it is absolutely unapproachable. Intellect is not the door at all.If you have a sensitive body you can live in godliness, you can breathe it. But no matter how keen an intellect you have, you cannot touch it, you cannot come near it. If you simply bring intellect in, it is no longer there; it simply disappears.And in that very spot he, Indra, beheld a woman, the wondrously effulgent Uma, the daughter of the snow-clad mountain, Himavat. And of her he asked, “Who could this Yaksha be?”With the mind, if you bring mind in, if you bring reason in, the ultimate disappears. And what happens? This parable gives many clues, many dimensions. When the ultimate disappears, then only sex remains the source of all. Then you feel as if sex is the source of all energy. When you cannot feel the divine as the source, you feel sex as the source of all energy.Science proved that there is no God; and then came Sigmund Freud, and he said there is only woman – or you can say there is only man if you are a woman. Science cleared the ground – God became invisible. Whenever there is no God, only sex remains to be the God. Then you feel everything is because of sex; Freud says so. If Freud could have known about this parable, he would have understood. This parable is a criticism, a deep criticism, his whole ideology. When there is no God, sex becomes the God.A beautiful woman appeared before Indra, and he asked that woman, “Uma, who was this who has disappeared?” Now psychologists are asking sex: “What is the origin of life?” They are penetrating into sexual energy and trying to know something about the original source of life through sex, through the door of sex.With intellect, you cannot penetrate deeper than sex. Sex is, of course, part of that great energy. But with mind alone you become acquainted with the part, not with the original source. And mind gets entangled with sex. The whole Western mind is now entangled with sex and it has become a labyrinth. You cannot move out of it. Wheresoever you move, you come back again and again to it.Everything is now reduced to sex. Freud says if a mother loves a child it is sex; if a father loves his child it is sex. If a father loves his daughter it is heterosexual; if the father loves his son more it is homosexual.Just now, a few days ago, I was reading a book – the book is written by a psychoanalyst – and he says it is possible that Jesus was a homosexual because he always moved with his twelve apostles – with boys. Always moving with boys means homosexuality. Somewhere I have read some other psychoanalyst who wrote that Buddha’s monks must have been homosexual because they were always living in the company of men. Everything is reduced to sex if mind is the approach.Before Indra, before mind, the ultimate disappeared.And in that very spot he beheld a woman, the wondrously effulgent one, the daughter of the snow-clad mountain, Himavat. And of her he asked: “Who could this Yaksha be?”This is what we are asking – asking sex what this life is.Now get ready for the meditation.

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The Supreme Doctrine 01-11Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Supreme Doctrine 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,In the West, psychoanalysis has grown through Freud, Adler, Jung and Wilhelm Reich, to solve the problems arising from the ego such as frustrations, conflicts, schizophrenia and madness. In comparison to your meditation techniques, please explain the contributions, limitations and incompleteness of the system of psychoanalysis in solving the human problems rooted in the ego.The first thing to be understood is that any problem rooted in the ego cannot be solved without transcending the ego. You can postpone the problem, you can bring in a little normality, you can create a little normalness about it, you can dilute the problem, but you cannot solve it. You can make a man function more efficiently in the society through psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis never solves a problem. And whenever a problem is postponed, shifted, it creates another problem. It simply changes its place, but it remains there. A new eruption will come sooner or later and when the new outbreak of the old problem comes it will become more difficult to postpone and shift it.Psychoanalysis is a temporary relief because psychoanalysis cannot conceive of anything which transcends ego. A problem can be solved only when you can go beyond it. If you cannot go beyond it, then you are the problem. Then who is going to solve it? Then how is one going to solve it? Then you are the problem; the problem is not something separate from you.Yoga, Tantra and all meditation techniques are based upon a different ground. They say the problems are there, the problems are around you, but you are never the problem. You can transcend them; you can look at them like a watcher is looking down from the hill into the valley. This witnessing self can solve the problem. Really, just by witnessing a problem, it is half solved already. This is because when you can witness a problem, when you can observe it impartially, when you are not involved in it – you can stand by the side and look at it. The very clarity that comes out of this witnessing gives you a clue, gives you the secret key. And almost all problems are there because there is no clarity through which to understand them. You don’t need solutions: you need clarity.A problem rightly understood is solved, because a problem arises through the nonunderstanding mind. You create the problem because you are not understanding. So the basic thing is not to solve the problem; the basic thing is to create more understanding. And if more understanding, more clarity is there, the problem can be encountered impartially, observed as if it doesn’t belong to you, as if it belongs to someone else. The problem can only be solved if you can create a distance between the problem and you.Meditation creates a distance, it gives you a perspective. You go beyond the problem. The level of consciousness changes. Through psychoanalysis you remain on the same level. The level never changes; you are adjusted on the same level again. Your awareness, your consciousness, your witnessing capacity, doesn’t change. As you move in meditation you go higher and higher, you can look down at your problems. They are now in the valley, and you are now on a hill. From this perspective, this height, all the problems look different. And the more the distance grows, the more you become capable of observing them as if they don’t belong to you.Remember one thing: if a problem doesn’t belong to you, you can always give good advice on how to solve it. If it belongs to someone else, if someone else is in difficulty, you are always wise. You can give very good advice. But if the problem belongs to you, you simply don’t know what to do. What has happened? The problem is the same, but now you are involved in it. When it was someone else’s problem, you had a distance from which to look at it impartially. Everyone is a good advisor for others, but when it happens to oneself then all your wisdom is lost because the distance is lost.Someone has died and the family is in anguish: you can give good advice. You can say the soul is immortal; you can say nothing dies, life is eternal. But when someone has died whom you loved, who means something to you, who was near, intimate, you are beating your breast and crying and weeping. Now you cannot give the same advice to yourself – that life is immortal and no one dies, ever. Now it looks absurd.So remember, while advising others you may look foolish. When you say to someone whose beloved has died that life is immortal, he will think you stupid. You are talking nonsense to him. He knows what it feels like to lose a beloved. No philosophy can give consolation. And he knows why you are saying this thing: because the problem is not yours. You can afford to be wise; he cannot afford it.Through meditation you transcend your ordinary being. A new point arises in you from where you can look at things in a new way. The distance is created. Problems are there, but they are now very far away – as if happening to someone else. Now you can give good advice to yourself, but there is no need to give it. The very distance will make you wise. So the whole technique of meditation consists of creating a distance between the problems and you. Right now, as you are, you are so much entangled with your problems that you cannot think, you cannot contemplate, you cannot see through them, you cannot witness them.Psychoanalysis helps just for readjustment. It is not a transformation; that is one thing. And another thing: in psychoanalysis you become dependent. You need an expert and the expert will do everything. It will take three years, four years, or even five years if the problem is very deep, and you will become just dependent – you are not growing. Rather, on the contrary, you are becoming more and more dependent. You will need to see the psychoanalyst every day or twice a week or thrice a week. If you don’t go to him you will feel lost. If you stop psychoanalysis you will feel lost. Psychoanalysis becomes intoxicating, it becomes alcoholic.You start being dependent upon someone – someone who is an expert. You can tell your problem to him and he will solve it. He will discuss it, and he will bring the unconscious roots out of you. But he will do it; the solving will be done by someone else, not by you.Remember, a problem solved by someone else is not going to give you more maturity. A problem solved by someone else may give him some maturity but it cannot give you maturity. You may become more immature. Then whenever there is a problem, you will need some expert advice, some professional advice. And I don’t think that even psychoanalysts grow mature through your problems because they go for psychoanalysis to other psychoanalysts. They have their own problems. They solve your problems, but they cannot solve their problems. Again the question of distance.Wilhelm Reich himself tried again and again to be psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud. Freud refused to psychoanalyze him, and all his life he felt hurt because Freud refused him. And Freudians, orthodox Freudians, never accepted that Reich was an expert because he had not been psychoanalyzed.Every psychoanalyst goes to someone else with his own problems. It is just like the medical profession. If the doctor himself is ill he cannot diagnose himself. He is so near that he is afraid, so he will go to someone else. If you are a surgeon you cannot operate upon your own body – or can you? The distance is not there. It is difficult to operate upon one’s own body. But it is also difficult if your wife is really ill and a serious operation is to be done – you cannot operate because your hand will tremble. The intimacy is so much you will be afraid, you cannot be a good surgeon. You will have to take advice; you will have to call some other surgeon to operate on your wife.What is happening? You have been operating; you have done many operations. And now what is happening? You cannot do it on your child or your wife because the distance is so little – as if there is no distance. Without distance you cannot be impartial. A psychoanalyst can help others, but when he is in trouble he will have to take advice, he will have to be psychoanalyzed by someone else. And it is really strange that even a person like Wilhelm Reich goes mad in the end.We cannot conceive of a buddha going mad – or can you conceive it? And if a buddha can go mad, then there is no way out of this misery. It is inconceivable that a buddha goes mad.Look at Sigmund Freud’s life. He is the father and founder of psychoanalysis; he went on talking about problems very deeply. But as far as he himself was concerned, not a single problem was solved. Not a single problem! Fear was as much a problem for him as for anybody else. He was so afraid and nervous. Anger was as much a problem for him as for anybody else. He would get so angry that he would fall unconscious in a fit. This man knew so much about the human mind, but as far as he himself was concerned, that knowledge seemed to be of no use.Jung himself would fall unconscious when in deep anxiety; he would have a fit. What is the problem? Distance is the problem. They had been thinking about problems, but they had not been growing in consciousness. They thought intellectually, keenly, logically, and they concluded something. Sometimes those conclusions may have been right, but that is not the point. They did not grow in consciousness, they did not become in any way superhuman. And unless you transcend humanity, the problems cannot be solved; they can only be adjusted.Freud, in the last days of his life, said that man is incurable. At the most we can hope that he can exist as an adjusted being; there is no other hope. This is at the most! Man cannot be happy, Freud says. At the most we can arrange it so that he is not very unhappy. That’s all. But he cannot be happy; he is incurable. What type of solution can come out of such an attitude? And this is after forty years’ experience with human beings! He concludes that man cannot be helped, that man is naturally, by nature, miserable, that he will remain in misery.But Yoga says that man’s problems can be transcended. It is not that man is incurable, it is his minimal consciousness that creates the problem. Grow in consciousness, increase in consciousness, and problems decrease. They exist in the same proportion: if there is a minimum of consciousness, there are a maximum of problems; if there is a maximum of consciousness, there are a minimum of problems. With total consciousness, problems simply disappear just like the sun rises in the morning and dewdrops disappear. With total consciousness there are no problems because with total consciousness problems cannot arise. At the most psychoanalysis can be a cure. But problems will go on arising; psychoanalysis is not preventive.Yoga, meditation, goes to the very depth. It will change you so that problems cannot arise. Psychoanalysis is concerned with problems; meditation is concerned with you directly. It is not concerned with problems at all. That is why the greatest of Eastern psychologists – Buddha, Mahavira or Krishna – don’t talk about problems. Because of this, Western psychology thinks that psychology is a new phenomenon. It is not.It was just in this century, in the first part of this century, that Freud could prove scientifically that there is something like the unconscious. Buddha talked about it twenty-five centuries before. But Buddha has never tackled any problem because he says problems are infinite. If you go on tackling every problem, you will never really be able to tackle them. Tackle the man himself. Just forget the problems. Tackle the being itself and help the being to grow. As the being grows, as a person becomes more conscious, problems go on dropping; you need not be worried about them.For example, a person is schizophrenic, split, divided. Psychoanalysis will deal with this split – with how to make this split workable, with how to adjust this man so that he can function, so that he can live in the society peacefully. Psychoanalysis will tackle the problem, the schizophrenia. But if this man comes to Buddha, Buddha will not talk about the schizophrenic state. He will say, “Meditate so that the inner being becomes one. When the inner being becomes one, the split will disappear from the periphery.” The split is there – but it is not the cause, it is just the effect. Somewhere deep in the being there is a duality and that duality has made this crack on the periphery.You go on cementing the crack, but the inner split remains. Then the crack will appear somewhere else. Then you cement that crack; then the crack will go on appearing somewhere else. So if you treat one psychological problem, another problem arises immediately; then you treat another and a third arises.This is good as far as the professionals are concerned because they live off it. But this is not a help. The West will have to go beyond psychoanalysis, and unless the West comes to the methods of growing consciousness, of inner growth of being, of expansion of consciousness, psychoanalysis cannot be of much help.Now, this is happening already: psychoanalysis is already out of date. The keen thinkers of the West are now thinking about how to expand consciousness and not about how to solve problems – about how to make a man alert and aware. Now this has come; the seeds have sprouted.The emphasis has to be remembered. I am not concerned with your problems. There are millions and millions, and it is just useless to go on solving them – because you are the creator and you remain untouched. I solve a problem and you will create ten. Your problems cannot be defeated because the creator remains behind them. And as I go on solving, I am just wasting my energy.I will push aside your problems; I will simply penetrate you. The creator must be changed. Once the creator is changed, the problems on the periphery drop. Now no one is cooperating with them, no one is helping to create them, no one is enjoying them. You may feel the word enjoy strange, but remember well that you enjoy your problems; hence you create them. You enjoy them for so many reasons.The whole humanity is sick because of basic reasons, basic causes, which we go on overlooking. Whenever a child is sick he gets attention; whenever he is healthy no one gives him any attention. Whenever a child is sick, the parents love him – or at least they pretend. But whenever he is okay, no one is worried about him. No one thinks to give him a kiss or a good hug. The child learns the trick of how to get attention. Love is a basic need and attention is a basic food. For the child, attention is even more potentially necessary than milk. Without attention something will die within him.You may have heard about new experiments in one English laboratory, Delabar, where they are experimenting with plants. Even plants grow faster if you give them attention by looking at them lovingly. Two plants are used for the experiment. Give one plant attention, love – just a smiling, loving approach – and don’t give any attention to the other. Give everything else necessary: water, fertilizers, sun rays; give everything equally to each, but to one give more attention. To the other don’t give any attention; whenever you pass nearby don’t even look at it. And one grows faster, brings bigger flowers, and the other grows in a delayed way and brings smaller flowers.Attention is energy. When someone looks lovingly at you he is giving you food – a very subtle food. So every child needs attention; but you give attention only when he is ill, when there is some problem. So if the child needs attention he will create problems, he will become a creator of problems.Love is a basic need. Your body grows with food, your soul grows with love. But you can get love only when you are ill, when you have some problem; otherwise no one is going to give you love. The child learns your ways; then he starts creating problems. Whenever he is ill or with a problem, everyone gives attention.Have you ever observed? In your house the children are playing silently, peacefully. Then if some guests come they start creating trouble. This is because your attention goes to the guests and now the children are hankering for attention. They need your attention, your guests’ attention, everybody’s attention toward them. They will do something, they will create some trouble. This is unconscious, but it becomes a pattern. And when you are grown up, you still go on doing it.For women, it is true that ninety-nine percent of their illnesses, their mental problems, are basically love needs. Whenever you love a woman, she has no problems. Whenever there is some problem in love, many problems arise. Now she is hankering for attention. And psychoanalysts are exploiting this need for attention, because a psychoanalyst is a professional attention-giver. You go to him: he is a professional. For one hour he looks at you attentively. Whatsoever you say, whatsoever nonsense, he listens as if the Vedas are being preached. And he persuades you to talk more, to say anything, relevant or irrelevant, to bring your mind out. Then you feel so good.You know, ninety-nine percent of patients fall in love with their psychoanalysts. And how to protect the client–expert relationship is a great problem because sooner or later it becomes a lover’s relationship. Why? Why does a woman patient fall in love with a male psychoanalyst? Or the reverse: Why does a male patient fall in love with a woman psychoanalyst? The reason is for the first time so much attention is given. The love need is fulfilled.Unless your basic being is changed, nothing will come out of solving problems. You have an infinite potential to create new ones. Meditation is an effort to make you independent, first; and second, to change the type and quality of your consciousness. With a new quality of consciousness old problems cannot exist: they simply disappear. For instance, you were a small child; you had certain types of problems. When you became older they simply disappeared. Where have they gone? You never solved them, they simply disappeared. You cannot even remember what the problems were that belonged to your childhood. You have grown and those problems have disappeared.Then you were a little older, you had different types of problems; when you become old they will not be there. Not that you will be able to solve them – no one is able to solve problems – one can simply grow out of them. When you are old you will laugh at your own problems which were there, so urgent, so destructive that you had many times contemplated committing suicide because of them. And then when you have grown old, you will simply laugh: Where have those problems gone? Have you solved them? No – you have simply grown. Those problems belonged to a particular state of growth.Similar is the case as you grow deeper into consciousness. Problems go on disappearing. A moment comes when you are so aware that problems don’t arise. Meditation is not analysis. Meditation is growth. It is not concerned with problems; it is concerned with the being.The second question:Osho,Last night you said that we should either believe in whatsoever you say as true, or we should disbelieve you totally, taking what you say as untrue, and that both ways will help us. But what is to be done by those persons who are not capable of being total in either way? Is there any third alternative possible in this matter?There is none and there cannot be. The third is your state already; there is no need. The first two are the alternatives to come out of that; the third you are already – confused. You can come out of this confusion only with a total effort. Why is it difficult to be total either in belief or disbelief? Why is it easy to be in the middle? – because if you are in the middle, then no change is needed: you are already there. And if you go on thinking about what to believe and what not to believe, your mind remains the same. This is because it is your mind which chooses what to believe and what not to believe. You choose according to your mind.Then how can this mind change? If your mind is the chooser, it will choose something which can become a food to it. It will go on discarding all that can be destructive to it or that can help it to change. The mind tries to remain in the status quo. It wants to remain static, because with change there is pain, insecurity. You will have to adjust everything again; every arrangement will have to be made again. It will be difficult.So mind is basically orthodox, even the minds of those who think themselves revolutionary. Mind is orthodox, so every revolution becomes an orthodoxy in the end and all the revolutionaries turn out ultimately to be dogmatists. Every revolution ends as a static society. Why does this happen? – because the very nature of the mind is to be orthodox, to cling to the old. So if I say something which will help you remain as you are, you can choose that. You will say, “This is true.” To that which will lead you to a transformation – to an unknown state, in insecurity, on an uncharted path, on an unknown journey and voyage – you will say, “This is not true.”So you can go on choosing; this is what you have been doing. So I say to you, “Be total!” Then change is bound to be there, the revolution will happen. When I say, “Believe totally in me,” or, “Don’t believe at all,” I don’t say, “Believe in me,” I say, “Be total.” Half-hearted, you will never move anywhere. And how can you decide what is true and what is untrue? There is more possibility that whatsoever you think is true will be untrue, and vice versa, because if you already know what is true, then there is no need – no need to come to me or anybody else. There is no need at all! But the mind goes on playing tricks.One young man was here today to meet me. I told him, “Take a jump – take a jump into sannyas.”He said, “I have been listening to J. Krishnamurti and I cannot be committed to anything.” But he is not aware that he is already committed to J. Krishnamurti.J. Krishnamurti says, “Don’t be committed,” so he is not committing himself. He has taken the advice; he has already become a follower of J. Krishnamurti. But his mind is working a trick. It is thinking that now there is no need to follow anybody.You have already become a follower, but this is unconscious. You are not clear about what has happened to you. And this will not be of much help because this is unconscious. Unless it becomes conscious… I say, if you feel that Krishnamurti is right, then be committed to him consciously and totally. But make it conscious because only that which is conscious can be of help in transmutation, in transformation. That which is unconscious cannot be of much help. Or, if you think that don’t need to commit yourself to anyone, then you will have to safeguard your independence in many ways. Then there is no need to go to J. Krishnamurti or to me or to anyone else because the very effort of going shows that you need help – that someone else is needed.But you can go on playing with yourself; you can go on thinking, “I am just listening. I will choose: whatsoever is true I will believe; whatsoever is not true I will not believe” – as if you have a criterion to judge what is true and what is not true. How will you judge it? Either you know it, then there is no need to go; or you don’t know it, then you cannot judge.Buddha used to say, “Don’t ask me questions. Rather, do whatsoever I say, and after a year of doing I will allow you to ask questions. But for one year, just do whatsoever I say. For just one year don’t be a chooser; follow me totally. And after one year, when you have become clear, conscious, then you can ask, and then you can choose because then you will have something like a criterion to judge by – a touchstone.” But it almost always happened that after one year’s deep meditation, when Buddha would say, “Now you can ask and now I allow you to choose,” the man would say, “Now I have nothing to ask and now I have nothing to choose.”When I say to you, “Take a jump into sannyas,” I mean this: for the time being don’t be a chooser. This is not going to be for your whole life, but for the time being don’t be a chooser so that your mind is not allowed to come in. And do whatsoever I say. After a year of sincere effort of doing, I will allow you to choose. Then you can choose, then you can think. Then you have something by which you can judge. Right now you cannot judge, but you go on judging.I am happy with both types of people: those who can say, “I believe totally” – I can work with them – and those who say, “I don’t believe at all” – I can leave them to themselves. But for the confused types who go on saying, “Some things I can believe and some things I cannot believe,” nothing can be done. They go on hanging around me and I cannot help them. They are unnecessarily wasting their time because they cannot take my help. They won’t allow it. They are wasting time; they are missing an opportunity. Something would have been possible very easily if they were available, but they are not available. And they say they will judge. They can go on thinking, but they will never come to any conclusion.You cannot come to any conclusion because your mind is confused. And if you choose out of confusion, you will be more in confusion. Any conclusion out of confusion will lead you into more confusion. A confused mind cannot choose. That is the meaning of surrender: when you feel you are confused, you go to someone; you feel he has a clarity. I say, you feel, not you think. If you feel that someone has a clarity that you don’t have, then surrender. This is risky, dangerous, but one has to take the risk because without risk there is no possibility.If you are too wise and clever and you don’t want to take any risk, you will miss for your whole life and you will not come to any point of realization. Risk is basic. It is risky – because you cannot be absolutely certain whether the person to whom you are surrendering is really true or not. It is risky, but try it. If he is not true, then too you will have gained something because he cannot lead you anywhere. If he is not true and you risk your total being to him, you will become aware of what an untrue master is and you will never fall in the same trap again. But if he is true, then you will come to a new dimension of being. Nothing is lost; the risk is worth taking.But you are clever – your cleverness is your barrier. Be a little foolish and take a jump. Don’t be so clever – you have already missed much by being clever. There are certain points where only fools, madmen, lovers, can enter; there are certain doors. Clever men never go there. It happens that through certain risks fools prove to be wise and the wise prove to be fools because fools can take the risk and the so-called wise cannot take it.There is no alternative, no third alternative; these are the two possibilities. The third alternative you are already. So if you think that the third is good, remain whatsoever you are; don’t think of any change.If you think that whatsoever you are is too much of a misery, a hell, then take a jump out of that hell. And the jump is always into the unknown, so risk is there; it is implied. Be a little daring, a little foolish.When Buddha left his palace he was foolish. Even the driver who led him out of his kingdom told him. The name of the driver was Chhanna. Chhanna said to Buddha, “You are committing a foolish act. It is too risky: losing an empire, losing a kingdom, for something which is very vague. No one knows whether any soul really exists. It is foolish to lose that which you have for that which is uncertain.”Buddha would not listen to him. That man was old, wiser, and he said to Buddha, “You are young, and because of your youth you are not yet mature enough to understand what you are doing. Turn around! Everyone is trying to get into that palace which you are leaving. And where are you going – to be a beggar? If beggars could have achieved, then the whole world would have been beggars. And there are beggars on the streets and they have not achieved. Where are you going? You are taking a risk.”Leaving the known for the unknown is always a risk. Buddha said, “I am fed up with the known. I have known it; now there is nothing more to know. So allow me to take the risk. Even if I lose, I lose nothing because I don’t have anything. If I gain, I gain everything. The risk is worth taking. I cannot lose anything because I don’t have anything. I have lived with those palaces and those beautiful wives, I have known them. Now nothing is there to know. No mystery is there. Now it has become a boredom, a repetition, a habit. I have become a mechanical thing. Now there is nothing to go back to. I will take the risk. If I lose, I lose nothing because I don’t have anything.”What have you got that you are so much afraid of surrender? What have you got? You are just like a naked man who is afraid of taking a bath in the river because he is thinking, “Where will I go to dry my clothes?” And he is nude, he has no clothes, but he is not entering the stream to take a bath because he is afraid that there is no place where he can dry his clothes. What have you got to lose? And there is every possibility to gain. But I say “possibility”: that is the risk.Religion is not for weaklings, it is only for those who have a strong will to move into the unknown. Weaklings always remain confused because they go on traveling in two boats simultaneously – in two directions. They cannot move in one boat because they are afraid. And they are very clever, so they think that if one goes wrong at least the other will always be there. So they travel in two boats, but they never reach anywhere because you cannot travel in two boats.There is no third alternative. You will have to decide this or that; only then does a revolution set in. The old will have to die for the new to be born and there can be no compromise.The old cannot continue in some form in the new; it has to be dropped completely. Religion is both a death and a rebirth. And when I say to you: “Choose one,” be total in your choice, it is going to be a death – that is the fear. But unless you die you cannot be reborn.The last question:Osho,I am feeling completely helpless about everything – life, health, meditation – and even helpless to surrender totally. Everything I can do is always partial. Unconscious factors control much and my efforts and attempts at no-effort are powerless against them. I feel that I want to leave it all to you but that too is only possible as much as I am consciously capable. And then too I am aware the ultimate happening may or may not happen in this life and that I cannot ask when it will happen if I leave it to you. Can I just adopt an attitude of leaving it all to you even though I am aware of the possibility that the happening could take lives anyway? Is this still surrender even though nothing happens as a result of it?Three things: one, by “total” I mean whatsoever is possible; I don’t mean the whole. You cannot surrender the whole right now, because you are not the whole. So how can you surrender the whole? By “total” I mean that which you can do: don’t withhold anything. That which you can do: your whole capacity – not your whole being because you are not that, so how can you surrender it? But let all that you can do be included in the surrender.It is going to be partial – partial in the sense that your whole being will not be involved in it. You have an unconscious part. You cannot bring that into it; it is impossible for you. You don’t even know what it is, where it is, how it functions and how it can be brought into the surrender. You cannot do it. Don’t leave anything undone of whatsoever you can do. By “total” I mean surrender with all your conscious capacity. Through this surrender, by and by, the inner being will come up and will be included in it.In the beginning it can only be in this way. So don’t wait until you are ready to surrender the whole being because then there will be no need to surrender – because when you have already become whole there is no need to surrender. Surrender is a technique to become whole. So take a jump as you are and as much as you can; that is all.Secondly, don’t be worried about when it will happen. It can happen the next moment, it may not happen for lives together. It depends. If your jump is intense, total, if you have put into it whatsoever you could, it can happen the next moment. But if you withhold something, then it will take time. It can take lives together. But even if it happens after many lives it is early because you have already been alive for millions of lives and it has not happened yet.So even if it takes a few lives it is not too much – it is early. Don’t be worried about it because that worry will become a barrier to total surrender and that worry will create an inner condition. Knowingly or unknowingly you will be expecting it to happen soon. That will become a desire and that desire will become a barrier.So don’t think about what will happen; don’t make a condition. Let it happen unconditionally. Say deeply within your heart, “I am not. Whether it happens or not, I am still ready to surrender.” Then it will happen very soon. It can happen in the very surrender itself; it may not take a single moment.I will tell you a story, one very old Hindu parable:Two sannyasins are meditating under two trees, and Narada passes by. Narada is a messenger between the two worlds, “this” and “that”; he moves between both. He goes on carrying news from here to there and from there to here.He passes the first monk who is very old, who is doing deep austerities and who has been working for salvation for many lives. The monk asks, “Narada, are you going to the other world? Then ask the divine how much time I still need, how much more time I will have to exist in this body. It has been too much. I have been working for many lives. Now how much time is left for the ultimate transformation? Please ask for me.”The way the old monk asks this is very tense, full of lust, full of conditions, as if he is complaining. He feels he has been making arduous efforts for too many lives – that some injustice has been done to him. The tone, the very way, is of complaint.Narada passes by the second tree. A young man is dancing there, singing, celebrating his ecstasy. He doesn’t even look at Narada. Narada stands there. The young man sees him, but he goes on dancing. So Narada asks him, “Don’t you have any question? The other monk under your neighboring tree has asked. Would you also like me to bring you news about when your salvation is going to happen?” The man goes on dancing and he doesn’t say anything.Narada goes to the other world. He comes back. He says to the old monk, “I asked God, and he said three lives more.”The old monk was chanting on his mala, his beads. He threw down the beads and said, “Three lives more!” He got very angry and disappointed.Narada reached the other tree. The young man was still dancing. Narada said, “Though you didn’t ask me to ask, still I asked. But I am afraid to tell you, because that old man has thrown his beads and is so angry and disappointed. I am afraid to tell you.”The young man said, “You can say it because whatsoever is, is blissful and whatsoever happens is good. You can tell me; don’t be worried.”So Narada said, “I asked God and he said that you will have to be born as many lives as there are leaves on the tree under which you are dancing.”The young man became so full of ecstasy. He said, “Just this many leaves? So few? – because the earth is so full of leaves, infinite leaves.” He again started dancing and it is said that immediately, that very moment, he disappeared from the earth.This is surrender. This is total acceptance – no complaints, no conditions, no expectations. Immediately he was liberated; that very moment he was liberated.I don’t know about the old monk; nothing is said. But I don’t think three lives will be enough for him. He must be somewhere here, still working.Now get ready for the meditation.

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The Supreme Doctrine 01-11Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Supreme Doctrine 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

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“That Yaksha was brahman,” said Uma. “It was through the victory of brahman, indeed, that you achieved this glory.” It was from that – from the words of Uma – that Indra understood that the Yaksha was brahman.Therefore, verily, these gods – Agni, Vayu, and Indra – excel all other gods, for they approached the Yaksha nearest; they were the first to know him as brahman.And, therefore, indeed, Indra excels the other gods, for he approached the Yaksha nearest; he was the first to know him as brahman.This is the teaching regarding that – brahman. It is like a flash of lightning; it is like a wink of the eye. This is with reference to the adhidaivatam – its aspect as cosmic manifestation.Now its description with reference to the adhyatma – its aspect as manifested in man: mind proceeds to brahman in all speed, as it were. By his mind also, this brahman is remembered and imagined as always near.The mind is abstract. It cannot touch, it cannot see, it cannot hear. It can only think. Thinking is abstract. Thoughts move just in a vacuum. Thoughts have no substance. They cannot be touched, cannot be heard, cannot be felt. So mind is the most abstract faculty in man and when this abstract faculty tries to reach the truth, it can only think about it. It cannot realize it, it cannot feel it. It can only contemplate about it. The approach is going to be indirect. Senses are direct; mind is indirect.Indra represents the mind; Agni represents the eyes; Vayu, air, represents the ears. Remember this. Ears are the part which is related to the cosmic existence of air. Eyes are the part in man related to the cosmic existence of fire or sun.Vayu approached brahman, Agni approached brahman: they could hear, they could see. They could be in more substantial touch with the ultimate reality, but they couldn’t recognize. The brahman was present, but the senses could not recognize who he was. For the recognition the mind is needed; only mind can recognize. But then a problem arises: mind cannot approach directly. Mind approaches indirectly. Mind cannot penetrate reality because mind is an abstract sense. It can only think. Through thinking it can recognize, but then the reality disappears. It becomes only a thinking inside. Indra could recognize, but not directly, because when Indra approached, the brahman, the spirit, disappeared.So the first thing to be understood is that mind is an indirect process. Senses are direct: I can touch you with my hand, but I cannot touch you with my mind. I can see you through my eyes, but I cannot see you through my mind. Mind is enclosed within me and there is no bridge from the mind to reach you directly. If the mind wants to reach you directly, some medium will be needed. If the mind wants to see you, it will see through the eyes. To touch you, it will touch through the hands. A medium, an agency, a mediator, will be needed. Mind needs a mediator.So whatsoever knowledge mind can give, it can never be immediate. This is one of the findings of the Eastern mind, that mind cannot give you immediate knowledge of anything. A mediator will be there and knowledge will come through a means, through a medium. There is no direct penetration from the mind into reality. Senses are direct, but they cannot recognize. Mind can recognize, but it is indirect. So unless mind and senses are both in a deep harmony, you cannot know reality.Agni approached alone, Vayu approached alone, Indra approached alone. They all were failures. Brahman was present to Agni, but then Agni had no mind to think, to recognize, to remember; he couldn’t come to any conclusion as to who he was. Indra could recognize, but he had no direct possibility to know who he was. The brahman disappeared before the mind.So the first thing: if mind is the way to know the reality, the reality will disappear. That is why for science there is no brahman. Science is Indra – mind working. So science goes on denying. Science says there is no spirit in you, no atman, and no brahman, no cosmic soul in the universe. This is a mental approach – abstract. But a very deep phenomenon happens in this parable: brahman disappears and a woman, one of the most beautiful of women, Uma, appears.Whenever the mind tries to penetrate the mystery of life, brahman will disappear and sex will appear. For the mind, sex is the nearest to brahman, the closest possibility to know the life force. Why? Sex is the nearest to the mind for many reasons. One, brahman is the cosmic life force and sex is your individual life force. Brahman is outside you; sex is within you. To feel brahman, senses will be needed. To understand sex, you can close your eyes and understand it. It is a reality within you. Or, you can say that the brahman has penetrated you in the shape of sex. It has become sexual energy within you. It is the individual counterpart of the cosmic life force.You can understand brahman through the mind only as sex. So whenever abstract thinking reaches to its climax, brahman disappears and sex becomes the sole reality. It has happened many times before; it is happening right now in the contemporary world. It happened in India and because of that happening Tantra was born. Tantra means to forget the brahman completely; just penetrate the sexual energy to its very core and you will come to brahman.Tantra was born because India reached to an intellectual climax, to the same climax that now Western countries have reached. India has known that climax – the climax of abstract thinking, the climax of scientific thinking, the climax of conceptualization and philosophy. India reached to a very sophisticated state of mind where the brahman disappeared and the life force became the sex force – appeared as the sex force.Tantra preaches that there is really no God to be approached directly. Unless you penetrate the mystery of sex, unless you go deep into it, you cannot know brahman. And it is also symbolic that sex appears before Indra in the form of Uma. Uma is the consort of Shiva, and Shiva is the greatest tantric. Uma is the counterpart. In that deeper experience of the life force, Shiva is male, Uma is female. To Shiva, Uma is the source of the life force, the door toward cosmic phenomena. To Uma, Shiva is the door to the cosmic phenomena. And when Uma and Shiva meet in a deep orgasm, they lose themselves and only the cosmic energy vibrates.You have seen the shivalinga – it is not alone, it is also with the yoni of Uma. The shivalinga is placed in the yoni of Uma. The shivalinga is phallic, and just underneath is the pudendum – the yoni. The shivalinga is the symbol of sexual orgasm and meeting. Through this meeting the individuals disappear and the cosmic is revealed.Before Indra, Uma appeared; before mind, sex appeared. This is how I decode it. And Indra asked Uma, “Who was this spirit?” When mind reaches to its climax, it can only ask sex energy, “Who is this cosmic force?”Inside man, mind is one pole and sex is another pole. You exist between two poles. In your head is the thinking force, the reason, the mind. And just on the other pole is sex. On your backbone these are the two poles. Scientists say that your brain is just an extension of your backbone, the spine. On one pole exists sex energy, on the other pole exists reasoning. These are the two poles of your spine, and your spine is your existence. You exist through your spine. When reason comes to its climax, you become polar. You have moved to one extreme, and it is absolutely abstract. And sex is the most substantial; it is not abstract at all.Through eyes you can see, through hands you can touch, through ears you can hear; but through the sex center you penetrate most deeply. No eyes can penetrate that much, no hands can touch that much, no ears can hear that much. Through sex, you penetrate into the mystery of the other to the very depth. Sex is a deeply penetrating force. Mind never penetrates anything directly; sex penetrates only directly. Sex has no abstraction about it; mind has no substantiality about it. So sex is the earth within you; mind is just the sky. Sex is the root within you; mind is the flower.So whenever mind wants to know what the life force is, what the brahman is, there is only one way and that is to come back to the roots, because those roots are in the cosmos, those roots are deep in the cosmic life energy. Through sex, mind can move backward to the very source. If you go on thinking, then you move around and around in the mind and there is no way to go out. You can create big philosophies, great systems, but they will be all concepts, words, verbalization; they cannot be realities. Mind can know only if mind falls back to the roots, goes down to the very source. And through that source the brahman can be known.Now, through Western search, the world has come again to a point where mind has become supreme. Hence, so much interest, so much research and so much philosophizing about sex in the West. God has been pushed aside. Now the basic problem in the West is not God: the basic problem is sex. And if this mystery can be penetrated, only then can God somehow again become a living problem. Western thinkers are continuously thinking about the mystery of sex – what it is.Uma appeared before Indra and Indra asked Uma, “Who was this force? Who was this spirit? Who was this presence which has disappeared before me?” This is what mind asks the sex force: “What is life? What is God? What is brahman?” Asking the sex center is Tantra. Tantra means the Yoga of sex. This can be said as a prophecy – that for the coming, future generations, only Tantra can be helpful because only Tantra knows the secrets of how to ask Uma, how to ask the sex center, sex energy, about the ultimate source of energy.And Uma answered:“That Yaksha was brahman,” said she.Uma answered that that presence was brahman.Two things that sex can answer: for a man, a woman is the answer and for a woman, the man is the answer. If you can rightly ask, sex can become for you the deepest answer possible. But there are dangers. If you cannot ask rightly, then sex will prove to be a misery for you. Then sex will become for you the greatest fall. If you can rightly question, then sex can become for you the deepest secret to be known. But if you wrongly question, then sex will become the greatest fall possible. This is bound to be so because sex has a height. If you travel toward that height wrongly, you will fall.Christianity understands sex to be just a fall, and Tantra thinks sex to be the right answer. Christianity and Tantra are just opposed to each other. Not only Christianity: Jainism and many other religions are also opposed to sex. They are opposed for a reason. The reason is the fifty percent possibility of falling down. It is dangerous.So try to travel in some other way where this fifty percent fall is not a possibility. And it is mathematically fifty percent. Actually it is ninety-nine percent, because sex is such an attraction and sex is such an unconscious force that it is difficult to remain alert, meditative. While experimenting in it, you will become unconscious. And if you become unconscious in orgasm it leads you nowhere.The possibility is ninety-nine percent is that you will fall through sex. There is only a one percent possibility that you may rise. But Tantra says that that percentage of fall can be reduced through right techniques and a man or a woman can be trained. Then making love becomes an art – the greatest art. And if you know the art, then you approach very cautiously, very delicately. And then it is not just a temporary release, a relief. It becomes a sacred worship.So Tantra trains people first to be nonsexual. Tantra teaches first to come to a point where sex is not a madness for you. Tantra first teaches you to be totally unattached, without desire. A nude woman, a beautiful woman will be sitting before a tantric seeker, a sadhak, and he has to contemplate on her, on her beauty, but as a divine force. And he has to go on watching inside that no lust arises. If lust arises the point is lost.This is the most difficult thing. For months together the seeker is to practice going beyond lust. And when a beautiful woman appears to be just like a beautiful flower and the seeker has no lust in the mind, only then will the master allow the seeker to approach this beautiful woman without lust, to enter this woman without lust. Then it becomes a meditation, and the orgasm becomes cosmic. Then individuals are not there because individuals exist through desire, lust, and passion. Then love happens and this love is prayer. And through each other they have entered the greater depth that encompasses all.Sex can give you the answer and if you have become too intellectual then only sex can give you the answer. Any intellectual age will have to ask through sex. If you have moved too much in the head you will have to fall back to the other extreme. Only then do your two opposites within meet and you become a unity.Uma said: “That Yaksha was brahman”… Through deep sex experience, meditative sex experience, you will come to know that this sex energy is nothing but divine energy. Then sex becomes samadhi.Uma said:“It was through the victory of brahman, indeed, that you achieved this glory.” It was from that that Indra understood that the Yaksha was brahman.The mind cannot understand directly. Sex becomes the mediator: Uma becomes the medium. And through that medium Indra could understand who that spirit was, who that presence was. Mind needs a mediator because mind is abstract and reality is not abstract. Only through a mediator, a transformer, can mind come in contact with reality.Greek philosophy lost its path only because of this – because they depended totally on mind and reason and they thought nothing else was needed: go on thinking and through thinking the truth will be achieved. It has not been achieved yet. Greek philosophy goes on. It has changed its land, it has changed its abode. It has traveled through the whole Western history of thought.The river that was born in Athens has traveled through Berlin, through Paris, through London, through New York. It has been going on and on, but it simply gives more words. It gives Hegel and Kant, it gives Berkeley and Hume, it gives Russell and Wittgenstein – words and words and words. It cannot produce a Buddha, it cannot produce a Jesus – it cannot produce experience. And now the West is becoming interested in Tantra. That may be the turning-point. The head comes back to the roots.Through Uma, Indra could understand that the Yaksha was brahman, that this presence which had disappeared, which was now not visible – and instead of it Uma was visible, a beautiful woman, a sex symbol was visible – was brahman. Sex can give you the answer to what the reality of life is because sex is the most alive thing in you. Mind is the most dead thing in you and sex is the most alive thing in you. That is why mind is always against sex, and mind is always for suppressing it. They are enemies. Mind is a dead thing and sex is the life force; they go on fighting. And whenever you move into sex, the mind feels frustrated and the mind says, “This is wrong. Don’t move into it again.”The mind becomes the moralizer, the mind becomes the puritan, the mind becomes the priest. The mind goes on condemning. All that is alive the mind goes on condemning and all that is dead the mind goes on worshipping. And sex is the most alive thing in you because life comes through it: you are born through it, you can give birth through it. Wherever there is life, aliveness, sex is the source. Not only in man: these trees are also sexual. Flowers are nothing but maturing seeds; they are sexual. The animals are sexual.Now scientists feel that sex even penetrates matter because there is a polarity of the feminine and the masculine in matter. Even in the deepest atom there exists a force as positive and there exists a force as negative. And those two forces create all that is there. The constant fight between the two forces and the constant meeting – the fight and meeting, the attraction and repulsion – creates energy. The whole existence is a creation between two opposing forces. So whenever you are nearest to life, you are nearest to sex. Or vice versa: whenever you are nearest to sex, you are nearest to life. You are young when sex energy is young; you are old when sex energy is old.Now, scientists say, biologists say, that if we can replace the sex glands, only then can old age be stopped – because if the sex glands are young, then the whole body will be young. If the sex glands are old, then you cannot do anything to make the body young.There has been a constant effort: all the medical researchers all over the world have been trying to make man live longer, stay younger longer, and now the right point has been touched. The sex glands become old first and then your whole body follows. Your sex glands become youthful first and then your whole body follows. So really it is not a question of the whole body, it is only a question of the sex center. If the center is young you are nearer to life; if the center is old you are nearer to death.Some day or other – it is possible now – we will be able to replace the sex glands. Once we are able to replace the sex glands, man can live younger forever. The body will follow. The body is just an expression. You may not have thought about it, but the sex center is the center of your whole body. The whole body is just a circle around it. Biologists say the whole body exists for the sex center to survive. The body is just a situation in which sex hormones can live and survive. The sex glands are not for the body: the body is for the sex glands.Once the sex energy has traveled and given birth, the body goes on becoming old. Once the sex energy is exhausted, the body has to be discarded. Now the abode is not worth living in. Now the energy will find another body to live in. Now the energy will find another more alive, younger body to live in so that the life force can continue on and on.You see a fruit: deep in the fruit are the seeds. The fruit exists only to protect the seeds, to give life, energy, food, to the seeds. The seeds do not exist for the fruit. The fruit exists just to protect, so that the seeds can survive. And once the seeds are ready, the fruit is useless. The fruit will ripen, fall down, because the only need was just for the seeds. When the seeds are ready to sprout as a new life, the fruit will become ripe and fall down from the tree. Why does the fruit fall down from the tree? – because the seeds now want to move into the ground. Now they are ready. They want to move into the earth, into the womb.When you feel sexual you think you can control it just by thinking. But you cannot because now the seeds are ready to move into a woman – and those seeds are struggling to move. So whatsoever you do, just by using your mind you cannot do anything because deep down the mind exists for the seeds, not the seeds for the mind. They will struggle and they will defeat you. They will move out of your body because your body has been just an abode – a fruit. Now the seeds are ready. They want to move out of your body. They will move anyhow. If you don’t make love to a woman, they will move in your dreams. But now they want to move out. They are ready – ready to live in another body, ready to give life a further push.Unless you understand this sex center and unless you do something deep within the center, you cannot attain brahmacharya – you cannot become a celibate. The so-called brahmacharis are just so-called. They may not be making love to women: that is not difficult. But the seeds of semen are going out; they cannot be contained. Brahmacharis are not honest, so they will not say anything. A person who is honest will say.Mahatma Gandhi has said – and he was one of the most honest men – that even at the age of seventy he was having wet dreams. He said, “I have come away from sex as far as my conscious mind is concerned, but the moment I fall asleep I cannot do anything. In dreams, sexual imagery comes in and the semen moves out.” He was honest.Sex energy can be transformed only when sex becomes the door to the cosmic. And once you know the secret that sex can become the door to the cosmic, you have the key – and that key only can make you a brahmacharin. Why? – because now you can give birth to a higher sort of life. Now the sex energy can give birth to a higher sort of life. But it must give birth; if there is no higher movement, then it will move into a lower world. But it will move! Energy needs movement.Tantra has discovered certain secrets by which a higher form of life is created through sex – not only bodies, but a higher form of energy. And once you know how to create that energy, sex disappears as sex. It starts moving in a higher dimension.Tantra says – and Tantra has techniques which have been proved right for all those who have experimented with them – that when a woman and a man are in an orgasm, ordinarily the orgasm is a release: the man ejaculates and the orgasm ends. But tantric orgasms are without ejaculation. Simply, the two energies meet – not on the physical plane: the energies meet on a psychic plane. And when they move deeper they meet on a spiritual plane and that meeting becomes the door and energy starts moving. It becomes creative; it gives birth to you on a new plane. With every higher movement of sex energy, you are born on a higher level; you go on becoming superhuman. Sex can become the answer: that is the message of the parable.Uma said that this Yaksha was brahman himself. “It was through the victory of brahman, indeed, that you achieved this glory.”So whatsoever man achieves, he achieves because of the life force. At the lowest that life force is known as sex energy; at the highest the life force is known as the brahman. And the mind can approach only the lowest. That is why Uma appeared. And only from that lowest, mind can move by and by to the highest. The lowest will become the medium.It was from that – from the words of Uma – that Indra understood that the Yaksha was brahman.Therefore, verily, these gods – Agni, Vayu and Indra – excel all other gods, for they approached the Yaksha nearest; they were the first to know him as brahman.Three gods – Agni, Vayu, Indra. Agni is represented by your eyes in your body, Vayu is represented by your ears in your body, Indra is represented by your mind in your body. Your body is a miniature cosmos. Whatsoever is in the cosmos is in your body. You are a small representative of the whole cosmic existence, of the whole phenomenon.So now let us decode these symbols. Agni, Vayu and Indra excel all other gods. Whatsoever you know about brahman is known either through the ears or through the eyes or through the mind. You have heard about him: it is through the ears – Vayu. All the scriptures are for the ears – the god Vayu. All the smritis, shrutis – all that has been known and recorded, is recorded for your ears.Ears can give you a glimpse, the first glimpse, but if all the scriptures are destroyed and no one says anything to you about God, still your eyes will feel. Your eyes will come to a glimpse of something unknown that is hidden everywhere. That is why we call our rishis, seers, drashta – because it is through the eyes that they have the first glimpse.Hence, in this parable, Agni approaches brahman first. Agni approaches brahman first: that is, eyes give you the first glimpse. They cannot recognize, of course, but they touch the reality. They have a feeling that something is there, unrecognized. When eyes have known or felt or come to a contact, only then can whatsoever is heard become meaningful. So scriptures will not be of much help unless your own eyes have started to penetrate the reality around you. When you can see something, then scriptures become true. Only through your own seeing do scriptures become true.So next Vayu approaches brahman – but even through the eyes or through the ears, you will not be able to recognize. Only then can your mind be of help. But when mind approaches it is abstract and the brahman disappears.There have been philosophers who have believed only in the eyes: for example, Charvakas. They say pratyaksha – that which is before the eyes – is the only reality. They believe only in the eyes, so they say whatsoever is seen is real and because God is not seen, God is unreal.There are philosophers, for example, mimansakas, who say that whatsoever is heard about him is true – the Vedas are true – and he cannot be known otherwise; the Vedas are the last authority. They believe in the God Vayu. And then there are the rationalists – those who say, “Only through mind can you know; there is no other way to know.” Rationalists exist all over the world. They say that only through reason can you approach the reality.These are the three doors: through the eyes, through the ears, through the mind. And then there is the fourth, Tantra, which says that the mind must approach through sex; only then will you know the reality.This sutra says:Therefore, verily, these gods – Agni, Vayu and Indra – excel all other gods, for they approached the Yaksha nearest; they were the first to know him as brahman.And therefore, indeed, Indra excels all other gods, for he approached the Yaksha nearest; he was the first to know him as brahman.So mind is the nearest, but only through a mediator. Alone, it moves in a circle, never reaching anywhere.This is the teaching regarding that – brahman. It is like a flash of lightning; it is like a wink of the eye. This is with reference to its aspect as cosmic manifestation.Now its description with reference to…its aspect as manifested in man: mind proceeds to brahman in all speed, as it were. By his mind also, this brahman is remembered and imagined as always near.So the whole parable comes to a particular conclusion. You can try to approach the ultimate reality through the senses; you will touch it, but you will not be able to recognize it. You can approach the ultimate reality through mind: now you are capable of recognizing it, but it will disappear before you.Your reason has to be tethered to the life force within you. Your reason must become total with your life force; it must not function as separate. Your head must not function as something separate from your life energy; it must be rooted in it. And you must move into the cosmos with your mind clear and with your life energy joined to it, together. Your life energy will become the mediator. Your mind will be on this side. In between your mind and the brahman will be the life energy. And only through that life energy, Uma, will you be able to know and recognize both.The experience of the ultimate has to happen through you as a whole. You cannot approach it through parts. All parts will be failures. All your parts must become a whole when you approach the ultimate; only then will you be able to know it.This is a key – the whole meaning of the parable. You must approach the ultimate as a total, a whole, with all your senses included, your reason included, your life force, sex included; nothing should be excluded. You should not approach in fragments. You should approach the ultimate as a unity – integrated, one.Then there will be two phenomena. Like lightning the cosmic will appear before you – as if suddenly the darkness has disappeared and there has been lightning, and everything is seen in a flash. Whenever you are a unity, suddenly lightning happens. The very unity of your being becomes the situation in which the whole cosmos becomes lightning. All darkness disappears. In a single moment everything is revealed.Remember well that the ultimate is not revealed in parts; hence, the use of lightning. If you move in a deep dark forest with a lamp, then that forest will be revealed in parts. Sometimes you will see some trees, and then you will move ahead, and then some other trees will be seen. But those trees which you had seen before will disappear. They will move into darkness. With a lamp, if you move in a dark forest, only in parts will the forest be revealed to you. The brahman is never revealed in parts, but as if you are standing in a dark forest and suddenly there is lightning in the clouds and the whole forest is revealed in a single flash.So you cannot say, “I have known brahman five percent, ten percent, fifteen percent.” Whenever you know, you know one hundred percent. Either you know one hundred percent, or you don’t know. You cannot know the ultimate in parts. It is indivisible. Just like lightning, when you are ready the ultimate reality is revealed. And it is revealed in such a short time that it cannot be called a fragment of time.So two things: as space brahman is revealed totally and as time it is revealed without a single moment. It is like a wink of the eye – as if you have winked: that much time. Really, no time – as a flash, as lightning, the whole space, the whole phenomenon of brahman is known, and without a single moment of time. It is not divided either as space or as time.You are hearing me. I will say a sentence, then time will pass. Then I will say another sentence and time will pass. You cannot hear me totally; there is no possibility. Time will be there. You will hear me in fragments.But brahman is heard without time; brahman is known without time. Hence, the Upanishads call him eternal, timeless, beyond time, kalateet – beyond time, beyond space. Time and space both disappear in a single moment of meeting. Everything is revealed. That is why the Upanishads say by knowing one, all is known. By knowing one, all is known! That one is the brahman. Enter into it as a total unity.J. Krishnamurti goes on talking in abstract terms. The whole approach seems to be mental, as if only mind is to be used. The body need not be involved in it, emotions need not be involved in it: only the abstract mind, as if brahman is a mathematical problem. It is not, it is an organic problem.Listening to Krishnamurti you are listening to the mind – the purest mind. You will feel good. Listening, you will feel that you are understanding. Listening, you will feel you are reaching somewhere. But you are learning only new words. You will learn awareness – the word, not awareness itself. You will learn choicelessness – the word, not choicelessness. And they will go on in the mind, and they will move in the mind, and you will become just a mind – a cerebral center. Your emotions are not touched; your body remains untouched. Only your mind is touched.That is why Krishnamurti has been a failure. He is himself enlightened, but he has been a failure. His whole life he has been working with the mind and whatsoever he says is true, but it is not applicable because you are not only the mind: you are much more. And that “much more” has to be transformed with the mind.You have to be transformed as a totality.You must not only think about God: you must also dance about him. You must not only conceptualize: you must also have emotions about him. You must eat him, you must breathe him, you must walk him, you must dance him. You must come as a totality, as an organic whole. And when you come as an organic whole, undivided, the undivided is revealed to you. If you come divided, the undivided cannot be revealed to you. When you are undivided, you become a mirror for the undivided. You mirror it; it is reflected in you. When you are divided, then everything that you look at is divided.It is just like a lake. There are waves on it and the full moon is in the sky. But the full moon cannot be reflected on the lake. The lake is disturbed, so the lake will know the full moon in fragments. It will be scattered all over the lake in parts. Then the lake becomes silent and the waves disappear. Not even ripples are there. Now the lake becomes a mirror – undivided, undisturbed. The full moon is reflected in it.The only thing that is needed is to make you indivisible, without waves and ripples, without fragments – to make you one unity. Your body, your emotions, your thinking, all must become one – integrated. Then you will reflect the divine in a flash, like lightning, with no time lost. The whole will be revealed to you: Knowing one, all is known.

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The Supreme Doctrine 01-11Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Supreme Doctrine 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Do Hindu mythological gods, like Shiva, Uma and Indra have a real existence on some plane, or are they just symbols as you implied in your talks the last two mornings? And if they are really symbolic, why do people see visions of them in meditation and what do such visions of gods mean?Mythology deals with symbols. It is not history; it is not concerned with objective reality. But that does not mean that it is not concerned with reality itself. It is concerned with subjective reality. These gods, these mythological symbols, don’t exist outside you, but they have a psychological existence and that psychological existence can be helpful, can be used. So the first thing to be understood is that they are not real persons in the world, but they are real symbols in the psyche of man.Carl Gustav Jung came very near to discovering the secret of these symbols. He was working on mental patients, disturbed persons. He would tell his patients to go on painting things, whatsoever came to their minds. A person who is schizophrenic, divided, split, will paint certain things and the painting will show a particular pattern. All schizophrenic patients will paint certain things and the pattern will be the same. And when they get over their illness, their disease, they will start painting different things. That will happen to every patient; just by seeing their paintings you can say whether the patient is ill or not.Then Jung became aware that whenever a person who has been suffering with a divided personality again becomes one, undivided, he starts painting something like a mandala – a circle. That circle, that mandala, shows somehow a deep relationship with his own inner circle that has been regained. Now, inside, he has become a circle, joined together; he has become one. Then in his paintings suddenly circles will erupt. So Jung came to conclude that your inner mind can express certain things in a certain state. If the state of mind changes, then your visions will change, your expressions will change.Hindu mythological gods are certain visions of a certain state of mind. When you come into that state of mind, visions start happening to you. They will have a similarity. All the world over they will have a similarity. There will be minor differences because of culture, education, training, but deep down there will be a similarity.For example, the mandala is one of the mythological symbols. It has been recurring all over the world. In old Christian paintings it is there. In old Tibetan paintings it is there. In Chinese, Japanese and Indian art the circle has a fascination. Somehow, when your sight becomes circular, when it becomes a current, joined together, undivided, you start seeing a circle in your vision, in your dreams. That circle represents your reality. In the same way, all symbols represent inner subjective realities. And if a society gives a particular shape to a deity, it becomes very helpful. It becomes very helpful for the seeker because now he can decode many inner visions.Freud inaugurated a new era in the West by interpreting dreams. Before Freud, in the West, no one was really interested in dreams. No one thought that dreams could have some meaning, or that dreams could have some reality of their own, or that they could have some secret keys which could open the personality of men. But in India it has always been known. We have been interpreting dreams, and not only dreams, because dreams are ordinary: we have been interpreting visions. Visions are the dreams of those persons who are meditating and changing their consciousness. They are also dreams. In ordinary consciousness dreams happen and now Freudian psychology has come to conclude that a particular pattern of dreams shows a particular meaning.For example, a person goes on seeing in his dream that he is flying in the sky, that he has become a bird. He goes on flying: over hills, mountains, rivers, oceans, cities, he goes on flying. Freud says this type of dream, a dream of flying, happens to the mind which is very ambitious. Ambition becomes flying in dreams. You want to be above everyone – above hills, above everyone. If you can fly, you will be above everyone. Ambition is an effort to fly above everyone. In dream, ambition becomes a pictorial image of flying.Sexual dreams have a similar pattern all over the world. When boys become sexually mature they will start dreaming of holes, tunnels. Those holes, tunnels, are symbols of the feminine sex center, of the vagina. Girls will start seeing phallic-like symbols in their dreams – pillars or minarets. And this happens all over the world: all over the world there is no distinction; it is similar. Phallic symbols will come to girls and hole-like symbols will come to boys.If in a particular sexual state particular dreams happen, they have a reality. That reality is subjective. It is just the same when you enter meditation: you are entering a different state of consciousness. Particular visions will start happening. They are also dreams, but we call them visions because they are not normal. Unless you achieve a certain state in meditation they will not happen. They show that something is happening within. They project your inner realities on the screen of the mind in a pictorial way.Remember that your unconscious mind does not know any language. Your unconscious mind knows only the most primitive language, which is of pictures. Your conscious mind has learned language symbols, but the unconscious mind still remains pictorial just like the mind of small children. It converts everything into pictures.So, for example, Shiva’s shivalinga has many meanings. One I told you about this morning, that it is the very source of life energy – a sex symbol. But that is only one meaning. The shivalinga is egg-shaped – white and egg-shaped. It happens in a particular state of meditation that this appears before you: a white egg-shaped thing filled with light. Light is coming out of it, rays are coming out of it.Whenever, deep down, you become cool, silent, and the whole being loses heat, this symbol appears. That is why the mythological story is that Shiva lives on the Himalayas, the coolest place in the world, where everything is cool. Just look at a shivalinga – a marble shivalinga. Just looking at it you will feel a certain coolness entering you. That is why above a shivalinga a pot is to be held continuously, and from that pot drops of water go on dropping on the shivalinga, just to make it cool. These are symbols just to give you a feeling of coolness.In Kashmir there is one shivalinga, a natural shivalinga, which arises automatically when snow falls. It is a snow shivalinga. Just by the dropping of snow in a cave a shivalinga is formed. That shivalinga is the best one for meditation because it is so cool all around that it gives a glimpse of the inner happening – when the shivalinga appears within your consciousness, when it becomes a picture, a symbol, a vision.These symbols have been found through centuries and centuries’ work and effort. They indicate a certain state of mind. To me, all mythological gods are meaningful subjectively. Objectively they are nowhere to be found. And if you start trying to find them somewhere objectively, then you will become a victim of your own imagination – because you can find them; you can project them so strongly that you can find them.Human imagination is such a forcible thing, it has such a tremendous force within it, that if you imagine something continuously you will start feeling it around you. Then you can see it, then you can realize it. It will become an objective thing. It is not objective, but you will feel it as existing outside you. So it is dangerous to play with imagination because then you can be hypnotized by your own imagination and you can come to see and feel things which are not. This is creating a private fantasy, a dreamworld; this is a sort of madness. You can see Krishna, you can see Christ, you can see Buddha, but this whole effort is wasted because you are moving in dreams and not in reality.Hence, my insistence to always remember that these mythological figures are symbolic. They are meaningful, they are poetic, they are a certain language. They say something, they imply something, but they are not objective personalities. If you can remember this, then you can use them beautifully. They can be of much help. But if you think of them as objective they will be harmful, and by and by you will move into a dreamworld and you will lose contact with the reality. And to lose contact with the reality is to go mad. Be constantly in contact with reality. Still, don’t allow the objective reality to kill the inner and the subjective. Be alive and alert in the inner world, but don’t mix them.This is happening: either we allow the objective reality to kill the inner and the subjective, or we allow the subjective to project a dream world on the objective, and then the objective disappears. These are two extreme viewpoints. Science goes on thinking in terms of the objective and goes on denying the subjective. Religion goes on talking about the subjective and denying the objective.I am totally different from both. My emphasis is: objective is objective and let it remain objective, and subjective is subjective and let it remain subjective. Keep their purities and you will be saner for it. If you mix them, if you confuse them, you will become insane, you will lose balance.The second question:Osho,Yesterday you spoke of psychoanalysis and the phenomenon of patients falling in love with their analysts. Analysis calls this phenomenon transference and tries to make it happen on purpose. Through this total projection of one's feelings of love onto the analyst, a person grows and learns to love in a healthier way. Is not this concept the same as that of surrender in the Eastern tradition? Is it not possible that Freud discovered its value through some esoteric leak?Yes, transference can be helpful, but not with an analyst. It can be helpful with a master. It can be helpful only if the person you fall in love with has himself gone beyond lust, has himself solved all his love problems. If you fall in love with a master… By “master” I mean one who has gone beyond attachment, lust; who has gone beyond all problems of love.Otherwise the transference is going to be double. The patient is transferring, projecting, his own love need onto the doctor and the doctor is projecting his own love need onto the patient. And a doctor who has his own love need cannot be of much help. Really, he himself is ill, and two ill persons cannot help each other to be healthier. This is again going to be a frustration, not a growth in love.Love can grow only if the other person has grown beyond ordinary problems, the ordinary conflict of love. What is the problem of love? The first problem is that the moment you are in love with someone you are also in hate with the same person. This is the first problem because whomsoever you love, side by side you hate also.Why do you hate a person you love? Love is a need, and just like love there is another need and that is of freedom. The moment you love a person you start feeling dependent; your freedom is lost. And the person who is killing your freedom is bound to be hated. And the person who is making you dependent will appear not only as an enemy but as the archenemy, because he is killing all your freedom, your liberty, your individuality. But love is a need, so you fulfill love at the cost of freedom. You love a person and you hate that person also.Then the second problem arises: the moment you are in love with someone, you are not in your senses. You are mad. Really, you are a lunatic. You are not alert, you are not conscious. You are moving as if in sleep. And if the other person is also the same – and a doctor or a psychoanalyst is the same, there is no difference, he has no higher consciousness than you – then he is also moving in sleep. Two persons moving in sleep are bound to collide; they will be in conflict, struggle.We in India have given another word for falling in love with a master, just to show the difference. We call it shraddha – we call it trust, a loving trust. If you fall in love with a master – and you will fall – then there is a difference. You are in sleep, but the master is not in sleep. You will try in every way to create a conflict, violence, aggression, but he can laugh at it – at you. He can be kind and he can arrange things so there is no collision. He can arrange things so there is no violence and no hate. But with a psychoanalyst, you are meeting a person of the same state of mind. The quality of the mind is similar; you will both create problems for each other.In love, lovers create problems for each other. They go on throwing their problems on the other. And if both are throwing their problems on each other, then it cannot be a growth, it cannot come to a healthy maturity. Impossible! Again it will be an experience in failure. And the more you fail, the more you become experienced in failure. Then you know more how to fail. And with every love experience and relationship, if misery is created, by and by you will come to feel that love is a sort of disease.Oscar Wilde has said somewhere that love is a fever, a feverish state. It is not health, because whenever you are in love you are in a fever. You cannot sleep properly when you are in love, you cannot be at ease. You are uneasy, a turmoil goes on, a fever grips you.The third problem is that whenever you are in love you try to possess the other, you try to become the master of the other – the possessor. And the same is being done by the other: he or she is trying to possess you. And what does this possession mean? What is possession? Possession means to transform the person into a thing so that you can manipulate him. Then the person has no freedom. And each lover is making an effort to kill the other as a person.Only with a master will this not happen. With the master the disciple will try in every way to possess, but you cannot possess a master. That is impossible, because you can possess a person only if he deeply cooperates with you. He may be insisting that he wants to remain independent, but there also is a deep need to be possessed. A master cannot be possessed, so your effort toward possession will fail. And he will not try to possess you. Rather, on the contrary, he is trying to make you more of a person – more alive, more free, more conscious, more alert. His whole effort is to make you more a person than a thing. But lovers are trying to make each other a thing. A psychoanalyst is an ordinary person with some expertise, but with no change of consciousness.There are some psychoanalysts like Wilhelm Reich and his followers who say that this transference, this falling of the patient into a love relationship with the doctor, is good. But I have been reading the memoirs of Wilhelm Reich’s wife and she says that he was making love to each woman patient, but he would not allow his wife even to talk with another man.His wife was away at some resort for two months. When she came back, he inquired in detail about what she had been doing there – who she was meeting, whether she fell in love with someone… And his wife says that he was making love with a new woman every day, yet he was jealous of his wife and possessive. How can this man be helpful? What type of help can come from this man? He is himself in trouble with his own love problems. It is possible that he is just giving a philosophy. He is a maniac, a pervert, and he is philosophizing the whole thing, he is rationalizing the whole thing.I don’t say that love cannot be helpful. Love can be helpful. But it can be helpful only when you are in love with a person who is higher than you; otherwise it cannot be helpful. And we call that love shraddha – a loving trust.If you are in love with a master, with a buddha – and of course you will be if you are near a buddha – then in the beginning your love toward the buddha will have a certain sexuality about it; it is bound to be so. That’s why it happens that around Buddha, around Mahavira… It is known about Mahavira that he had forty thousand disciples – monks and nuns. Of forty thousand monks and nuns, thirty thousand were women, only ten thousand were men. The proportion was three women to one man. Of four followers, three were women and one was a man.These thirty thousand women must have had a deep love and in the beginning a sexual attraction. It is bound to be so, it is natural. But by and by, the presence of Mahavira will change that sexual part. By and by, living near him, the sexuality will drop and the love will become purer; it will become more spiritual.In the beginning it will be possessive. Even I feel that it becomes possessive. Around me there are many women and they start being possessive, unknowingly. And nothing is wrong in it; it is natural. But if I am also of the same state of mind, then I cannot help them. Then, rather than me bringing them to a higher state of mind, they will bring me down to their level. And there is a constant struggle for equality. Remember, just as water seeks its own level, whenever you meet a person you both struggle to create a level. Either he should come down or you should go up, but sooner or later you must settle on the same level; otherwise it will be difficult, you won’t be able to remain related.Just like water seeks a level, a relationship seeks a level. If you fall in love with me, then there will be a struggle. Long or short, it depends on what type of a person you are, there will be a struggle. You will try to bring me down so that equality is established. Nature likes equality. But if you can bring me down, then I cannot help you. So while you are trying to bring me down, I must try to bring you up to a higher state. And remember, to go to a lower state is very easy; to bring someone to a higher state is very difficult. It is a long struggle.When the doctor and the patient are of similar consciousness, only their knowledge differs – not their being. One man has studied psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry: he is an expert. The other has not studied it; that is the only difference. Their memories differ, their information differs. They are, as far as their minds are concerned, different; but as far as their consciousness is concerned they are similar.So I don’t think that this phenomenon called transference, projection of love, can be of any help; it cannot be. It can be only if the psychoanalyst is also a master, is also a guru. Then it can be of help; otherwise it cannot be of any help. The person with whom you fall in love must be of such integrity that you cannot bring him down whatsoever you do. And you will make every effort, you will make a desperate effort, to bring him down. This is natural because you feel uneasy with a person who is higher than you. Either you must go higher, which is difficult, or he must come down – and it looks easier for you to bring him down.If he can come down, or if he is already down and simply pretends that he is not down, then he cannot be of much help. But if he remains higher than you, then your love can really become a growth.Disciples and masters are in constant struggle, remember this – in constant struggle because the disciples are trying to bring the master down and the master is trying to bring the disciples up. It is a very penetrating struggle and the disciples will not leave anything undone. Not that they know; they don’t know what they are doing: they are unconscious, and they can be forgiven. The master cannot be forgiven because he must be aware, he must be alert, he must be conscious of what is happening around him.A psychoanalyst is not a master; that is why I say that, in the West, the relationship between psychoanalysts and patients has become a sexual license – nothing else. It is helping neither.And the second part of the same question is: “Is not this concept the same as that of surrender in Eastern tradition? Isn’t possible that Freud discovered its value through some esoteric leak?” No. Surrender is different from love. In love you remain yourself. Love is a relationship between two persons who remain two. It is a relationship, it is a bridge. Surrender is not a relationship. You simply disappear, you are no more. When you surrender to a master, you say, “I am not now, so do whatsoever you like; I am not.” It is not a relationship. Surrender is not a relationship, because one disappears through it and a relationship needs two. Only the master remains.Really, when you surrender the master is working in you – you are not there. Then it becomes very easy to work because the struggle that the disciple puts up, the resistance that he usually gives, is no longer there. He is simply in a let-go. When the master says come to the left, he comes to the left. Or if he says come to the right, he comes to the right. Whatsoever the master says he simply follows. He doesn’t allow his ego to assert itself; it is not a relationship.Love is a relationship. Both the lovers are trying to remain themselves; hence, the struggle. Both are trying to be related and yet to remain independent. This is contradictory because the very relationship will change you and you will have to compromise and adjust with the other. And you will not be the same again.A person who is unmarried will not be the same person when he is married. He cannot be. It is impossible to remain the same person because now a new compromise has entered. Now a new person has entered and a relationship is created. This relationship will change both. Remember, in love both change; in surrender, only the surrendered changes – not the master. He is not related. He remains aloof, he remains faraway, he remains distant. You surrender and you change. In love it is always a condition. You give something to take something. This is a give and take. In surrender, you simply give; there is no condition to it.Surrender is a very different phenomenon. Really, the West is absolutely unacquainted with it. The master–disciple relationship is absolutely an Eastern happening. In the West there are teachers and the taught, not masters and disciples. That is why Krishnamurti’s teachings have been so influential in the West, because he says there is no master and no disciple.The East has come to evolve a new type of relationship – if you can call it a relationship – in which one exists and the other dissolves, in which the surrendered changes but the master makes no compromise. It is one-way.Love is two-way, so both do something; both give and take. It is an exchange. Surrender is one-way. The disciple simply offers himself. The master remains untouched. Only then can he work. If he is changed by you, he cannot change you. So many times masters look very hard: they look very unkind, they look very cruel because you go on weeping and crying and they remain untouched. Or even if they show that they are touched, you can see that they are pretending, that they are play-acting.Surrender is one-way, totally one-way. That is why it is so difficult. If you feel that the other is also bending, it becomes easier. Then it is a contract, then it is a marriage. Marriage is a contract. Surrender is not a marriage; there is no contract. You simply dissolve yourself on your own and the master will not even thank you. You are dissolving yourself totally, surrendering, and he will not even say a single thank-you to you. He may not even look at you.It is said that Bayazid, a Sufi mystic, came to his master and the master said, “Are you ready to surrender? Otherwise, go and move in the world to have some experience of the world, some experience of the failures of the ego, so that you don’t resist.”But Bayazid said, “I am ready.”The master said to Bayazid, “Now remain silent. Unless I say something to you, you need not say anything.”It is said Bayazid remained silent for twelve years. He would come every day, sit by the side of the master, and wait. And it is said that just by waiting he achieved.One day, after twelve years, the master looked at him for the first time, and that was the moment, Bayazid remembers, when he was absolutely in waiting. Not a single thought was there. It was then that the master looked at him, and this was the recognition: “Now you are accepted.”Then another three years passed, and one day the master took Bayazid’s hand in his own. Bayazid remembers that that was the day when even the waiting had disappeared. Even that was a subtle thought: “Waiting, waiting, waiting – someday something is going to happen.” Even that had disappeared when the master took his hand in his own.Then three more years passed and one day the master called him near, took him near his heart, embraced him and said, “Now you can go.” These were the first words uttered: “Now you can go.”This is surrender.And Bayazid remembers: “That was the moment when I was so totally one with existence, with the present moment, that the master had disappeared. I was sitting by his side; he was no longer there – no one was there. Simply, existence was there. That was the moment the master called me near, embraced me, and said, ‘Now you can go.’” This is surrender – one-way.But when disciples come to a master, in the beginning they fall in love, not in surrender. And they call that love surrender. That creates problems because love is not surrender. Surrender is a higher state – totally, qualitatively different: undemanding, nonpossessive, not asking for anything, unconditional. But it is natural that surrender is not known to you, while love is a natural phenomenon. First love stirs you. And if the other person is not in a love need, only then can he bring your love toward surrender.It will depend on how much you resist. You can resist your whole life: then it will not happen. And no master can do anything unless you are cooperating, no master can do anything unless you allow, because no master can be aggressive. If you are open, he can enter; if you are nonresistant, he can change and transform you.Surrender is the easiest way to be transformed. All other ways are difficult, take a long time. If you can put yourself aside, then the master can immediately enter in you and can change your total being. But no master can be aggressive. Against your will nothing can be done. Surrender means that you are cooperative – totally! Whatsoever is done, you will cooperate. In the West it has never existed; even Jesus’ followers, the twelve apostles, were not really surrendered.On the last night, when Jesus was going to be caught by the enemies, and the rumor was that he was going to be crucified, killed, murdered, Peter said, “I will follow you wherever you go.”Jesus laughed and said, “Before the sun rises in the morning you will have denied me three times.”And it happened so. Jesus was caught. It was dark and the people who had caught him, the enemies, started taking him away somewhere. Peter followed. Someone saw his face. They had lit torches so someone saw his face. Peter looked like a stranger because those in the group were known to each other, so someone said, “Who are you? Are you a follower of Jesus?”He said, “No, I don’t know him at all.”And Jesus looked back and said, “You have denied me already.”On the last night, when he was departing, the disciples asked him, “We know that soon we will enter the kingdom of God. You will sit at God’s right hand because you are his only begotten son, but it will be good if you can tell us where we twelve will be sitting. What will be our positions?”This is not surrender. This is not surrender at all. They are ambitious, they have egos, and they are thinking in terms of greed and contract. Jesus could not get surrendered disciples. Because of that, Christianity went against him. It carries the name of Christ, but it does not belong to Christ at all. It is absolutely against him because only surrendered disciples can carry the real message, the authentic message. Those who are not surrendered will distort it. So it can be said now the pope is the most anti-Christ person in the world. The concept of surrender is Eastern.Someone said to Buddha one day, “You have ten thousand monks around you. How many of them have become buddhas – enlightened?” Buddha said, “So many.”So the person asked, “If so many have become enlightened among these ten thousand monks, then why don’t they shine like you? Why are they not known like you? Why are they not worshipped and adored like you? Why have they not become godmen?”So Buddha said, “They are just waiting for my permission – just waiting. If I tell them to, they will disclose themselves. They are surrendered disciples. If I say, they will disclose themselves – they are just waiting for me. If I don’t say anything, they will dissolve into the cosmos without uttering a single word.”This is something absolutely different which has not existed anywhere else. The East has come to create surrender, the phenomenon of surrender, out of the elements of love. But it is a new synthesis, it is a new phenomenon. It is not natural. Love is natural: surrender is supernatural. It is something new which doesn’t come out of evolution itself. It has been created by superconscious beings. It is a new phenomenon, it is a creation.The last question:Osho,I am deeply under the impression that unknown forces control my every thought and action. I feel like a puppet being manipulated by unseen strings. It is as if I am being tested from moment to moment. Still, I am unaware of this and don't know whether I am making things up. Even this question seems arranged by another force beyond my doing and control. Please explain what this means.This is so clear, there is no need for any explanation. This is not a question – just a statement of fact. And this is good. If you really feel that you are a puppet, you don’t need to do anything else. If you really feel that you are in the hands of some greater force, you are no more. And this is what is needed – to be no more.But I think when you say that you feel like a puppet there is a little condemnation in it. You don’t feel good about feeling like a puppet. But still you are. Who is feeling like a puppet? If you are really a puppet, then who is it that is feeling like a puppet? Who can feel, who is there to feel? You will be a puppet and there ends everything.So do one thing: drop this idea that you are a puppet. Simply be aware of the cosmic forces around you. You are nothing – not even a puppet – just a crossing point of so many forces, just a crossroads of so many forces passing. And because so many forces pass, a point arises. Just at the crossing, a point arises. If you draw many lines crossing each other, a point will arise. That point becomes your ego and you feel that you are.You are not. Only the cosmos is. You are not even like a puppet: that too is carrying the ego in a new form. And because the ego is being carried, it feels a little condemnation about the whole situation.Be ecstatic that you are not, because with the disappearance of you all misery disappears. With the disappearance of the ego there is no hell. You are freed – freed from yourself. Then there are only cosmic forces working eternally. You don’t exist anywhere, not even like a puppet. If this can go deep in you, you have arrived. You have come to the real thing all religions want you to come to. You have touched the core – the very ground.But it is difficult. You may be imagining it; you may be making it up really. It is very difficult. You can think it, but thinking will not help unless you feel it, unless it becomes a realization. It can happen only through deep meditation; otherwise it cannot happen. Only in meditation can you come to a point where you feel, “Everything is happening and I am not the doer.” And not even that you are not the doer: you are simply not there; things are happening in a space. You have become a space and things are happening there – and you are not there.This can happen only when all your thoughts cease and your being becomes unclouded – unclouded by thoughts. You exist only in that pure existence; you can feel this. But if you feel that this is happening, it is a good sign. Move ahead and drop that puppet also; don’t carry it. When you are no more, why carry a puppet? Drop that puppet also. Be free totally from the ego.This is why I am here – to make you completely free of the ego. That is why I say to jump, to dance, to sing, to be ecstatic, like a madman – because if you can do this the ego cannot exist, because the ego always exists as a controller. If you don’t control anything, it disappears. It is a function of control.When you start dancing, the ego says, “What are you doing? You will look foolish. Such an intelligent man like you, dancing like a primitive?” The ego will say, “Don’t do it. Control yourself!” If you control, the ego remains. Be uncontrolled; don’t listen to this controlling force. Just allow yourself for the first time to be simply alive without any control and immediately you will feel that the ego is not there. Existence is there, forces are there, but the ego is not there.To me, to exist uncontrolled is the only discipline. If you can exist uncontrolled, you have attained to the highest discipline possible. If you don’t control yourself and there is order, then this order doesn’t belong to you. This order comes from the higher sources. If you discipline yourself, then you are the only source of your life. Then you are cut off from the cosmic source. Drop yourself completely.I will tell you one anecdote, and then we will try this dropping.One day, a king came to Buddha with a very precious diamond in one hand and a lotus flower in the other. He thought that Buddha might not like the diamond because he had renounced all riches, so he brought the lotus flower in order not to take a chance. He would have liked to present the diamond. It was rare; it belonged only to him. That was the point really; Buddha was not the point. He was going to present Buddha with a diamond that no one else could present. And then it would be known all over the world that this king had presented Buddha with such a precious thing.That was the point; Buddha was just an excuse. But Buddha might not like the diamond, he might not accept, so he brought a lotus flower. That too was rare because this was not the season for it. It was unseasonal.He came before Buddha with his diamond in his right hand. Buddha, just seeing him, said, “Drop it!”The man understood that he didn’t like it, so he dropped the diamond on the ground. Then he brought the lotus flower in his left hand and Buddha said, “Drop that also!” So he dropped it.Then he brought his empty folded hands. Buddha, for a third time, said, “Drop that also.”Now he had nothing to drop, so he looked puzzled, confused. Buddha said, “Don’t think – drop that also.”Then suddenly he understood that Buddha was not saying to drop the diamond or the flower, but the ego which brought the diamond and the flower.He fell down at Buddha’s feet, and Buddha said to the assembly, “This man is a man of understanding.”When he arose, when he stood back, he was a different man – altogether different. The old had simply disappeared. The man who had fallen at Buddha’s feet was no more; a new man had come up. What had changed? The ego.Now get ready, and drop it!

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Tantra Supreme Understanding 01-10Category: TANTRA

Tantra Supreme Understanding 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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In his Song of Mahamudra, Tilopa says:Mahamudra is beyond all words and symbols, but for you, Naropa,earnest and loyal, must this be said.The void needs no reliance, Mahamudra rests on naught. Without making an effort, but remaining loose and natural, one can break the yoke thus gaining liberation.The experience of the ultimate is not an experience at all because the experiencer is lost. And when there is no experiencer, what can be said about it? Who will say it? Who will relate the experience? When there is no subject, the object also disappears; the banks disappear, only the river of experience remains. Knowledge is there, but the knower is not.That has been the problem for all the mystics. They reach the ultimate, but they cannot relate it to those who are following. They cannot relate it to others who would like to have an intellectual understanding. They have become one with it. Their whole being relates it, but no intellectual communication is possible. They can give it to you if you are ready to receive; they can allow it to happen in you if you also allow it, if you are receptive and open. But words won’t do, symbols won’t help; theories and doctrines are of no use at all.The experience is such that it is more like an experiencing than like an experience. It is a process, and it begins, but it never ends. You enter it, but you never possess it. It is like a drop dropping into the ocean, or the ocean itself dropping into the drop. It is a deep merger, it is oneness: you simply melt away into it. Nothing is left behind, not even a trace, so who will communicate? Who will come back to the world of the valley? Who will come back to this dark night to tell you?All the mystics all over the world have always felt impotent as far as communication is concerned. Communion is possible, but not communication. This has to be understood from the very beginning. Communion is a totally different dimension: two hearts meet; it is a love affair. Communication is from head to head; communion is from heart to heart, communion is a feeling. Communication is knowledge: only words are given, only words are said, and only words are taken and understood. And words are such… The very nature of words is so dead that nothing alive can be related through them. Even in ordinary life – leave aside the ultimate – even in ordinary experiencing when you have a peak moment, an ecstatic moment, when you really feel something and become something, it becomes impossible to relate it in words.In my childhood I used to go to the river early in the morning. It is a small village. The river is very, very lazy, as if not flowing at all, and in the morning when the sun has not yet arisen, you cannot see whether it is flowing, it is so lazy and silent. In the morning when there is nobody – the bathers have not come yet – it is tremendously silent. Even the birds are not singing in the early morning, no sound, just a soundlessness pervades. And the smell of the mango trees hangs all over the river.I used to go there, to the furthest corner of the river, just to sit, just to be there. There was no need to do anything, just being there was enough; it was such a beautiful experience to be there. I would take a bath, I would swim, and when the sun rose I would go to the other shore, to the vast expanse of sand, and dry myself there under the sun, and lie there and sometimes even go to sleep.When I came back, my mother used to ask, “What have you been doing the whole morning?”I would say, “Nothing,” because actually, I had not been doing anything.And she would say, “How is it possible? For hours you have not been here, how is it possible that you have not been doing anything? You must have been doing something.” And she was right, but also I was not wrong.I was not doing anything at all. I was just there being with the river, not doing anything, allowing things to happen. If I felt like swimming – remember if I felt like swimming – I would swim, but it was not a doing on my part, I was not forcing anything. If I felt like going to sleep, I would go. Things were happening, but there was no doer. And my first experiences of satori started near that river; not doing anything, simply being there, millions of things happened.But she would insist, “You must have been doing something.”So I would say, “Okay, I took a bath and I dried myself in the sun,” and then she was satisfied. But I was not because what happened there in the river is not expressed by the words “I took a bath”; it looks so poor and pale. Playing with the river, floating in the river, swimming in the river, was such a deep experience. To simply say, “I took a bath,” makes no sense, or just to say, “I went there, had a walk on the bank, sat there,” conveys nothing.Even in ordinary life you feel the futility of words. And if you don’t feel the futility of words, that shows that you have not been alive at all, that shows that you have lived very superficially. If whatsoever you have been living can be conveyed by words, it means you have not lived at all.When for the first time something starts happening which is beyond words, life has happened to you, life has knocked at your door. And when the ultimate knocks at your door, you have simply gone beyond words: you become dumb, you cannot speak, not even a single word is formed inside. Whatsoever you say looks so pale, so dead, so meaningless, without any significance. It seems that you are doing injustice to the experience which has happened to you. Remember this because Mahamudra is the last, the ultimate experience.Mahamudra means a total orgasm with the universe. If you have loved somebody, and sometimes you have felt a melting and merging, the two are no longer two. The bodies remain separate, but something between the bodies makes a bridge, a golden bridge, and the twoness inside disappears; one life energy vibrates at both the poles. If it has happened to you, only then can you understand what Mahamudra is: millions and millions times deeper, millions and millions times higher is Mahamudra. It is a total orgasm with the whole, with the universe. It is melting into the source of being.And this is The Song of Mahamudra. It is beautiful that Tilopa has called it a song. You can sing it, but you cannot say it; you can dance it, but you cannot say it. It is such a deep phenomenon that singing may convey a tiny, small part of it – not what you sing, but the way you sing it.Many mystics have simply danced after their ultimate experience; they could not do anything else. They were saying something through their whole being and body all together: body, mind, soul, and everything involved in it. They were dancing; those dances were not ordinary dances. In fact, all dancing was born because of these mystics; it was a way to relate the ecstasy, the happiness, the bliss. Something of the unknown has penetrated into the known, something of the beyond has come to the earth – what else can you do? You can dance it; you can sing it. This is a song of Mahamudra.Who will sing it? Tilopa is no more. The orgasmic feeling itself is singing. It is not a song of Tilopa; Tilopa is no more. The experience itself is vibrating and singing. Hence The Song of Mahamudra: the song of ecstasy, ecstasy itself singing it. Tilopa has nothing to do; Tilopa is not there at all, Tilopa has melted. When the seeker is lost, only then is the goal achieved. Only when the experiencer is no longer there, is the experience there. Seek and you will miss it because through your seeking, the seeker will be strengthened. Don’t seek and you will find it. The very seeking, the very effort, becomes a barrier because the more you seek, the more the ego, the seeker, is strengthened. Do not seek!This is the deepest message of this whole Song of Mahamudra: do not seek, just remain as you are, don’t go anywhere else. Nobody ever reaches God; nobody can because you don’t know the address. Where will you go? Where will you find God? There is no map, there is no way, and there is nobody to say where it is. No, nobody ever reaches God. It is always the reverse: God comes to you. Whenever you are ready, he knocks at your door; he seeks you whenever you are ready. And the readiness is nothing but receptivity. When you are completely receptive and there is no ego, you become a hollow temple with nobody in it.Tilopa says in the song, become like a hollow bamboo: nothing inside. And suddenly, the moment you are a hollow bamboo, the divine lips are on you, the hollow bamboo becomes a flute and the song starts – this is The Song of Mahamudra. Tilopa has become a hollow bamboo, the divine has come and the song has started. It is not Tilopa’s song; it is the song of the ultimate experience itself.Let me say something about Tilopa before we enter this beautiful phenomenon. Nothing much is known about Tilopa because nothing in fact can be known about such persons. They don’t leave a trace. They don’t become a part of history. They exist by the side, they are not part of the main traffic where the whole of humanity is moving; they don’t move there. The whole of humanity moves through desiring, and people like Tilopa move into desirelessness. They simply move away from the main traffic of humanity where history exists.The more they go away from the traffic, the more mythological they become. They exist like a myth. They are no longer events in time, and this is as it should be because they move beyond time, they live beyond time; they live in eternity. They simply disappear from this dimension of our common humanity; they evaporate. We remember only that moment when they are evaporating; for only that long are they a part of us. That’s why nothing much is known about Tilopa, about who he is.Only this song exists. This is his gift, and the gift was given to his disciple, Naropa. These gifts cannot be given to anybody unless a deep love intimacy exists. One has to be capable to receive such gifts. This song has been given to Naropa, his disciple. Before this song was given to Naropa, Naropa was tested in millions of ways: his faith, his love, and trust. When it became known that nothing like doubt exists in him, not even a tiny part of doubt, when his heart was totally full with trust and love, then this song was given.I am also here to sing a song, but it can be given to you only when you are ready. And your readiness means that doubt should simply disappear from the mind; it should not be suppressed, you should not try to defeat it because defeated it will remain in you, suppressed it will remain part of your unconscious and it will go on affecting you. Don’t fight your doubting mind; don’t suppress it. Rather, on the contrary, simply bring more and more energy into trust. Simply be indifferent to your doubting mind; nothing else can be done.Indifference is the key: you are simply indifferent. It is there; accept it. Bring your energies more and more toward trust and love because it is all the same energy. The energy which becomes doubt is the same as that which becomes trust. Remain indifferent to doubt. The moment you are indifferent your cooperation is broken; you are not feeding it – because it is through attention that anything is fed. If you pay attention to your doubt, even if you are against it, paying attention to it is dangerous because the very attention is food; that is how you cooperate with it. One has to be just indifferent, neither for nor against: don’t be for doubt; don’t be against doubt.So, now you will have to understand three words. One word is doubt, another word is belief, and the third word is trust or faith, known in the East as shraddha. Doubt is a negative attitude toward anything. Whatsoever is said, first you look at it negatively. You are against it, and you will find reasons, rationalizations to support your negativity. Then there is the mind of belief. It is just like the mind of doubt only standing upside down; there is not much difference. This mind looks at things positively and tries to find reasons, rationalizations to support it, to be for it. The mind that doubts suppresses belief; the mind that believes suppresses doubt. But they are both of the same stuff; the quality is not different.Then there is a third mind, whose doubting has simply disappeared. And when doubt disappears, belief disappears. Faith is not belief; it is love. Faith is not belief because it is not halfhearted; it is total. Faith is not belief because there is no doubt in it, so how can you believe? Faith is not a rationalization at all: neither for nor against, neither this nor that. Faith is a trusting, a deep trusting: love. You don’t find any rationalizations for it; it simply is so.So what to do? Don’t create belief against faith. Just be indifferent to both belief and doubt, and bring your energies toward more and more love. Love more, love unconditionally. Not only love me, because that is not possible; if you love, you simply love more. If you love, you simply exist in a more loving way – not only toward the master but toward everything that exists around you: toward the trees and the stones and the sky and the earth. You, your being, your very quality of being becomes a love phenomenon. Then trust arises and only in such a trust can a gift like The Song of Mahamudra be given. When Naropa was ready, Tilopa gave this gift.So remember, with a master you are not on a head trip. Doubt and belief are all head trips. With a master you are on a “heart trip.” And the heart doesn’t know what doubt is, the heart doesn’t know what belief is; the heart simply knows trust. The heart is just like a small child. The small child clings to the father’s hand, and wherever the father is going the child goes, neither trusting nor doubting; the child is undivided. Doubt is half; belief is half. A child is still total, whole; he simply goes with his father wherever he is going. When a disciple becomes just like a child, only then can these gifts of the highest peak of consciousness be given.When you become the deepest valley of receptivity, then the highest peaks of consciousness can be given to you. Only a valley can receive a peak. A disciple should be absolutely feminine, receptive, like a womb. Only then does such a phenomenon happen as is going to happen in this song.Tilopa is the master, Naropa is the disciple, and Tilopa says:Mahamudra is beyond all words and symbols, but for you, Naropa,earnest and loyal, must this be said.It is beyond words and symbols, all words and all symbols. Then how can it be said? If it is really beyond all words and symbols, then how can it be said? Then is there any way? Yes, there is a way; if there is a Naropa, there is a way. If there is really a disciple, there is a way. It depends on the disciple whether the way will be found or not.If the disciple is so receptive that he has no mind of his own, he does not judge whether it is right or wrong. He has no mind of his own, he has surrendered his mind to the master, he is simply receptivity, an emptiness ready to welcome whatsoever is given unconditionally; then words and symbols are not needed, then something can be given. You can listen to it between the words, you can read between the lines, then words are just an excuse. The real thing happens just by the side of the words.A word is just a trick, a device. The real thing follows the words like a shadow. If you are too much of the mind, you will listen to the words, and then it cannot be communicated. But if you are not a mind at all, then the subtle shadows that follow the words – very subtle, only the heart can see them, invisible shadows, invisible ripples of consciousness, vibes, then communion is immediately possible.Remember this, says Tilopa: …but for you, Naropa, earnest and loyal, must this be said. That which cannot be said, must be said for a disciple. That which cannot be said, which is absolutely invisible, must be made visible for the disciple. It depends not only on the master; it depends even more on the disciple. Tilopa was fortunate to find a Naropa. There have been a few unfortunate masters who never found a disciple like Naropa. So whatsoever they had gained disappeared with them because there was nobody to receive it.Sometimes masters have traveled thousands of miles to find a disciple. Tilopa himself went from India to Tibet to find Naropa, to find a disciple. Tilopa wandered all over India and couldn’t find a man of that quality who would receive such a gift, who would appreciate such a gift, who would be able to absorb it, to be reborn through it. Once Naropa received the gift, he became totally transformed. Then Tilopa is reported to have said to him, “Now go and find your own Naropa.”Naropa was also fortunate in that way, he found a disciple whose name was Marpa. Marpa was also very fortunate; he found a disciple whose name was Milarepa. But then the tradition disappeared, then there were no more disciples of that great caliber. Many times religion has come to the earth and disappeared; again many times will it come and disappear. A religion cannot become a church; a religion cannot become a sect. A religion depends on personal communication, on personal communion. The religion of Tilopa existed for only four generations: from Naropa to Milarepa, then it disappeared.Religion is just like an oasis: the desert is vast, and sometimes, in tiny parts of the desert, an oasis appears. While it lasts, seek it; and while it is there, drink of it – it is very, very rare.Jesus says many times to his disciples, “I am here a little while longer and while I am here, eat me, drink me. Don’t miss this opportunity,” because then thousands of years…and a man like Jesus may not be there. The desert is vast. The oasis sometimes appears and disappears because the oasis comes from the unknown; it needs an anchor on this earth. If the anchor is not there, it cannot remain here. Naropa is an anchor.I would like to say the same to you, “While I am here a little while longer, don’t miss the opportunity.” And you can miss it in trivial things. You can remain occupied with nonsense, with mental garbage. You can go on thinking for and against, and the oasis will soon disappear. You can think for and against later on. Right now drink of it because afterward there will be many lives during which to think for and against, then there will be no hurry for it. But while it lasts, drink of it!Once you are drunk with a Jesus or a Naropa you are totally transformed. The transformation is very, very easy and simple; it is a natural process. All that is needed is to become the soil and receive the seed, to become a womb and receive the seed.Mahamudra is beyond all words and symbols, but for you, Naropa, earnest and loyal, must this be said. It cannot be uttered, it is unutterable, but it has to be said for a Naropa. Wherever a disciple is ready, the master appears, has to appear. Wherever there is a deep need, it has to be fulfilled. The whole existence responds to your deepest need, but the need must be there; otherwise you can pass a Tilopa, a Buddha, a Jesus and may not even be able to see that you passed them.Tilopa lived in this country. Nobody listened to him – and he was ready to give the ultimate gift. What happened? And it has happened in this country many times – there must be something behind it. It has happened more in this country than anywhere else because more Tilopas have been born here. But why does it happen that a Tilopa has to go to Tibet? Why does it happen that a Bodhidharma has to go to China?This country knows too much, this country has become too much in the head. That’s why it is difficult to find a heart: the country of brahmins and pundits, the country of great knowers, philosophers. They know all the Vedas, all the Upanishads; they can recite by memory all the scriptures – a country of heads. That’s why it has happened so many times.Even I feel – so many times I feel it – that whenever a brahmin comes here, it is difficult to communicate. A man who knows too much, becomes almost impossible because he knows without knowing. He has gathered many concepts, theories, doctrines, scriptures. It is just a burden on his consciousness; it is not a flowering. It has not happened to him; it is all borrowed, and all that is borrowed is rubbish, rot. Throw it away as soon as you can.Only that which happens to you is true. Only that which flowers in you is true. Only that which grows in you is true and alive. Remember, always avoid borrowed knowledge.Borrowed knowledge becomes a trick of the mind; it hides ignorance, it never destroys it. The more you are surrounded by knowledge, deep inside at the center, at the very root of your being, is ignorance and darkness. And a man of knowledge, borrowed knowledge, is almost closed within his own knowledge; you cannot penetrate him. It is difficult to find his heart; he himself has lost all contact with his heart. So it is not incidental that a Tilopa has to go to Tibet, a Bodhidharma to China. A seed has to travel so far, not finding soil here.Remember this because it is easy to become too addicted to knowledge. It is an addiction; it is a drug. LSD and marijuana are not so dangerous. And in a way they are similar because marijuana gives you a glimpse of something which is not there; it gives you a dream of something, which is absolutely subjective, it gives you a hallucination. Knowledge is the same: it gives you a hallucination of knowing. You start feeling that you know because you can recite the Vedas, you know because you can argue, you know because you have a very, very logical and keen mind. Don’t be a fool! Logic has never led anybody to truth.A rational mind is just a game. All arguments are juvenile. Life exists without any argument, and truth needs no proofs; it needs only your heart, not arguments, but your love, your trust, your readiness to receive.Mahamudra is beyond all words and symbols, but for you, Naropa,earnest and loyal, must this be said.The void needs no reliance, Mahamudra rests on naught. Without making an effort, but remaining loose and natural, one can break the yoke thus gaining liberation.You cannot find more significant words ever uttered. Try to understand every nuance of what Tilopa is trying to say.The void needs no reliance… If there is something, it needs a support; it needs reliance. But if there is nothing, emptiness, there is no need for any support. And this is the deepest realization of all the knowers: that your being is a non-being. To say it is a being is wrong because it is not some thing, it is not like some thing. It is like nothing: a vast emptiness, with no boundaries to it. It is an anatma, a no-self; it is not a self inside you. All feelings of self are false. All identifications, “I am this and that,” are false.When you come to the ultimate, when you come to your deepest core, you suddenly know that you are neither this nor that; you are no one. You are not an ego; you are just a vast emptiness. And sometimes if you sit, close your eyes and just feel who you are – where are you? Go deeper and you may become afraid because the deeper you go, the deeper you feel that you are nobody, a nothingness. That’s why people become so scared of meditation. It is a death. It is a death of the ego, and the ego is just a false concept.Now physicists have come to the same truth through their scientific research deepening into the realm of matter. What Buddha, Tilopa and Bodhidharma reached through their insight, science has been discovering in the outside world also. Now they say there is no substance, substance is a parallel concept of self.A rock exists; you feel that it is very substantial. You can hit somebody’s head and blood will come out, the man may even die; it is very substantial. But ask the physicists; they say it is a “no-substance,” there is nothing in it. They say that it is just an energy phenomenon: many energy currents crisscrossing on this rock give it a feeling of substance. Just as you draw many lines crisscrossing on a piece of paper, where many lines cross a point, a point arises. The point was not there, two lines cross and a point arises, many lines cross and a big point arises. Is that point really there, or do lines crossing just give an illusion of a point being there?Physicists say that energy currents crisscrossing create matter. If you ask what these energy currents are, they are not material; they have no weight; they are nonmaterial. Nonmaterial lines crisscrossing give an illusion of a material thing: very substantial like a rock.Buddha achieved this illumination twenty-five centuries before Einstein: that inside there is nobody, only energy lines crisscrossing give you a feeling of the self. Buddha used to say that the self is just like an onion: you peel it; one layer comes off, another layer is there. You go on peeling, layer by layer, and what remains finally? The whole onion is peeled, and you find nothing inside.Man is just like an onion. You peel layers of thought, feeling, and finally, what do you find? Nothing. This nothingness needs no support. This nothingness exists by itself. That’s why Buddha says there is no God; there is no need for a God because God is a support. Buddha says there is no creator because there is no need to create nothingness. This is one of the most difficult concepts to understand, unless you realize it.That’s why Tilopa says: Mahamudra is beyond all words and symbols… Mahamudra is an experience of nothingness; simply, you are not, and when you are not, then who is there to suffer? Who is there to be in pain and anguish? Who is there to be depressed and sad, and who is there to be happy and blissful? Buddha says that if you feel you are blissful you will become again a victim of suffering because you are still there. When you are not, completely not, utterly not, then there is no suffering and no bliss – and this is the real bliss. Then you cannot fall back. To attain nothingness is to attain all.My whole effort with you is also to lead you toward nothingness, to lead you to a total vacuum. The void needs no reliance, Mahamudra rests on naught. Without making an effort, but remaining loose and natural, one can break the yoke thus gaining liberation.The first thing to understand is that the concept of self is created by the mind; there is no self in you.It happened…A great Buddhist, a man of enlightenment, was invited by a king to teach him. The name of the Buddhist monk was Nagasen, and the king was a viceroy of Alexander. When Alexander went back from India, he left Minander as his viceroy here; his Indian name is Milanda. Milanda asked Nagasen to come and teach him. He was really interested and he had heard many stories about Nagasen. And many rumors had come to the court: “This is a rare phenomenon! Rarely it happens that a man flowers, and this man has flowered. He has an aroma of something unknown around him, a mysterious energy. He walks on the earth, but he is not of the earth.” He became interested; he invited him.The messenger who went to Nagasen came back very puzzled because Nagasen said, “Yes, if he invites, Nagasen will come. But tell him there is no one like Nagasen. If he invites I will come, but tell him exactly that there is no one like ‘I am.’ I am no more.” The messenger was puzzled because if Nagasen is no more, then who will come?And Milanda was also puzzled. He said, “This man talks in puzzles. But let him come.”He was a Greek, this Milanda, and the Greek mind is basically logical.There are only two minds in the world, the Indian and the Greek. The Indian is illogical, and the Greek is logical. The Indian moves into the dark depths, wild depths where there are no boundaries, everything is vague, cloudy. The Greek mind walks on the logical, the straight, where everything is defined and classified. The Greek mind moves into the known. The Indian mind moves into the unknown, and even more into the unknowable. The Greek mind is absolutely rational; the Indian mind is absolutely contradictory. So if you find too many contradictions in me, don’t be bothered. It is the way: in the East, contradiction is the way to relate.Milanda said, “This man seems to be irrational, gone mad. If he is not, then how can he come? But let him come, I will see. I will prove that just by coming he is proving that he is.”Then Nagasen came. Milanda received him at the gate and the first thing he asked, he said, “I am puzzled; you have come and still you said that you are not.”Nagasen said, “Still I say. So let us settle it here.”A crowd gathered, the whole court came there, and Nagasen said, “Ask.”Milanda asked, “First tell me, if something is not, how can it come? In the first place it is not, then there is no possibility of its coming. And you have come. It is simple logic that you are.”Nagasen laughed and he said, “Look at this ratha” – the bullock cart on which he had come. He said, “Look at this. You call it a ratha, a cart.”Milanda said, “Yes.”Then he told his followers to remove the bullocks. The bullocks were removed and Nagasen asked, “Are these bullocks the cart?”Milanda said, “Of course not.”Then, by and by, everything from the cart was removed, every part. The wheels were removed, and he asked, “Are these wheels the cart?”And Milanda said, “Of course not!”Everything was removed and there was nothing, then Nagasen asked, “Where is the cart I had come in? We never removed the cart, and all that we have removed you confirmed is not the cart. Now where is the cart?”Nagasen said, “Just like this, Nagasen exists. Remove the parts and he will disappear.”Just crisscrossing lines of energy, remove the lines and the dot will disappear. The cart is just a combination of parts. You are also a combination of parts; the I is a combination of parts. Remove things and the I will disappear. That’s why when thoughts are removed from consciousness, you cannot say I because there is no I, just a vacuum is left. When feelings are removed, the self disappears completely. You are and yet are not: just an absence, with no boundaries, emptiness.This is the final attainment; this state is Mahamudra because only in that state can you have an orgasm with the whole. Now there is no boundary, no self exists; now there is no boundary to you to divide.The whole has no boundaries. You must become like the whole, only then can there be a meeting, a merger. When you are empty, you are without boundaries. Suddenly you become the whole. When you are not, you become the whole. When you are, you become an ugly ego. When you are not, you have all the expanse of existence for your being to be.But these are contradictions, so try to understand; become a little like Naropa, otherwise these words and symbols will not carry anything to you. Listen to me in trust, and when I say listen to me in trust I mean I have known this. This is so. I am a witness; I bear witness to it. This is so. It may not be possible to say it but that doesn’t mean that it is not. It may be possible to say something, that doesn’t mean that it is. You can say something which is not, and you may be incapable of saying something which is. I bear witness to it, but you will be able to understand me only if you are a Naropa, if you listen in trust.I am not teaching a doctrine. I would not have been at all concerned with Tilopa if this was not my own experience also. Tilopa has said it well: The void needs no reliance, Mahamudra rests on naught.Mahamudra rests on nothing. Mahamudra, the literal word, means the great gesture, or the ultimate gesture, the last that you can have, beyond which nothing is possible. Mahamudra rests on nothing. Be a nothing, and then all is attained. You die and you become godliness. You disappear, and you become the whole. Here the drop disappears, and there the ocean comes into existence.Don’t cling to yourself. That’s all you have been doing all your past lives: clinging, afraid that if you don’t cling to the ego, then when you look down, a bottomless abyss is there.That’s why we cling to tiny things, really trivial; we go on clinging to them. The clinging shows only that you are also aware of a vast emptiness inside. Something is needed to cling to, but your clinging is your samsara, is your misery. Leave yourself in the abyss, and once you leave yourself in the abyss, you become the abyss itself. Then there is no death because how can an abyss die? Then there is no end to it because how can nothingness end? Something can end – will have to end – only nothing can be eternal. Mahamudra rests on nothing.Let me explain it to you through some experience that you have had. When you love a person, you have to become a nothing. When you love a person, you have to become a no-self. That’s why love is so difficult. And that’s why Jesus says: “God is like love.” He knows something about Mahamudra because before he started teaching in Jerusalem, he had been to India. He had been to Tibet also. He met people like Tilopa and Naropa. He stayed in Buddhist monasteries. He learned about what it is that these people call nothingness. Then he tried to translate his whole understanding into Jewish terminology. There everything got messed up.You cannot translate Buddhist understanding into Jewish terminology. It is impossible because the whole of Jewish terminology depends on positive terms, and the Buddhist terminology depends on absolutely nihilistic terms: nothingness, emptiness. But here and there in Jesus’ words there are glimpses. He says: “God is love.” He is indicating something. What is the indication?When you love, you have to become nobody. If you remain somebody, then love never happens. When you love a person – even if for a single moment love happens and flows between two persons – there are two nothingnesses, not two persons. If you have ever had any experience of love, you can understand.Two lovers sitting by each other’s side, or two nothingnesses sitting together, only then is the meeting possible because barriers are broken, boundaries thrown away. The energy can move from here to there, there is no hindrance, and only in such a moment of deep love is orgasm possible.When two lovers are making love, and if they are both no-selves, nothingnesses, then orgasm happens. Then their body energy, their whole being, loses all identity; they are no longer themselves, they have fallen into the abyss. But this can happen only for a moment. Again they regain; again they start clinging. That’s why people also become afraid in love.In deep love, people are afraid of going mad or of dying, afraid of what will happen. The abyss opens its mouth, the whole of existence yawns, and you are suddenly there and you can fall into it. One becomes scared of love, then people remain satisfied with sex and they call their sex love.Love is not sex. Sex can happen in love, it can be a part, an integral part to it, but sex itself is not love; it is a substitute. You are trying to avoid love through sex. You are giving yourself a feeling that you are in love, and you are not moving into love. Sex is just like borrowed knowledge: giving a feeling of knowing without knowing, giving a feeling of love and loving without loving.In love you are not, the other is also not. Only then, suddenly, the two disappear. The same happens in Mahamudra. Mahamudra is a total orgasm with the whole of existence.That’s why in Tantra – and Tilopa is a tantric master – deep intercourse, orgasmic intercourse, between lovers is also called Mahamudra, and two lovers in a deep orgasmic state are pictured in Tantra temples, in Tantra books. That has become a symbol of the final orgasm.…Mahamudra rests on naught. Without making an effort, but remaining loose and natural… This is the whole method of Tilopa, and the whole method of Tantra: Without making an effort… because if you make an effort, the ego is strengthened. If you make an effort, you come in.So love is not an effort, you cannot make an effort to love. If you make an effort, there is no love. You flow into it, you don’t make an effort, you simply allow it to happen; you don’t make an effort. It is not a doing, it is a happening: …Without making an effort… And the same is the case with the total, the final; you don’t make an effort, you simply float with it: …but remaining loose and natural… This is the way, this is the very ground of Tantra.Yoga says make an effort, and Tantra says don’t make any effort. Yoga is ego-oriented, finally it will take the jump, but Tantra is from the very beginning non ego-oriented. Yoga, in the end, attains to such significance, such meaning, and such depth, that only in the end it says to its seeker, “Now drop the ego.” Tantra, from the very beginning, from the very first step…I would like to say it in this way, in such a way; where Yoga ends, Tantra starts. The highest peak of Yoga is the beginning of Tantra – and Tantra leads you to the ultimate goal. Yoga can prepare you for Tantra, that’s all, because the final thing is to be effortless: …loose and natural…What does Tilopa mean by: …loose and natural…? Don’t fight with yourself; be loose. Don’t try to make a structure around yourself of character, of morality. Don’t discipline yourself too much; otherwise your very discipline will become the bondage. Don’t create an imprisonment around you. Remain loose, floating, move with the situation; respond to the situation. Don’t move with a character jacket around you; don’t move with a fixed attitude. Remain loose like water, not fixed like ice. Remain moving and flowing; wherever nature leads you, go. Don’t resist, don’t try to impose anything on you, your being.But the whole society teaches you to impose something or other: be good, be moral, be this and that. Tantra is absolutely beyond society, culture and civilization. It says if you are too cultured you will lose all that is natural, and then you will be a mechanical thing, not floating, not flowing. So don’t force a structure around you, live moment to moment, live with alertness. This is a deep thing to be understood.Why do people try to create a structure around them? It is so that they don’t need alertness because if you have no character around you, you will need to be very, very aware because each moment a decision has to be taken. You don’t have a prefabricated decision; you don’t have an attitude. You have to respond to the situation. Something is there, and you are absolutely unprepared for it – you will have to be very, very aware.To avoid awareness people have created a trick, and the trick is character. Force yourself into a certain discipline so that whether you are aware or not, the discipline will take care of you. Make a habit of always saying the truth; make it a habit, then you need not be worried about it. Somebody asks, out of habit you will say the truth – but out of habit a truth is dead.Life is not so simple. Life is a very, very complex phenomenon. Sometimes a lie is needed and sometimes a truth can be dangerous – and one has to be aware. For example, if through your lie, somebody’s life is saved, and through your lie, nobody is harmed and somebody’s life is saved, what will you do? If you have a fixed mind that you have to be true, then you will kill life.Nothing is more valuable than life; no truth, nothing, is more valuable than life. And sometimes your truth can kill somebody’s life. What will you do? Just saving your own old pattern and habit, your own ego that, “I am a truthful man,” you will sacrifice a life. Being a truthful man, just to be that? This is too much, you are completely mad! If a life can be saved, even if people think that you are a liar, what is wrong in it? Why bother so much about what people say about you?It is difficult. It is not so easy to create a fixed pattern because life goes on moving and changing, and every moment there is a new situation and one has to respond to it. Respond with full awareness, that’s all. And let the decision come out of the situation itself, not prefabricated, not imposed. Don’t carry an inbuilt mind; just remain loose and aware and natural.This is how a real religious man is; otherwise, the so-called religious people are just dead. They act out of their habits, they go on acting out of their habits – this is conditioning, this is not freedom. Consciousness needs freedom.Be loose; remember this word as deeply as possible. Let it penetrate you. Be loose – so in every situation you can flow easily, water-like, as when water is poured into a glass, it takes the shape of the glass. It doesn’t resist, it doesn’t say, “This is not my form.” If the water is poured into a jar, into a jug, it takes the shape of that. It has no resistance; it is loose. Remain loose like water.Sometimes you will have to move south and sometimes north, you will have to change directions, according to the situation, you will have to flow. But if you know how to flow, it is enough. The ocean is not very far away if you know how to flow.So don’t create a pattern – and the whole society tries to create a pattern, and all the religions try to create a pattern. Only very few enlightened persons have been courageous enough to say the truth, the truth of: be loose and natural! If you are loose you will be natural, of course.Tilopa doesn’t say, “Be moral,” he says, “Be natural.” These are completely, diametrically opposite dimensions. A moral man is never natural, cannot be. If he feels angry, he cannot be angry because the morality doesn’t allow it. If he feels loving, he cannot be loving because the morality is there. It is always according to the morality that he acts; it is never according to his nature.I tell you, if you start moving according to moral patterns and not according to your nature, you will never reach the state of Mahamudra because it is a natural state, the highest peak of being natural. I tell you, if you feel angry, be angry – but perfect awareness has to be retained. Anger should not overpower your consciousness, that’s all.Let anger be there, let it happen, but be fully alert to what is happening. Remain loose, natural, aware, watching what is happening. By and by, you will see many things have simply disappeared; they don’t happen any more, and without making any effort on your part. You never tried to kill them and they have simply disappeared.When one is aware, anger by and by disappears. It becomes simply stupid – not bad remember because bad is a loaded value. It becomes simply stupid. It is not that because it is bad you don’t move into it, it is simply foolish; it is not a sin, but simply stupid. Greed disappears; it is stupid. Jealousy disappears; it is stupid.Remember this valuation. In morality, there is something good and something bad. In being natural, there is something wise and something stupid. A man who is natural is wise, not good. A man who is not natural is stupid, not bad. There is nothing bad and nothing good, only wise things and foolish things. If you are foolish you harm yourself and others, and if you are wise you don’t harm anybody – neither others, nor you. There is nothing like sin and there is nothing like virtue; wisdom is all. If you want to call it virtue, call it virtue. And ignorance is there; if you want to, call it sin. It is the only sin.So how to transform your ignorance into wisdom? That is the only transformation, and you cannot force it; it happens when you are loose and natural.…remaining loose and natural, one can break the yoke thus gaining liberation. One becomes totally free. It will be difficult in the beginning because the old habits will constantly be there, forcing you to do something. You would like to be angry but the old habit simply starts a smile on your face. There are people that, whenever they smile, you can be certain that they are angry. In their very smile, they show their anger. They are hiding something; a false smile spreads on their faces. These are the hypocrites.A hypocrite is an unnatural man: if anger is there, he will smile; if hate is there, he will show love; if he feels murderous, he will pretend compassion. A hypocrite is a perfect moralist – absolutely artificial, a plastic flower, ugly, of no use, not a flower at all, just a pretension.Tantra is the natural way. Be loose and natural! It will be difficult because the old habits have to be broken. It is difficult because you will have to live in a society of hypocrites. It will be difficult because everywhere you will find a conflict with the hypocrites, but one has to go through it. It will be arduous because there are many investments in false, artificial pretensions. You may feel completely alone, but this will be only a passing phase. Soon others will start feeling your authenticity, and remember, even authentic anger is better than a pretended smile because at least it is authentic. At least he is authentic, true to his being. Whatsoever is happening, you can rely on him that it is true. A man who cannot be authentically angry cannot be authentic at all.This is my observation: that true anger is beautiful and a false smile is ugly. And true hate has its own beauty, just like true love – because beauty is concerned with truth. Neither is it concerned with hate, nor with love – beauty is of the true. Truth is beautiful in whatsoever form. A truly dead man is more beautiful than a falsely alive man because at least the basic quality of being true is there.Mulla Nasruddin’s wife died and the neighbors gathered, but Mulla Nasruddin was standing there completely unaffected, as if nothing had happened. Neighbors started crying and weeping and they said, “What are you standing there for, Nasruddin? She is dead.”Nasruddin said, “Wait! She is such a liar – at least for three days I have to wait and see whether it is true or not.”Remember this, that beauty is of truth, authenticity. Become more authentic and you will have a flowering. And the more authentic you become, by and by you will feel many things are falling away of their own accord. You never made any effort to do it; they are falling of their own accord. And once you know the knack of it, then you become more and more loose, more and more natural, authentic.And, says Tilopa: …one can break the yoke thus gaining liberation.The liberation is not very far away; it is hidden just behind you. Once you are authentic and the door is open – but you are such a liar, you are such a pretender, you are such a hypocrite, you are so deeply false; that’s why you feel that the liberation is very, very far away. It is not! For an authentic being, liberation is just natural. It is as natural as anything.As water flows toward the ocean, as vapor rises toward the sky, as the sun is hot and the moon is cool, so for an authentic being, is liberation. It is nothing to be bragged about. It is not something you have to tell people that you have gained.When Lin Chi was asked, “What has happened to you? People say that you have become enlightened,” he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Happened? Nothing. I cut wood in the forest, and carry water to the ashram – carry water from the well, cut wood because the winter is approaching.” He shrugged his shoulders, a very meaningful gesture.He is saying, “Nothing has happened. What nonsense you are asking! It is natural: carrying water from the well, cutting wood in the forest. Life is absolutely natural.”Says Lin Chi, “When I feel sleepy, I go to sleep; and when I feel hungry, I eat. Life has become absolutely natural.”Liberation is you being perfectly natural. Liberation is not something to be bragged about, that you have attained something very great. It is nothing great; it is nothing extraordinary. It is just being natural, just being yourself.So what to do? Drop pretensions, drop hypocrisies, drop all that you have cultivated around your natural being, become natural. In the beginning it will be a very, very arduous thing, but only in the beginning. Once you get attuned to it, others will also start feeling something has happened to you because an authentic being is such a force, has such a magnetism. They will start feeling something has happened: “This man no longer moves as part of us, he has become totally different.” And you will not be at a loss because only artificial things will drop.Once the emptiness is created by throwing away artificial things, pretensions, masks – then the natural being starts flowing. It needs space. Be empty, loose and natural. Let that be the most fundamental principle in your life.Enough for today.

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Tantra Supreme Understanding 01-10Category: TANTRA

Tantra Supreme Understanding 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The song continues:If one sees naught when staring into space, if with the mind one then observes the mind, one destroys distinctions and reaches buddhahood.The clouds that wander through the sky have no roots, no home; nor do the distinctive thoughts floating through the mind. Once the self-mind is seen, discrimination stops.In space shapes and colors form, but neither by black nor white is space tinged. From the self-mind all things emerge, the mind by virtues and by vices is not stained.The root problem of all problems is mind itself. The first thing to be understood is what this mind is, of what stuff it is made, whether it is an entity or just a process, whether it is substantial, or just dreamlike. And unless you know the nature of the mind, you will not be able to solve any problems in your life.You may try hard, but if you try to solve single individual problems, you are bound to be a failure – that is absolutely certain – because in fact no individual problem exists: mind is the problem. If you solve this problem or that, it won’t help because the root remains untouched.It is just like cutting the branches of a tree, pruning the leaves, and not uprooting it. New leaves will come, new branches will sprout – even more than before; pruning helps a tree to become thicker. Unless you know how to uproot it, your fight is baseless; it is foolish. You will destroy yourself, not the tree.In fighting you will waste your energy, time, life, and the tree will go on becoming stronger and stronger, far thicker and more dense. And you will be surprised at what is happening: you are doing so much hard work, trying to solve this problem and that, and they go on growing, increasing. Even if one problem is solved, suddenly ten problems take its place.Don’t try to solve individual, single problems, there are none: mind itself is the problem. But mind is hidden underground; that’s why I call it the root, it is not apparent. Whenever you come across a problem the problem is above ground, you can see it; that’s why you are deceived by it.Always remember, the visible is never the root; the root always remains invisible, the root is always hidden. Never fight with the visible; otherwise you will fight with shadows. You may exhaust yourself, but there cannot be any transformation in your life, the same problems will crop up again and again and again. You can observe your own life and you will see what I mean. I am not talking about any theory of the mind, just the facticity of it. This is the fact: mind has to be solved.People come to me and ask, “How to attain a peaceful mind?” I say to them, “There exists nothing like that: peaceful mind. Never heard of it.”Mind is never peaceful; no-mind is peace. Mind itself can never be peaceful, silent. The very nature of the mind is to be tense, to be in confusion. Mind can never be clear, it cannot have clarity because mind is by nature confusion, cloudiness. Clarity is possible without mind, peace is possible without mind; silence is possible without mind, so never try to attain a silent mind. If you do, from the very beginning you are moving in an impossible dimension.So the first thing is to understand the nature of the mind, only then can something be done.If you watch, you will never come across any entity like mind. It is not a thing, it is just a process; it is not a thing, it is like a crowd. Individual thoughts exist, but they move so fast that you cannot see the gaps in between. The intervals cannot be seen because you are not very aware and alert; you need a deeper insight. When your eyes can look deep, you will suddenly see one thought, another thought, another thought – but no mind.Thoughts together, millions of thoughts, give you the illusion that mind exists. It is just like a crowd, millions of people standing in a crowd. Is there anything like a crowd? Can you find the crowd other than the individuals standing there? But they are standing together; their togetherness gives you the feeling that something like a crowd exists. Only individuals exist.This is the first insight into the mind. Watch, and you will find thoughts; you will never come across the mind. And if it becomes your own experience – not because I say it, not because Tilopa sings about it, no, that won’t be of much help – if it becomes your experience, if it becomes a fact of your own knowing, then suddenly many things start changing. Because you have understood such a deep thing about the mind, many things can follow.Watch the mind and see where it is, what it is. You will feel thoughts floating and there will be intervals. And if you watch long, you will see that intervals are more than the thoughts because each thought has to be separate from another thought; in fact, each word has to be separate from another word. The deeper you go, you will find more and more gaps, bigger and bigger gaps. A thought floats, then comes a gap where no thought exists; then another thought comes, another gap follows.If you are unconscious you cannot see the gaps; you jump from one thought to another, you never see the gap. If you become aware you will see more and more gaps. If you become perfectly aware, then miles of gaps will be revealed to you. And in those gaps, satoris happen. In those gaps the truth knocks at your door. In those gaps, the guest comes. In those gaps godliness is realized, or whatsoever way you like to express it. And when awareness is absolute, then there is only a vast gap of nothingness.It is just like clouds: clouds move. They can be so thick that you cannot see the sky hidden behind. The vast blueness of the sky is lost; you are covered with clouds. Then you go on watching: one cloud moves and another has not come into the vision yet, and suddenly a peek into the blueness of the vast sky.The same happens inside: you are the vast blueness of the sky, and thoughts are just like clouds hovering around you, filling you. But the gaps exist; the sky exists. To have a glimpse of the sky is satori, and to become the sky is samadhi. From satori to samadhi, the whole process is a deep insight into the mind, nothing else.Mind doesn’t exist as an entity – the first thing. Only thoughts exist.The second thing: the thoughts exist separate from you, they are not one with your nature; they come and go. You remain; you persist. You are like the sky: never comes, never goes, it is always there. Clouds come and go, they are momentary phenomena; they are not eternal. Even if you try to cling to a thought, you cannot retain it for long; it has to go, it has its own birth and death. Thoughts are not yours; they don’t belong to you. They come as visitors, guests, but they are not the host.Watch deeply, then you will become the host and thoughts will be the guests. And as guests they are beautiful, but if you forget completely that you are the host, and they become the hosts, then you are in a mess. This is what hell is. You are the master of the house, the house belongs to you, and guests have become the masters. Receive them, take care of them, but don’t get identified with them; otherwise, they will become the masters.The mind becomes the problem because you have taken thoughts so deeply inside you that you have completely forgotten the distance, that they are visitors, they come and go. Always remember that which abides: that is your nature, your Tao. Always be attentive to that which never comes and never goes, just like the sky. Change the gestalt, don’t be focused on the visitors, remain rooted in the host; the visitors will come and go.Of course, there are bad visitors and good visitors, but you need not be worried about them. A good host treats all the guests in the same way, without making any distinctions. A good host is just a good host: a bad thought comes and he treats the bad thought in the same way as he treats a good thought. It is not his concern that the thought is good or bad because once you make the distinction that this thought is good and that thought is bad, what are you doing? You are bringing the good thought nearer to yourself and pushing the bad thought further away. Sooner or later you will get identified with the good thought; the good thought will become the host. And any thought creates misery when it becomes the host because it is not the truth. The thought is a pretender and you get identified with it. Identification is the disease.Gurdjieff used to say that only one thing is needed: not to be identified with that which comes and goes. The morning comes, the noon comes, the evening comes, and they go; the night comes and again the morning. You abide – not as you because that too is a thought – as pure consciousness; not your name because that too is a thought; not your form because that too is a thought; not your body because one day you will realize that too is a thought. Just pure consciousness, with no name, no form, just the purity, just the formlessness and namelessness, just the very phenomenon of being aware – only that abides.If you get identified, you become the mind. If you get identified, you become the body. If you get identified, you become the name and the form – what Hindus call nama, rupa, name and form – then the host is lost. Then you forget the eternal and the momentary becomes significant. The momentary is the world; the eternal is divine.This is the second insight to be attained, that you are the host and thoughts are guests.The third thing, if you go on watching, will soon be realized. The third thing is that thoughts are foreign, intruders, outsiders. No thought is yours.They always come from without; you are just a passage. A bird comes into the house from one door, and flies out from another; just like that a thought comes into you and goes out of you.You go on thinking that thoughts are yours. Not only that, you fight for your thoughts, you say, “This is my thought, this is true.” You discuss, you debate; you argue about it, you try to prove “This is my thought.” No thought is yours, no thought is original – all thoughts are borrowed and not even secondhand because millions of people have claimed those same thoughts before you. Thought is just as outside as a thing.Somewhere the great physicist, Eddington, has said that the deeper science goes into matter, the more it becomes a realization that things are thoughts. That may be so. I am not a physicist, but from the other end I would like to tell you that Eddington may be true: that things look more and more like thoughts if you go deeper. If you go deeper into yourself, thoughts will look more and more like things. In fact, these are two aspects of the same phenomenon: a thing is a thought; a thought is a thing.When I say a thought is a thing, what do I mean? I mean that you can throw your thought just like a thing. You can hit somebody’s head with a thought just like a thing. You can kill a person through a thought just as you can throw a dagger. You can give your thought as a gift, or as an infection. Thoughts are things, they are forces, but they don’t belong to you. They come to you; they abide for a while in you and then they leave you. The whole universe is filled with thoughts and things. Things are just the physical part of thoughts, and thoughts are the mental part of things.Because of this fact, many miracles happen because thoughts are things. If a person continuously thinks about you and your welfare, it will happen because he is throwing a continuous force at you. That’s why blessings are useful, helpful. If you can be blessed by someone who has attained no-mind, the blessing is going to be true because a man who never uses thought accumulates thought energy, so whatsoever he says is going to be true.In all the Eastern traditions, before a person starts learning no-mind, there are techniques and much emphasis that he should stop being negative because if you once attain to no-mind and your trend remains negative, you can become a dangerous force. Before no-mind is attained, one should become absolutely positive. That is the whole difference between white and black magic.Black magic is nothing but when a man has accumulated thought energy without throwing out his negativity beforehand. And white magic is nothing but when a man has attained too much thought energy, and has based his total being on a positive attitude. The energy with negativity becomes black; the same energy with positivity becomes white. A thought is a great force; it is a thing.This will be the third insight. It has to be understood and watched within yourself.Sometimes it happens that you see your thought functioning as a thing, but just because of too much conditioning of materialism you think this may be just a coincidence. You neglect the fact, you simply don’t give any attention to it; you remain indifferent, you forget about it. But many times you know that sometimes you were thinking about the death of a certain person – and he dies. You think it is just a coincidence. Sometime you were thinking about a friend and a desire arose in you that it would be good if he comes – and he is at the door, knocking. You think it is a coincidence. It is not coincidence. In fact, there is nothing like coincidence, everything has its causality. Your thoughts go on creating a world around you.Your thoughts are things, so be careful with them. Handle them carefully! If you are not very conscious, you can create misery for yourself and for others – and you have done that. And remember, when you create misery for somebody, at the same time, unconsciously, you are creating misery for yourself because a thought is a double-edged sword. It simultaneously cuts you when it cuts somebody else.Just two or three years ago, an Israeli, Uri Geller, who had been working on thought energy, displayed his experiment on BBC television in England. He can bend anything just by thinking: somebody else keeps a spoon in his hand ten feet away from Uri Geller, and he just thinks about it – and the spoon bends immediately. You cannot bend it by your hand, and he bends it by his thought. But a very rare phenomenon happened on BBC television, even Uri Geller was not aware that it is possible.Thousands of people were watching the experiment in their homes. And when he did his experiment and bent things, in many people’s houses many things fell and became distorted – thousands of things all over England. The energy was as if broadcast. He was doing the experiment at a ten-foot distance and from the television screen in people’s homes, around the area of ten feet, many things happened: things became bent, fell down, became distorted. It was weird!Thoughts are things, and very, very forceful things. There is a woman in Soviet Russia, Mikhailovana. She can do many things to objects from far away; she can pull anything toward herself, just by thought. Russia is not a believer in occult things – a communist country, atheistic – so they have been working on Mikhailovana, on what is happening, in a scientific way. But when she does it, she loses almost two pounds in weight; in a half-hour experiment she loses two pounds. What does it mean?It means that through thoughts you are throwing energy – and you are continuously doing it. Your mind is a chatterbox. You are broadcasting things unnecessarily. You are destroying people around you; you are destroying yourself.You are a dangerous thing, and continuously broadcasting. Many things are happening because of you. And it is a great network. Every day the whole world goes on becoming more and more miserable because more and more people are on the earth and they are broadcasting more and more thoughts.The further back you go, the more and more peaceful you find the earth – less and less broadcasters. In the days of Buddha, or in the days of Lao Tzu, the world was very, very peaceful, natural; it was a heaven. Why? The population was very, very small – one thing. People were not thinking too much, they were more and more prone to feeling rather than thinking. And people were praying. In the morning, the first thing they would do would be a prayer. In the night, the last thing they would do was to pray. And throughout the whole day also, whenever they would find a moment, they would be praying inside.What is a prayer? Prayer is sending blessings to all. Prayer is sending your compassion to all. Prayer is creating an antidote of negative thoughts; it is positivity.This will be the third insight about thoughts, that they are things, forces, and you have to handle them very carefully.Ordinarily, not aware, you go on thinking anything. It is difficult to find a person who has not committed many murders in thought; difficult to find a person who has not been doing all sorts of sins and crimes inside the mind – and then these things happen. And remember, you may not murder, but your continuous thinking of murdering somebody may create the situation in which the person is murdered. Somebody may take your thought because there are weaker persons all around and thoughts flow like water: downward. If you think something continuously, someone who is a weakling may take your thought and go and kill a person.That’s why those who have known the inner reality of man say that whatsoever happens on the earth, everybody is responsible, everybody. Whatsoever happens in Vietnam, not only are the Nixons responsible, everybody who thinks is also responsible. Only one person cannot be held responsible, and that is the person who has no mind, otherwise everybody is responsible for everything that goes on. If the earth is a hell, you are a creator; you participate.Don’t go on throwing responsibility on others. You are also responsible; it is a collective phenomenon. The disease may bubble up anywhere, the explosion may happen millions, thousands of miles away from you – that doesn’t make any difference because thought is a non-spatial phenomenon, it needs no space.That’s why it travels fastest. Even light cannot travel so fast because even for light, space is needed. Thought travels fastest. In fact it takes no time to travel, space doesn’t exist for it. You may be here, thinking of something, and it happens in America. How can you be held responsible? No court can punish you, but in the ultimate court of existence you will be punished – you are already punished. That’s why you are so miserable.People come to me and they say, “We never do anything wrong to anybody, and still we are so miserable.” You may not be doing, you may be thinking, and thinking is subtler than doing. A person can protect himself from doing, but he cannot protect himself from thinking. From thinking everybody is vulnerable.No-thinking is a must if you want to be completely freed from sin, freed from crime, freed from all that goes on around you – and that is the meaning of a buddha.A buddha is a person who lives without the mind; then he’s not responsible. That’s why in the East we say that he never accumulates karma; he never accumulates any entanglements for the future. He lives, he walks, he moves, he eats, he talks; he is doing many things so he must accumulate karma because karma means activity. But in the East it is said even if a buddha kills, he will not accumulate karma. Why? And you, even if you don’t kill, will accumulate karma. Why?It is simple: whatsoever he is doing, he is doing without any mind in it. He is spontaneous; it is not activity. He is not thinking about it, it happens. He is not the doer. He moves like emptiness. He has no mind for it; he was not thinking to do it. But if existence allows it to happen, he allows it to happen. He no longer has the ego to resist, no longer the ego to do.That is the meaning of being empty and a no-self: just being a non-being, anatta, no-selfness. Then you accumulate nothing; then you are not responsible for anything that goes on around you, then you transcend.Each single thought is creating something for you and for others. Be alert!But when I say be alert, I don’t mean think good thoughts, no, because whenever you think good thoughts, by the side you are also thinking of bad thoughts. How can good exist without bad? If you think of love, just by the side, behind it, is hidden hate. How can you think about love without thinking about hate? You may not think consciously, love may be in the conscious layer of the mind, but hate is hidden in the unconscious – they move together.Whenever you think of compassion, you think of cruelty. Can you think of compassion without thinking of cruelty? Can you think of nonviolence without thinking of violence? In the very word nonviolence, violence enters; in the very concept it is there. Can you think of brahmacharya, celibacy, without thinking of sex? It is impossible because what will celibacy mean if there is no thought of sex? And if brahmacharya is based on the thought of sex, what type of brahmacharya is it?No, there is a totally different quality of being which comes by not thinking: not good, not bad, simply a state of no-thinking. You simply watch, you simply remain conscious, but you don’t think. And if some thought enters – it will enter because thoughts are not yours; they are just floating in the air. All around there is a noosphere, a thought sphere, all around: just as there is air, there is thought all around you, and it goes on entering on its own accord. It stops only when you become more and more aware. There is something in it: if you become more aware, a thought simply disappears, it melts because awareness is a greater energy than thought.Awareness is like fire to thought. It is just like you burn a lamp in a house and the darkness cannot enter. You put the light off, from everywhere darkness has entered; without taking a single minute, a single moment, it is there. When the light burns in the house, the darkness cannot enter. Thoughts are like darkness: they enter only if there is no light within. Awareness is fire: you become more aware – fewer and fewer thoughts enter.If you become really integrated in your awareness, thoughts don’t enter you; you have become an impenetrable citadel, nothing can penetrate you. Not that you are closed, remember; you are absolutely open, but just the very energy of awareness becomes your citadel. And when no thoughts can enter you, they will come and they will bypass you. You will see them coming, and simply, by the time they reach near you they turn. Then you can move anywhere, then you go to the very hell, nothing can affect you. This is what we mean by enlightenment.Now try to understand Tilopa’s sutra:If one sees naught when staring into space, if with the mind one then observes the mind, one destroys distinctions and reaches buddhahood.If one sees naught when staring into space… This is a method, a Tantra method: to look into space, into the sky, without seeing, to look with an empty eye. Looking, yet not looking for something: just an empty look.Sometimes you see in a madman’s eyes an empty look – and madmen and sages are alike in certain ways. A madman looks at your face, but you can see he is not looking at you. He just looks through you as if you are a glass thing, transparent; you are just in the way, he is not looking at you. And you are transparent for him: he looks beyond you, through you. He looks without looking at you; the “at” is not present; he simply looks.Look into the sky without looking for something because if you look for something a cloud is bound to come. “Something” means a cloud; “nothing” means the vast expanse of the blue sky. Don’t look for any object. If you look for an object, the very look creates the object: a cloud comes, and then you are looking at a cloud. Don’t look at the clouds. Even if there are clouds, don’t look at them – simply look; let them float, they are there. Suddenly a moment comes when you are attuned to this look of “not looking” – clouds disappear for you, only the vast sky remains. It is difficult because eyes are focused and your eyes are tuned to look at things.Look at a small child the first day he is born. He has the same eyes as a sage, or like a madman – his eyes are loose and floating. He can bring both his eyes to meet at the center; he can allow them to float to the far corners, they are not yet fixed. His system is liquid, his nervous system is not yet a structure; everything is floating. So a child looks without looking at things – it is a mad look. Watch a child; the same look is needed from you because again you have to attain a second childhood.Watch a madman because the madman has fallen out of the society. Society means the fixed world of roles, games. A madman is mad because he has no fixed role now, he has fallen out: he is the perfect drop out. A sage is also a perfect drop out in a different dimension. He is not mad; in fact he is the only sane possibility. But the whole world is mad, fixed – that’s why a sage also looks mad. Watch a madman, that is the look which is needed.In old schools of Tibet they always had a madman, just for the seekers to watch his eyes. A madman was very much valued. He was sought after because a monastery could not exist without a madman. He became an object to observe. The seekers would observe the madman, his eyes, and then they would try to look at the world like the madman. Those days were beautiful.In the East, madmen have never suffered like they are suffering in the West. In the East they were valued: a madman was something special. The society took care of him; he was respected because he has certain elements of the sage, certain elements of the child. He is different from the so-called society, culture, civilization; he has fallen out of it. Of course, he has fallen down; a sage falls up, a madman falls down – that’s the difference – but both have fallen out. And they have similarities. Watch a madman, and then try to let your eyes become unfocused.In Harvard they were doing an experiment a few months ago and they were surprised, they couldn’t believe it. They were trying to find out whether the world, as we see it, is so or not, because many things have surfaced within the last few years.We see the world not as it is, we see it as we expect it to be seen, we project something onto it.It happened that a great ship reached a small island in the Pacific for the first time. The people of the island didn’t see it – nobody! And the ship was so vast, but the people were attuned, their eyes were attuned to small boats. They had never known such a big ship; they had never seen such a thing. Simply, their eyes would not catch the glimpse, their eyes simply refused.In Harvard they tried on a young man: they gave him spectacles with distorting glasses, and he had to wear them for seven days. For the first three days he was in a miserable state because everything distorted, the whole world around distorted! It gave him such a severe headache he couldn’t sleep. Even with closed eyes those distorted figures would…the faces distorted, the trees distorted, the roads distorted. He couldn’t even walk because he couldn’t believe what was true and what was given by the projection of distorting glasses.But a miracle happened. After the third day he became attuned to it; the distortion disappeared. The glasses remained the same, distorting, but he started looking at the world in the same old way. Within a week everything was okay: there was no headache, no problem, and the scientists were simply surprised; they couldn’t believe it was happening. The eyes had completely dropped the glasses, as if they were no longer there. The glasses were there, and they were distorting, but the eyes had come to see the world for which they were trained.Nobody knows whether what you are seeing is there or not. It may not be there; it may be there in a totally different way. The colors you see, the forms you see – everything is projected by the eyes. And whenever you look fixedly, focused with your old patterns, you see things according to your own conditioning. That’s why a madman has a liquid look, an absent look, looking and not looking, together.This look is beautiful. It is one of the greatest Tantra techniques. If one sees naught when staring into space… Don’t see, just look. For the beginning few days, again and again you will see something, just because of the old habit. We hear things because of old habit. We see things because of old habit. We understand things because of old habit.One of the greatest disciples of Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, used to insist on a certain thing to his disciples – and everybody resented it, and many people left simply because of that insistence. If somebody said, “Yesterday you said…” he immediately would stop him and say, “Don’t say it like that. Say, ‘I understood that you said this thing yesterday.’ Add ‘I understood…’ Don’t say what I said; you cannot know that. Talk about what you heard.” And he would insist so much because we are habitual.Again you might say, “In the Bible it is said…” and he would say, “Don’t say that! Simply say that you understand that this is said in the Bible.” With each sentence he insisted, “Always remember that this is your understanding.”We go on forgetting. His disciples went on forgetting again and again every day, and he was stubborn about it. He would not allow you to go on. He would say, “Go back. Say first, ‘I understand you said this, this is my understanding’” – you hear according to yourself, you see according to yourself because you have a fixed pattern of seeing and hearing.This has to be dropped. To know existence, all fixed attitudes have to be dropped. Your eyes should just be windows, not projectors. Your ears should be just doors, not projectors.It happened…A psychoanalyst who was studying with Gurdjieff tried to do this experiment. In a wedding ceremony he tried a very simple but beautiful experiment. He stood by the side – people passing, and he watched them and he felt that nobody at the receiving end was hearing what they were saying…so many people, some rich man’s wedding ceremony. So he also joined in and he said very quietly to the first person in the receiving line, “My grandmother died today.”The man said, “So good of you, so beautiful.”Then to another he said it and the man said, “How nice of you.”And to the groom, when he said this, he said, “Old man, it is time you also followed.”Nobody is listening to anybody. You hear whatsoever you expect. Expectation is your specs – that is the glasses. Your eyes should be windows and this is the technique.Nothing should go out of the eyes because if something goes, a cloud is created. Then you see things which are not there, then a subtle hallucination… Let pure clarity be in the eyes, in the ears; all your senses should be clear, pure perception, only then can existence be revealed to you. And when you know existence, then you know that you are a buddha, a god, because in existence everything is divine.If one sees naught when staring into space, if with the mind one then observes the mind… First stare into the sky; lie down on the ground and just stare at the sky. Only one thing has to be tried: don’t look at anything. In the beginning you will fall again and again, you will forget again and again. You will not be able to remember continuously. Don’t be frustrated; it is natural because of so long a habit. Whenever you remember, again unfocus your eyes, make them loose; just look at the sky: not doing anything, just looking. Soon a time comes when you can see into the sky without trying to see anything there.Then try it with your inner sky: …if with the mind one then observes the mind…Then close your eyes and look inside, not looking for anything, just the same absent look. Thoughts floating but you are not looking for them, or at them, you are simply looking. If they come it is good, if they don’t come it is also good. Then you will be able to see the gaps: one thought passes, another comes – and the gap. And then, by and by, you will be able to see that the thought becomes transparent, even when the thought is passing you continue to see the gap, you continue to see the hidden sky behind the cloud.And the more you get attuned to this vision, thoughts will drop by and by, they will come less and less, less and less. The gaps will become wider. For minutes together no thought coming, everything is so quiet and silent inside – you are for the first time together. Everything feels absolutely blissful, no disturbance. And if this look becomes natural to you, it becomes… It is one of the most natural things; one just has to unfocus, decondition. …one destroys distinctions – then there is nothing good, nothing bad, nothing ugly, nothing beautiful – and reaches buddhahood.Buddhahood means the highest awakening. When there are no distinctions, all divisions are lost; unity is attained and only one remains. You cannot even call it one because that too is part of duality. One remains, but you cannot call it one because how can you call it one without deep down saying two. No, you don’t say that one remains, simply that two has disappeared; the many have disappeared. Now it is a vast oneness, there are no boundaries to anything.One tree merging into another tree, earth merging into the trees, trees merging into the sky, the sky merging into the beyond; you merging into me, I merging into you, everything merging, distinctions lost, melting and merging like waves into other waves. A vast oneness vibrating, alive, without boundaries, without definitions, without distinctions – the sage merging into the sinner, the sinner merging into the sage, good becoming bad, bad becoming good, night turning into the day, the day turning into the night, life melting into death, death molding again into life – then everything has become one.Only at this moment is buddhahood attained: when there is nothing good, nothing bad, no sin, no virtue, no darkness, no night – nothing, no distinctions. Distinctions are there because of your trained eyes. Distinction is a learned thing. Distinction is not there in existence; distinction is projected by you. Distinction is given by you to the world; it is not there. It is your eyes’ trick, your eyes playing a trick on you.The clouds that wander through the sky have no roots, no home; nor do the distinctive thoughts floating through the mind. Once the self-mind is seen, discrimination stops.The clouds that wander through the sky have no roots and no home… And the same is true for your thoughts, and the same is true for your inner sky. Your thoughts have no roots; they have no home, just like clouds they wander. So you need not fight them, you need not be against them, you need not even try to stop thought.This should become a deep understanding in you because whenever a person becomes interested in meditation, he starts trying to stop thinking. And if you try to stop thoughts they will never be stopped because the very effort to stop is a thought, the very effort to meditate is a thought, the very effort to attain buddhahood is a thought. And how can you stop a thought by another thought? How can you stop mind by creating another mind? Then you will be clinging to the other. And this will go on and on, ad nauseam; then there is no end to it.Don’t fight – because who will fight? Who are you? Just a thought, so don’t make yourself a battleground of one thought fighting another. Rather, be a witness, just watching thoughts floating. They stop, but not by your stopping. They stop by your becoming more aware, not by any effort on your part to stop them. No, they never stop, they resist. Try and you will find out; try to stop a thought and the thought will persist. Thoughts are very stubborn, adamant; they are hatha yogis, they persist. You throw them out and they will come back a million and one times. You will get tired, but they will not get tired.It happened that a man came to Tilopa. The man wanted to attain buddhahood and he had heard that this Tilopa had attained. Tilopa was staying in a temple somewhere in Tibet. He was sitting there and the man said, “I would like to stop my thoughts.”Tilopa said, “It is very easy. I will give you a device, a technique. Follow this: just sit down and don’t think of monkeys. This will do it.”The man said, “So easy? Just not thinking of monkeys? But I have never been thinking about them.”Tilopa said, “Now do it, and tomorrow morning report to me.”You can understand what happened to that poor man – monkeys and monkeys all around. In the night he couldn’t get any sleep, not a wink. He would open his eyes and they were sitting there, or he would close his eyes and they were sitting there, and they were making faces. He was simply surprised. “Why has this man given this technique because if monkeys are the problem, then I have never been bothered by them. This is happening for the first time!” And he tried, in the morning again he tried. He took a bath, sat, but nothing doing, the monkeys wouldn’t leave him.He came back by the evening almost mad – because the monkeys were following him and he was talking to them. He came and he said, “Save me somehow. I don’t want this, I was okay, I don’t want any meditation. And I don’t want your enlightenment – but save me from these monkeys!”If you think of monkeys, it may be that they may not come to you. But if you don’t want… If you want them not to come to you, then they will follow you. They have their egos and they cannot leave you so easily. And what do you think of yourself, trying not to think of monkeys? The monkeys get irritated, this cannot be allowed.This happens to people. Tilopa was joking; he was saying that if you try to stop a thought you cannot. On the contrary, the very effort to stop it gives it energy; the very effort to avoid it becomes attention. So, whenever you want to avoid something, you are paying too much attention to it. If you want not to think a thought, you are already thinking about it.Remember this, otherwise you will be in the same plight. The poor man who was obsessed became obsessed with monkeys because he wanted to stop them. There is no need to stop the mind. Thoughts are rootless, homeless vagabonds; you need not be worried about them. Simply watch, watch without looking at them, simply look.If they come, good, don’t feel bad because even a slight feeling that it is not good and you have started fighting. It’s okay, it is natural: as leaves come on the trees, thoughts come to the mind. It’s okay; it is perfectly as it should be. If they don’t come, it is beautiful. Simply remain an impartial watcher, neither for nor against, neither appreciating nor condemning, without any valuation. Simply sit inside yourself and look, looking without looking at.And it happens that the more you look, the less you find; the deeper you look, the thoughts disappear, disperse. Once you know this then the key is in your hand. And this key unlocks the most secret phenomenon: the phenomenon of buddhahood.The clouds that wander through the sky have no roots, no home; nor do the distinctive thoughts floating through the mind. Once the self-mind is seen, discrimination stops. And once you can see that thoughts are floating – you are not the thoughts but the space in which thoughts are floating – you have attained to your self-mind, you have understood the phenomenon of your consciousness. Then discrimination stops; then nothing is good, nothing is bad, then all desire simply disappears because if there is nothing good, nothing bad, there is nothing to be desired, nothing to be avoided.You accept; you become loose and natural. You simply start floating with existence, not going anywhere because there is no goal; not moving to any target because there is no target. Then you start enjoying every moment, whatsoever it brings – whatsoever, remember. And you can enjoy it because now you have no desires and no expectations. You don’t ask for anything, so whatsoever is given, you feel grateful. Just sitting and breathing is so beautiful, just being here is so wonderful that every moment of life becomes a magical thing, a miracle in itself.In space shapes and colors form, but neither by black nor white is space tinged. From the self-mind all things emerge, the mindby virtues and by vices is not stained.And then, then you know that: In space shapes and colors form… Clouds take many types of shapes: you can see elephants and lions, and whatsoever you like. In space, forms, colors, come and go: …but neither by black nor white is space tinged. But whatsoever happens, the sky remains untouched, untinged. In the morning it is like a fire, a red fire coming from the sun, the whole sky becomes red; but in the night where has that redness gone? The whole sky is dark, black. In the morning, where has that blackness gone? The sky remains untinged, untouched.And this is the way of a sannyasin: to remain like the sky, untinged by whatsoever comes and happens. A good thought comes, a sannyasin doesn’t brag about it. He doesn’t say, “I am filled with good thoughts, virtuous thoughts, blessings for the world.” No, he doesn’t brag because if he brags he is tinged. He does not claim that he is good. A bad thought comes, he is not depressed by it – otherwise he is tinged. Good or bad, day or night, everything that comes and goes he simply watches. Seasons change and he watches; youth becomes old age and he watches – he remains untinged. That is the deepest core of being a sannyasin, to be like sky, space.And this is in fact the case. When you think you are tinged, it is just thinking. When you think that you have become good or bad, sinner or sage, it is just thinking. Your inner sky never becomes anything. It is being, it never becomes anything. All becoming is just getting identified with some form and name, some color, some form arising in the space: all becoming. You are a being; you are already that, no need to become anything.Look at the sky – spring comes and the whole atmosphere is filled with birds singing, and then flowers and their fragrance. And then comes the fall, and then comes summer. Then comes the rain, and everything goes on changing, changing, changing. And it all happens in the sky, but nothing tinges it. It remains deeply distant, everywhere present and distant, nearest to everything and farthest away.A sannyasin is just like the sky, he lives in the world: hunger comes and satiety; summer comes and winter; good days, bad days. Good moods: very elated, ecstatic, euphoric; bad moods: depressed, in the valley, dark, burdened. Everything comes and goes and he remains a watcher. He simply looks, and he knows everything will go; many things will come and go. He is no longer identified with anything.Non-identification is sannyas, and sannyas is the greatest flowering, the greatest blooming that is possible. In space shapes and colors form, but neither by black nor white is space tinged. From the self-mind all things emerge, the mind by virtues and by vices is not stained.When Buddha attained to the ultimate, the utterly ultimate enlightenment, he was asked, “What have you attained?” And he laughed and said, “Nothing, because whatsoever I have attained was already there inside me. It is not something new that I have achieved. It has always been there from eternity, it is my very nature. But I was not mindful about it, I was not aware of it. The treasure was always there, but I had forgotten about it.”You have forgotten, that’s all; that’s your ignorance. Between a buddha and you there is no distinction as far as your nature is concerned, but only one distinction, and the distinction is that you don’t remember who you are, and he remembers. You are the same, but he remembers and you don’t remember. He is awake, you are fast asleep, but your nature is the same.Try to live it out in this way – Tilopa is talking about techniques – live in the world as if you are the sky, make it your very style of being. Somebody is angry at you, insulting – watch. If anger arises in you, watch; be a watcher on the hills, go on looking and looking and looking. And just by looking, without looking at anything, without getting obsessed by anything, when your perception becomes clear, suddenly, in a moment, in fact no time happens: suddenly, without time, you are fully awake. You are a buddha, you become the enlightened, the awakened one.What does a buddha gain out of it? He gains nothing. Rather, on the contrary, he loses many things: the misery, the pain, the anguish, the anxiety, the ambition, the jealousy, the hatred, the possessiveness, the violence – he loses all. As far as what he attains – nothing. He attains that which was already there; he remembers.Enough for today.

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Tantra Supreme Understanding 01-10Category: TANTRA

Tantra Supreme Understanding 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The song continues:The darkness of ages cannot shroud the glowing sun; the long kalpas of samsara ne’er can hide the mind’s brilliant light.Though words are spoken to explain the void, the void as such can never be expressed. Though we say, “The mind is bright as light,” it is beyond all words and symbols. Although the mind is void in essence, all things it embraces and contains.Let us first meditate a little on the nature of darkness. It is one of the most mysterious things in existence – and your life is so much involved with it, you cannot afford not to think about it. One has to come to terms with the nature of darkness because the same is the nature of sleep, the same is the nature of death and the same is the nature of all ignorance.The first thing that will be revealed to you if you meditate on darkness is that darkness does not exist; it is there without any existence. It is more mysterious than light. It has no existence at all; rather, on the contrary, it is just an absence of light. There is no darkness anywhere; you cannot find it, it is simply an absence. It is not, in itself; it has no existence in itself. It is simply that the light is not present.If the light is there, there is no darkness; if the light is not there, there is darkness, an absence of light. It is not a presence of something. That’s why light comes and goes, darkness remains. It is not, but it persists. Light you can create, light you can destroy, but you cannot create darkness and you cannot destroy darkness – it is always there without being there at all.The second thing: if you contemplate, you will come to realize that because it is nonexistential you cannot do anything to it. And if you try to do anything to it, you will be defeated. Darkness cannot be defeated, how can you defeat something which is not? And when you are defeated you will think, “It is very powerful because it has defeated me.” This is absurd. Darkness has no power; how can a thing which is not, have power? You are not defeated by the darkness and its power; you are defeated by your foolishness. In the first place you started fighting – that was foolish. How can you fight with something which is not? And remember, you have been fighting with many things which are not, they are just like darkness.All morality is a fight against darkness, that’s why it is stupid. All morality, unconditionally, is a fight with darkness, fighting with something which in itself is not. Hate is not real; it is just the absence of love. Anger is not real; it is just the absence of compassion. Ignorance is not real; it is just the absence of buddhahood, of enlightenment. Sex is not real; it is just the absence of brahmacharya. All morality goes on fighting with that which is not. A moralist can never succeed; it is impossible. Finally he has to be defeated because his whole effort is nonsense.And there is the distinction between religion and morality: morality tries to fight with darkness, and religion tries to awaken the light which is hidden within. It doesn’t bother about the darkness; it simply tries to find the light within. Once the light is there, darkness disappears; once the light is there, you need not do anything to darkness – it is simply not there.This is the second thing: that nothing can be done to darkness directly. If you want to do something with darkness, you will have to do something with light, not with darkness. Put the light off and the darkness is there; put the light on and the darkness is not there. But you cannot put darkness on and put off darkness; you cannot bring it from somewhere, you cannot push it out. If you want to do something with darkness, you have to go via light; you have to go in an indirect way.Never fight things which are not. The mind is tempted to fight, but that temptation is dangerous: you will waste your energy and life and dissipate yourself. Don’t be tempted by the mind, simply see whether a thing has a real existence or is just an absence. If it is an absence, then don’t fight with it; seek the thing of which it is the absence, then you will be on the right track.The third thing about darkness is that it is involved deeply with your existence in many millions of ways.Whenever you are angry, your light within has disappeared. In fact, you are angry because the light has disappeared; the darkness has entered. You can be angry only when you are unconscious, you cannot be angry consciously. Try it, either you will lose consciousness and anger will be there, or you will remain conscious and anger will not arise – you cannot be angry consciously. What does it mean? It means the nature of consciousness is just like light, and the nature of anger is just like darkness – you cannot have both. If the light is there, you cannot have darkness; if you are conscious, you cannot be angry.People come to me continuously and ask how not to be angry. They are asking a wrong question; and when you ask a wrong question it is very difficult to get the right answer. First ask the right question. Don’t ask how to dispel darkness, don’t ask how to dispel worries, anguish and anxiety, just analyze your mind and see why they are there in the first place. They are there because you are not conscious enough. So ask the right question: how to be more and more conscious? If you ask how not to be angry, you will become the victim of some moralist. And if you ask how to be more conscious, so anger cannot exist, so lust cannot exist, so greed cannot exist, then you are on the right track, then you will become a religious seeker.Morality is a false coin; it deceives people. It is not religion at all. Religion has nothing to do with morality because religion has nothing to do with darkness. It is a positive effort to awaken you. It does not bother about your character; what you do is meaningless and you cannot change it. You may decorate it; you cannot change it. You may color it in beautiful ways, you may paint it, but you cannot change it.There is only one transformation, only one revolution, and that revolution comes not by being concerned with your character, by your acts, by your doings, but being concerned with your being. Being is a positive phenomenon; once the being is alert, awake, conscious, suddenly darkness disappears – your being is of the nature of light.And the fourth thing – then we can enter the sutra. Sleep is just like darkness. It is not accidental that you find it difficult to sleep when there is light; it is simply natural. Darkness has an affinity with sleep; that’s why it is easy to sleep in the night. Darkness all around creates the milieu in which you can fall into sleep very easily.What happens in sleep? By and by you lose consciousness. There comes an interval period in which you dream. Dreaming means half conscious, half unconscious, just on the midway: moving toward total unconsciousness. From your waking state you are moving to total unconsciousness. On the path dreams exist. Dreams mean only that you are half awake and half asleep. That’s why, if you dream continuously the whole night, you feel tired in the morning. And if you are not allowed to dream, then too you will feel tired because dreams exist for a certain reason.In your waking hours you accumulate many things: thoughts, feelings, incomplete matters hang in the mind. You looked at a beautiful woman on the road and suddenly a desire arose in you. But you are a man of character, manners, civilized; you simply push it down, you will not look at it, you will go on with your work – an incomplete desire hangs around you. It has to be completed otherwise you will not be able to fall into deep sleep. It will pull you back again and again. It will say, “Come on! That woman was really beautiful; her body had a charm. And you are a fool, what are you doing here? Seek her, you have missed an opportunity!”The desire hanging there will not allow you to fall into sleep. The mind creates a dream: again you are on the road, the beautiful woman passes, but this time you are alone without any civilization around you. No manners are needed; no etiquette is needed. You are like an animal – you are natural, no morality. This is your own private world; no police constable can enter it, no judge can judge it. You are simply alone; there will not be even a witness. Now you can play with your lust: you will have a sexual dream. That dream completes the hanging desire; then you fall into sleep. But if you continuously dream, then too you will feel tired.If your dreams are not allowed… In the United States they have many sleep labs, and they have come to discover this phenomenon: if a person is not allowed to dream, within three weeks he will go mad. If he is awakened again and again whenever he starts dreaming… There are visible signs. When a person starts dreaming you can wake him. Particularly, his eyelids start fluttering fast; that means he is seeing a dream. When he is not seeing a dream, his eyelids rest. When he starts seeing a dream, his eyes are functioning. Wake him and do this the whole night: whenever he starts dreaming, wake him. Within three weeks he will go mad.Sleep doesn’t seem to be so necessary. If you wake a person – whenever he is not dreaming wake him; he will feel tired, but he will not go mad. What does it mean? It means dreams are a necessity for you. You are so illusory, your whole existence is such an illusion – what Hindus have called maya – that dreams are needed. Without dreams you cannot exist; dreams are your food, dreams are your strength, without dreams you will go mad. Dreams are a release of madness, and once the release happens you fall into sleep.From waking you fall into dreaming and from dreaming you fall into sleep. Every night a normal person has eight cycles of dreaming, and he has just a few moments of deep sleep between two dreaming cycles. In that deep sleep all consciousness disappears, it is absolutely dark. But still you are near the boundary; any emergency will wake you. The house is on fire, you will have to run back to your waking consciousness; or you are a mother and the child starts crying, you will run, rush, toward waking – so you remain on the boundary. You fall into deep darkness, but remain on the boundary.In death you fall exactly into the center. Death and sleep are similar: the quality is the same. Every day in sleep, you fall into darkness, complete darkness; that means you become completely unconscious, the very opposite pole of buddhahood. A buddha is totally awakened, and every night you fall to a totally unawakened state, absolute darkness.In the Gita, Krishna says to Arjuna that when everybody is fast asleep, the yogi is still awake. That doesn’t mean that he never sleeps. He sleeps, but only his body sleeps, his body rests. He has no dreams because he has no desires, so he cannot have incomplete desires. And he has no sleep like you; even in deepest rest his consciousness is clear, his consciousness burns like a flame.Every night you fall into sleep, you fall into deep unconsciousness, a coma. In death you fall in a deeper coma. These are all like darkness. That’s why you are afraid of darkness because it is deathlike. And there are people who are afraid of sleep also because sleep is also deathlike.I have come across many people who cannot sleep, and they want to sleep. When I tried to understand their minds, I came to realize that they are basically afraid. They say they would like to sleep because they feel tired, but deep down they are afraid of sleep, and that is creating the whole trouble. Ninety percent of insomnia is fear of sleep; you are afraid. You are afraid of darkness; you will be afraid of sleep also, and the fear comes from the fear of death.Once you understand that these are all darkness and your inner nature is that of light, things start changing. Then there is no sleep for you, only rest; then there is no death for you, only a change of clothes, of bodies, only a change of garments. But that can happen only if you realize the inner flame, your nature, your innermost being.Now we should enter the sutra:The darkness of ages cannot shroud the glowing sun; the long kalpas of samsara ne’er can hide the mind’s brilliant light.Those who have awakened have come to realize: The darkness of ages cannot shroud the glowing sun…You may have been wandering in darkness for millions of lives, but it cannot destroy your inner light because darkness cannot be aggressive. It is not. Something which is not, how can it be aggressive? Darkness cannot destroy light – how can darkness destroy light? Darkness cannot destroy even a small flame, darkness cannot jump on it, cannot be in conflict with it. How can darkness destroy a flame? How can darkness shroud a flame? It is impossible, it has never happened because it cannot happen.But people go on thinking in terms of conflict: they think darkness is against light. This is absurd! Darkness cannot be against light. How can the absence be against that of which it is the absence? Darkness cannot be against light, there is no fight in it; it is simply the absence, sheer absence, sheer impotency – how can it attack?You go on saying, “What could I do? I had an attack of anger” – it is impossible; “I had an attack of greed” – it is impossible. Greed cannot attack; anger cannot attack. They are of the nature of darkness, and your being is light; the very possibility doesn’t exist. But anger comes, that shows only that your inner flame has been completely forgotten, you have become completely oblivious of it, you don’t know it is there. This forgetfulness can shroud it, but not darkness.So the real darkness is your forgetfulness, and your forgetfulness can invite anger, greed, lust, hate, jealousy – they don’t attack you. Remember, you send the invitations first and they accept it. Your invitation is there; they cannot attack, they come as invited guests. You may have forgotten that you ever invited them. You can forget because you have forgotten yourself; you can forget anything.Forgetfulness is the real darkness. And in forgetfulness everything happens. You are just like a drunkard, you have completely forgotten yourself: who you are, where you are going, for what you are going. All direction is lost; the very sense of direction is not there. You are like a drunkard. That’s why all basic religious teachings insist on self-remembering. Forgetfulness is the disease, then self-remembering is going to be the antidote.Try to remember yourself. And you will say, “I know myself and I remember myself! What are you talking about?” Then try it: just keep your wristwatch before you, and look at the hand that shows seconds and remember only one thing: “I am looking at this hand which is showing seconds.” You will not be able to remember for even three seconds together. You will forget many times – just a simple thing: “I am looking and I will remember that I am looking.”You will forget. Many things will come into your mind. You have made an appointment, just looking at the watch the association will come into the mind: “I have to go at five o’clock to meet a friend.” Suddenly the thought comes and you have forgotten that you are looking at it. Just by looking at the watch you may start thinking of Switzerland because it is Swiss made. Just by looking at the watch you may start thinking, “How foolish I am. What am I doing here wasting time?” But you will not be able to remember, even for three consecutive seconds, that you are looking at the second hand moving; at the hand showing seconds moving.If you can attain to one minute’s self-remembering, I promise to make you a buddha. Even for one minute, sixty seconds, that will do. You will think, “So cheap, so easy?” It is not. You don’t know how deep your forgetfulness is. You will not be able to do it for one minute continuously, not a single thought coming in and disturbing your self-remembering. This is the real darkness. If you remember, you will become light. If you forget, you become dark. And in darkness, of course, all sorts of thieves come; all sorts of robbers attack you, all sorts of mishaps happen.Self-remembrance is the key. Try to remember more and more because whenever you try to remember more and more, you become centered, you are in yourself; your journeying mind falls back to one’s own self. Otherwise you are going somewhere, the mind continuously creating new desires, and you are following and chasing the mind simultaneously in many directions. That’s why you are split; you are not one, and your flame – inside flame – goes on wavering: a leaf in a strong wind.When the inner flame becomes unwavering, suddenly you are going through a mutation, a transformation, a new being is born. That being will be of the nature of light. Right now you are of the nature of darkness, you are simply an absence of something which is possible. In fact, you are not yet; you are not yet born. You have taken many births and many deaths, but you have not yet been born. Your real birth is still going to take place, and this will be the work: that you transform your inner nature from forgetfulness to self-remembering.Do whatsoever you do. I don’t give you any discipline, and I don’t say to you, “Do this and don’t do that.” My discipline is very easy. My discipline is: do whatsoever you like, but do it with self-remembering; remember yourself that you are doing it. Walking, remember that you are walking. You need not verbalize this because verbalization will not help; that itself will become a distraction. You need not walk and say inside “I am walking,” because if you say “I am walking, I am walking,” this “I am walking” will be the forgetfulness; then you will not be able to remember. Simply remember; there is no need to verbalize it.I have to verbalize because I am talking to you, but when you are walking simply remember the phenomenon, the walking; each step should be taken with full awareness. Eating, eat. I don’t say what to eat, and what not to eat. Eat whatsoever you like, but with the self-remembrance that you are eating. And soon you will see many things have become impossible to do.With self-remembering you cannot eat meat, impossible. It is impossible to be so violent if you remember. It is impossible to harm somebody when you remember because when you remember yourself, suddenly you see that the same light, the same flame is burning everywhere, within each body, each unit. The more you know your inner nature, the more you penetrate the other. How can you kill to eat? It becomes simply impossible. Not that you practice it – if you practice it, it is false. If you practice not to be a thief it is false; you will be a thief, you will find subtle ways. If you practice nonviolence, in your nonviolence there will be violence hidden behind it.No, religion cannot be practiced. Morality can be practiced; that’s why morality creates hypocrisy, morality creates false faces. Religion creates the authentic being; it cannot be practiced. How can you practice the being? You simply become more aware and things start changing. You simply become more of the nature of light, and darkness disappears.The darkness of ages cannot shroud the glowing sun… For millions of lives, for ages together, you have been in darkness. But don’t feel depressed and don’t feel hopeless because even if you have lived in darkness for millions of lives, this very moment you can attain to the light.Just look, a house has remained closed for one hundred years, dark, and you go into it and you light a light. Will the darkness say, “I am one hundred years old and this light is just a baby”? Will the darkness say, “I am not going to disappear, you will have to burn light at least for one hundred years, only then…”? No, even a baby flame is enough for very, very ancient darkness. Why? In one hundred years the darkness must have become engrained. But no, darkness cannot become engrained because it is not. It was simply waiting for the light. The moment the light comes in, the darkness disappears; it cannot resist because it has no positive existence.People come to me and say, “You teach that sudden enlightenment is possible. Then what will happen with our past lives and our past karmas?” Nothing – they are of the nature of darkness. You may have murdered, you may have been a thief, a robber, you may have been a Hitler, a Genghis Khan or somebody, the worst possible, but that doesn’t make any difference. Once you remember yourself, the light is there; the whole past disappears immediately, not for a single moment can it stay there. You murdered, but you cannot become a murderer; you murdered because you were not aware of yourself, you were not aware what you were doing.Jesus is reported to have said on the cross, “Father, forgive these people because they know not what they are doing.” He was saying simply, “These people are not of the nature of light, they don’t remember themselves. They are doing it in complete forgetfulness, in darkness they are moving and stumbling. Forgive them, they are not responsible for whatsoever they are doing.” How can a person be responsible who does not remember himself?If a drunkard kills somebody, even the court forgives him if it can be proved that he acted when he was completely unconscious. Why? Because how can you make a person responsible? You can make him responsible for drinking, but you cannot make him responsible for murder. If a madman kills somebody, he has to be forgiven because he is not himself.Responsibility means remembering.Whatsoever you have done, I tell you, don’t be worried by it. It has happened to you because you were not aware. Alight your inner flame – find it, seek it, it is there – and suddenly the whole past disappears, as if it all happened in a dream. In fact, it has happened in a dream because you were not conscious. All karmas have happened in a dream, they are made of the same stuff as dreams are made.You need not wait for your karmas to be fulfilled – then you will have to wait for eternity. And even then you will not be out of the wheel because you cannot simply wait for eternity. You will be doing many things meanwhile; then the vicious circle can never be completed. You will move on and on and on, and you will go on doing things, and new things will make you entangled in more future things – then where will the end be? No, there is no need. You simply become aware and suddenly all karmas drop. In a single moment of intense awareness, the whole past disappears, becomes rubbish.This is one of the most fundamental things the East has discovered. Christians cannot understand it; they go on thinking of judgment, and the Last Day of Judgment, that everybody has to be judged by his acts. Then Christ is wrong when he says, “Forgive these people because they know not what they are doing.” Jews cannot understand it; Mohammedans cannot understand it.Hindus are really one of the most daring races; they have penetrated to the very core of the problem. The problem is not action, the problem is being. Once you realize your inner being and the light, you are no longer of this world; whatsoever happened in the past happened in a dream. That’s why Hindus say this whole world is a dream. Only you are not a dream, only the dreamer is not the dream; otherwise, everything is a dream.Look at the beauty of this truth: only the dreamer is not a dream because the dreamer cannot be a dream; otherwise the dream cannot exist. At least somebody, the dreamer, has to be a real phenomenon.In the day you are awake; you do many things: you go to the shop, you go to the market, you work in a farm, or in a factory, and you do millions of things. At night when you are asleep, you forget everything about it; it disappears. A new world starts, the world of the dream. And now scientists say that the same time has to be given to dream as you give to awakening. The same waking hours have to be given to dreaming. In sixty years’ time, if twenty years have been devoted to work in the waking state, twenty years have been devoted to dreaming; the same time, exactly the same time, has to be devoted to dreaming. So dreaming is not less real, it has the same quality.In the night you dream, you forget about your waking world. In deep sleep you forget about your waking world, your dreaming world. In the morning, again the waking world comes into existence, you forget about your dreaming and your sleep. But one thing continuously remains: you. Who remembers the dreams? In the morning who says, “I dreamed last night”? In the morning who says, “Last night I had a very, very deep sleep without any dreams”? Who?There must be a witness to it who stands aside, who always stands aside and goes on looking. Waking comes, dreaming comes, sleep comes – and somebody stands by the side and goes on looking. Only this is the real because it exists in every state. Other states disappear, but it has to remain in every state, it is the only permanent thing in you.Attain to this witness more and more. Become more and more alert, and become more and more a witness. Rather than being an actor in the world, be a witness, a spectator. Everything else is a dream; only the dreamer is the truth. He has to be true, otherwise where will dreams happen? He’s the base; illusions can happen only if he is there.And once you remember, you start laughing. What type of life existed without remembering? You were a drunkard, moving from one state to another, not knowing why, drifting with no direction.But: The darkness of ages cannot shroud the glowing sun; the long kalpas of samsara – many, many ages, aeons of this world, kalpas – ne’er can hide the mind’s brilliant light. It is always there, it is your very being.Though words are spoken to explain the void, the void as such can never be expressed. Though we say, “The mind is bright as light,” it is beyond all words and symbols.One thing will be helpful to understand. There are three approaches toward reality. One is the empirical approach, the approach of the scientific mind: experiment, experiment with the objective world, and unless something is proved by experiment, don’t accept it. Then there is another approach, of the logical mind. He does not experiment; he simply thinks, argues, finds pros and cons, and just by mind effort, reason, he concludes. And then there is a third approach, the metaphorical: the approach of poetry and of religion. There are these three approaches, three dimensions, by which one reaches toward reality.Science cannot go beyond the object because the very approach makes a limitation. Science cannot go beyond the outer because only with the outer are experiments possible. Philosophy, logic, cannot go beyond the subjective because it is a mind effort, you work it out in your mind. You cannot dissolve the mind; you cannot go beyond it. Science is objective; logic, philosophy, is subjective. Religion goes beyond, poetry goes beyond: it is a golden bridge. It bridges the object with the subject. But then everything becomes chaos – of course, very creative; in fact, there is no creativity if there is no chaos. But everything becomes indiscriminate; divisions disappear.I would like to say it in this way. Science is a day approach. In the full noon, everything is clear: distinct boundaries, and you can see the other well. Logic is a night approach: groping in the dark only with the mind, without any experimental support, just thinking. Poetry and religion are twilight approaches, just in the middle. The day is no longer there, the brightness of the noon has gone; things are not so distinct, clear. The night has not yet come; the darkness has not enveloped all. Darkness and day meet, there is a soft grayness, neither white nor black, boundaries meeting and merging, everything indiscriminate, everything is everything else. This is the metaphorical approach.That’s why poetry talks in metaphors – and religion is the ultimate poetry; religion talks in metaphors.Remember, those metaphors are not to be taken literally; otherwise you will miss the point. When I say the inner light, don’t think in terms of literal understanding, no. When I say, “The inner is like light,” it is a metaphor. Something is indicated, but not demarked, not defined, something of the nature of light, not exactly light; it is a metaphor.And this becomes a problem because religion talks in metaphors; it cannot talk otherwise, there is no other way. If I have been to another world and I have seen flowers which don’t exist on this earth, and I come to you and talk about those flowers, what will I do? I will have to be metaphorical. I will say, “Like roses,” but they are not roses; otherwise why say like roses, simply say roses. But they are not roses; they have a different quality to them.Like means I am trying to bridge my understanding of the other world with your understanding of this world, hence the metaphor. You know the roses; you don’t know those flowers of the other world. I know those flowers of the other world and I am trying to communicate to you something of that world; I say they are like roses. Don’t be angry with me when you reach the other world and you don’t find roses; don’t drag me to a court because I never meant it literally. Just the quality of a rose is indicated; it is just a gesture, a finger pointing to the moon. But don’t catch hold of the finger; the finger is irrelevant. Look at the moon and forget the finger. That is the meaning of a metaphor; don’t cling to the metaphor.Many people are in deep, murky waters because of this; they cling to the metaphor. I talk about the inner light. Immediately, after a few days, people start coming to me, they say, “I have seen the inner light!” They have found the roses in the other world…they don’t exist there. Because of this metaphorical language, many people simply become imaginative.P. D. Ouspensky coined a word; he used to call it imaginazione. Whenever somebody came and he started talking about inner experiences: “The kundalini has arisen, I have seen a light in the head, chakras are opening,” he would stop him immediately and say, “Imaginazione.” So people would ask, “What is this imaginazione?” He would say, “The disease of imagination,” and he would simply drop the matter. Immediately he would say, “Stop! You have fallen a victim.”Religion talks in metaphors because there is no other way to – religion talks of the other world, of the beyond. It tries to find similes in this world. It uses words which are irrelevant, but somehow those irrelevant words are the only available words; you have to use them.Poetry you can easily understand; religion is difficult because with poetry you already know it is imagination so there is no trouble. Science you can easily understand because you know it is not imagination; it is an empirical fact. Poetry you can easily understand, you know it is poetry, mere poetry, finished – it is imagination. Good! Beautiful! You can enjoy it; it is not a truth.What will you do with religion? Religion is the ultimate poetry; it is not imagination. And I tell you it is empirical, as empirical as science, but it cannot use scientific terms, they are too objective. It cannot use philosophical terms – they are too subjective. It has to use something which is neither, it has to use something which bridges both – it uses poetry.All religion is ultimate poetry, essential poetry. You cannot find a greater poet than Buddha. Of course, he never tried writing a single poem. I am here with you. I am a poet. I have not composed a single poem, not even a haiku, but I am continuously talking in metaphors. I am continuously trying to bridge the gap that is created by science and philosophy. I am trying to give you the feeling of the whole, undivided.Science is half, philosophy is half – what to do? How to give you the feeling of the whole? If you move deep into philosophy, you will come to what Shankara came to. He said, “The world is illusory, it doesn’t exist – only consciousness exists.” This is too one-sided. If you move with scientists you will come to what Marx came to. Marx and Shankara are the polar opposites. Marx says, “There is no consciousness – only the world exists.” And I know both are true and both are wrong. Both are true because they are saying the half-truth; and both are wrong because they are denying the other half. And if I have to talk about the whole, how to do it? Poetry is the only way; metaphor is the only way out.Remember this: Though words are spoken to explain the void, the void as such can never be expressed. That’s why sages go on insisting, “Whatsoever we are saying, we cannot say. It is inexpressible, and still we are trying to express it.” They always emphasize the fact because the possibility exists that you may take them literally.The void is a void in the sense that nothing of you will be left there; but the void is not a void in another sense because the whole will descend into it – the void is going to be the most perfect, fulfilled phenomenon. So what to do? If you say void, suddenly the mind thinks there is nothing, then why bother? And if you say it is not a void, it is the most perfect being, the mind goes on an ambition trip: how to become the most perfect being. Then the ego enters into it.To drop the ego, the word void is emphasized. But to make you alert, the void is not really a void, it is filled with the whole. When you are not, the whole of existence comes into you. When the drop disappears, it becomes the ocean.Though we say, “The mind is bright as light,” – says Tilopa – it is beyond all words and symbols. Don’t be deceived by the metaphor; don’t start imagining a light inside. It is very easy – imaginazione. You can close the eyes and imagine a light; you are such a dreamer, you can dream so many things, why not light?Mind has a faculty to create anything that you want – just a little persistence is needed. You can create beautiful women in the mind, why not light? What is wrong in light? You can create so many beautiful women in your mind, that any woman in real life will be unsatisfactory because she will never come up to the standard. You can create a whole world of experiences inside. Every sense has its own imaginative center behind it.It happens in hypnosis: the imagination starts working with absolute functioning, and reason drops completely because reason goes into sleep in hypnosis. Hypnosis is nothing but a sleep of reason, the doubter; then the imagination functions perfectly. Then there is no brake on it, only an accelerator – you go on and on, no brake is there.In hypnosis anything can be imagined: you give an onion to a person who is lying hypnotized and say, “It is a beautiful apple, very delicious,” and he will eat the onion and will say, “It is really beautiful. I have never tasted such a delicious apple before.” You give him an apple and say, “This is an onion,” and his eyes will start dropping tears and he will say, “Very, very strong” – and he is eating apple. What is happening? The doubter is not there, it is hypnosis; the doubter has gone to sleep. Now imagination functions, there is no check on it. That is the problem with religion also.Religion needs trust and trust means the doubting faculty of the mind goes to sleep. It is like hypnosis. So when people say to you, “This man, Osho, has hypnotized you,” they are right in a way. If you trust me it is like hypnosis: fully awake, you have dropped your reason. Now imagination functions with a total capacity, now you are in a dangerous situation.If you allow imagination, you can imagine all sorts of things: kundalini is arising, chakras opening, you can imagine all sorts of things and they will all happen to you. And they are beautiful – but not true. So when you trust a person, in the very trusting you have to be aware of imagination. Trust, but don’t become a victim of imagination. Whatsoever is being said here is metaphorical. And remember always, all experiences are imagination. All experiences I say, unconditionally. Only the experiencer is the truth.So whatsoever you experience, don’t pay much attention to it, and don’t start bragging about it. Just remember that all that is experienced is illusory – only the one who experiences is true. Pay attention to the witness; focus on the witness and not on the experiences. Howsoever beautiful, all experiences are dreamlike and one has to go beyond all of them.So religion is poetic, one has to talk metaphorically. The disciple is in deep trust, he can fall a victim of imagination easily – one has to be very, very alert. Trust, listen to the metaphors, but remember they are metaphors. Trust – many things will start happening, but remember: all is imagination except you. And you have to come to a point where there is no experience; only the experiencer sits silently in his abode, no experience anywhere, no object, no light, no flowers flowering, no nothing.Somebody asked Lin Chi – he was sitting in his monastery, a small monastery on a hilltop. He was sitting under a tree, near a rock, and somebody asked, “What happens when one has attained?”And Lin Chi said, “I sit here alone. Clouds pass, and I watch; and seasons come and I watch; and visitors come sometimes and I watch. And I sit here alone.”Finally just the witness, the consciousness, remains watching everything. All experiences disappear, only the very background of all experiencing remains. You remain; everything is lost. Remember this, because with me you trust and I talk in metaphors – and then imagination is possible. Imaginazione: be aware of that disease!Though we say, “The mind is bright as light,” it is beyond all words and symbols. Although the mind is void in essence, all things it embraces and contains.These assertions look contradictory: you say the mind is void, and the next moment you say it contains all and everything. Why these contradictions? It is just the nature of the whole religious experience. Metaphors have to be used – and immediately you have to be alerted not to become a victim of the metaphors.It is void in essence, but it contains all things. When you become totally empty, only then will you be fulfilled. When you are no longer, only then for the first time will you be.Says Jesus, “If you lose yourself, you will attain. If you cling to yourself, you will lose. If you die, you will be reborn. If you can efface yourself completely, you will become eternal, you will become the very eternity.”These are all metaphors, but if you trust, if you love, if you allow your heart to be open toward me, then you will be able to understand: This understanding passeth all understanding. It is not intellectual; it is heart to heart. It is an energy jump from one heart to another.I am here and I am trying to talk to you, but that is secondary. The basic thing is, if you are open I can pour myself into you. If my talking to you can help only this much, that you become more and more open, it has done its work. I’m not trying to say something to you, I am just trying to make you more open – that is enough. Then I can pour myself into you, and unless you taste me, you will not be able to understand what I am saying.Enough for today.

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Tantra Supreme Understanding 01-10Category: TANTRA

Tantra Supreme Understanding 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The song continues:Do naught with the body but relax; shut firm the mouth and silent remain; empty your mind and think of naught. Like a hollow bamboo rest at ease with your body. Giving not nor taking, put your mind at rest.Mahamudra is like a mind that clings to naught.Thus practicing, in time you will reach buddhahood.First, the nature of activity and the hidden currents in it have to be understood, otherwise no relaxation is possible. Even if you want to relax, it will be impossible if you have not observed, watched, realized, the nature of your activity because activity is not a simple phenomenon.Many people would like to relax, but they cannot. Relaxation is like a flowering; you cannot force it. You have to understand the whole phenomenon: why you are so active, why so much occupation with activity, why you are obsessed with it.Remember two words: one is action; another is activity. Action is not activity; activity is not action. Their natures are diametrically opposite. Action is when the situation demands it, you act, you respond. Activity is when the situation doesn’t matter, it is not a response; you are so restless within, that the situation is just an excuse to be active.When action comes out of a silent mind, it is the most beautiful thing in the world. When activity comes out of a restless mind, it is the ugliest. Action is when it has relevance; activity is irrelevant. Action is moment to moment, spontaneous; activity is loaded with the past. It is not a response to the present moment; rather it is pouring your restlessness, which you have been carrying from the past, into the present. Action is creative. Activity is very, very destructive; it destroys you, it destroys others.Try to see the delicate distinction. For example, if you are hungry then you eat. This is action. But if you are not hungry, you don’t feel any hunger at all, and still you go on eating, this is activity. This eating is like a violence; you destroy food, you crush with your teeth and destroy food; it gives you a little release of your inner restlessness. You are eating not because of hunger; you are simply eating because of an inner need, an urge to be violent.In the animal world, violence is associated with the mouth and hands; the fingernails and the teeth too are the violent things in the animal kingdom. With food, while you are eating, both are joined together; with your hand you take the food, and with your mouth you eat it; violence is released. But there is no hunger; it is not an action, it is a disease. This activity is an obsession. Of course, you cannot go on eating like this because then you will burst. So people have invented tricks, they will chew pan or gum, they will smoke cigarettes. These are false foods, without any nutritious value in them, but they work well as far as violence is concerned.A man sitting chewing pan, what is he doing? He is killing somebody. In the mind, if he becomes aware, he may have a fantasy of murdering, killing, and he is chewing pan – a very innocent activity in itself. You are not harming anybody, but it is very dangerous for you because you seem to be completely unconscious of what you are doing. A man smoking, what is he doing? Very innocent in a way, just taking the smoke in and bringing it out, inhaling and exhaling, a sort of ill pranayama, and a sort of secular transcendental meditation. He is creating a mandala: takes smoke in, brings it out; takes it in, brings it out; a mandala is created, a circle. Through smoking he is doing a sort of chanting, a rhythmic chanting. It soothes, his inner restlessness is relieved a little.If you are talking to a person, always remember – it is almost hundred percent accurate – if the person starts looking for his cigarettes, it means he is bored, you should leave him now. He wanted to throw you out; that cannot be done, that will be too impolite. He is finding his cigarettes; he is saying, “Now, finished! I am fed up.” In the animal kingdom he would have jumped on you, but he cannot – he is a human being, civilized. He jumps on the cigarettes; he starts smoking. Now he is not worried about you, now he is enclosed in his own chanting of the smoke. It soothes.But this activity shows that you are obsessed. You cannot remain yourself, you cannot remain silent; you cannot remain inactive. Through activity you go on throwing off your madness, insanity. Action is beautiful, action comes as a spontaneous response; life needs response. Every moment you have to act, but the activity comes through the present moment. You are hungry and you seek food. You are thirsty and you go to the well. You are feeling sleepy and you go to sleep. It is out of the total situation that you act. Action is spontaneous and total.Activity is never spontaneous; it comes from the past. You may have been accumulating it for many years, and then it explodes into the present – it is not relevant. But the mind is cunning; the mind will always find rationalizations for the activity. The mind will always try to prove that this is not activity, this is action; it was needed. Suddenly you flare up in anger. Everybody else becomes aware that it was not needed, the situation never demanded it; it was simply irrelevant – only you cannot see. Everybody feels, “What are you doing? There was no need for it. Why are you so angry?” But you will find rationalizations; you will rationalize that it was needed.These rationalizations help you to remain unconscious about your madness. These are the things that Gurdjieff used to call buffers. You create buffers of rationalization around you so you don’t come to realize what the situation is. Buffers are used in trains; between two bogies, two compartments, buffers are used so that if there is a sudden stop, there will not be too much shock to the passengers – the buffers will absorb the shock. Your activity is continuously irrelevant, but the buffers of rationalization don’t allow you to see the situation. Buffers blind you, and this type of activity continues.If this activity is there, you cannot relax. How can you relax? It is an obsessive need; you want to do something, whatsoever it is.There are fools all over the world who go on saying, “Do something rather than nothing.” And there are perfect fools who have created a proverb all over the world that an empty mind is the Devil’s workshop. It is not. An empty mind is God’s workshop. An empty mind is the most beautiful thing in the world, the purest because how can an empty mind be a workshop for the Devil? The Devil cannot enter an empty mind, impossible! The Devil can enter only a mind which is obsessed with activity – then the Devil can take charge of you, he can show you ways and means and methods how to be more active. The Devil never says, “Relax!” He says, “Why are you wasting your time? Do something, man! Move! Life is going by, do something!” And all the great teachers, teachers who have awakened to the truth of life, have come to realize that an empty mind gives space to the divine to enter into you.Activity can be used by the Devil, not an empty mind. How can the Devil use an empty mind? He will not dare to come near because emptiness will simply kill him. But if you are filled with a deep urge, mad urge to be active, then the Devil will take charge, then he will guide you – then he is the only guide.I would like to tell you that this proverb is absolutely wrong. The Devil himself must have suggested it.This obsession to be active has to be watched. And you have to watch it in your own life because whatsoever I say, or Tilopa says, will not be of much meaning unless you watch it in yourself: your activity is irrelevant, it is not needed. Why are you doing it?Traveling, I have seen people continuously doing the same thing again and again. For twenty-four hours I am with a passenger in the train… He will read the same newspaper again and again, not finding what else to do. Enclosed in a railway compartment there is not much possibility to be active, so he will read the same newspaper again and again, and I am watching. What is this man doing?A newspaper is not a Gita or a Bible. You can read the Gita many times because each time you come to it a new significance is revealed. But a newspaper is not a Gita; it is finished once you have seen it! It was not even worth reading once, and people go on reading it. Again and again, they will start. What is the problem? Is it a need? No, they are obsessed; they cannot remain silent, inactive. That is impossible for them; it looks like death. They have to be active.Traveling for many years gave me many opportunities to watch people without their knowing. Sometimes only one person was with me in the compartment, and he would make all sorts of efforts to bring me to talk to him and I would say only yes or no; then he would drop the idea. Then I would simply watch – a beautiful experiment and without any expense.I would watch him and he would open the suitcase – and I saw that he was not doing anything – then he would look in it, close it. Then he would open the window, and then would close it; then again he would go to the newspaper, then he would smoke, then again open the suitcase, rearrange it, go and open the window, look out. What was he doing, and why? An inner urge, something was trembling within him, a feverish state of mind. He had to do something; otherwise he would be lost. He must have been an active man in life, now when there is a moment to relax, he cannot relax, the old habit persists.It is said that Aurangzeb, a Moghul emperor, imprisoned his father in his old age. Aurangzeb’s father, Shah Jehan built the Taj Mahal. Aurangzeb imprisoned him, dethroned him. It is said, and it is written in the autobiography of Aurangzeb, that after a few days, Shah Jehan was not worried about imprisonment because every luxury was provided. It was a palace and Shah Jehan was living as he was living before; it was not like a prison; absolutely everything that he needed was there. Only one thing was missing and that was activity – he couldn’t do anything. So he asked his son Aurangzeb, “It is okay, you have provided everything for me, and everything is beautiful. Just one thing I will be grateful forever and ever if you can do, and that is, send thirty boys. I would like to teach them.”Aurangzeb could not believe it: “Why would my father like to teach thirty boys?” He had never shown any inclination to be a teacher, was never interested in any type of education. What has happened to him? But he fulfilled the desire. Thirty boys were sent to him and everything was okay. He became the emperor again – thirty small boys…Go into a primary school, the teacher is almost the emperor; you can order them to sit and they will have to sit; you can order them to stand and they will have to stand. Shah Jehan created in that room with thirty boys the whole situation of his court – just old habit and the old addiction to ordering people.Psychologists suspect that teachers are in fact politicians. Of course, not self-confident enough to go into politics, they move to the schools and there they become presidents, prime ministers, emperors. Small children – and they order them and force them.And psychologists also suspect that teachers have an inclination toward being sadistic, they would like to torture. You cannot find a better place than a primary school. You can torture innocent children; you can torture them for their own sake, for their own good. Go and watch! I have been reading in primary schools, and I have been watching teachers. And psychologists suspect they are torturers – I am certain. And you cannot find more innocent victims: completely unarmed, they cannot even resist; they are so weak and helpless – and a teacher stands like an emperor.Aurangzeb writes in his autobiography: “My father, just because of old habits, still wants to pretend that he is the emperor. So let him pretend and let him fool himself, there is nothing wrong. Send him thirty boys or three hundred, whatsoever he wants. Let him run a madrassa, a small school, and be happy.”Activity is when the action has no relevance. Watch it in yourself and see: ninety percent of your energy is wasted in activity. And because of this, when the moment for action comes, you don’t have any energy. A relaxed person is simply non-obsessive, and the energy starts accumulating within him. He conserves his energy. It is conserved automatically and then when the moment for action comes, his total being flows into it. That’s why action is total. Activity is always half-hearted because how can you befool yourself absolutely? Even you know that it is useless. Even you are aware that you are doing it for certain feverish reasons within, which are not even clear to you, very vague.You can change activities, but unless activities are transformed into action, that won’t help. People come to me and they say, “I would like to stop smoking.” I say, “Why? This is such a beautiful transcendental meditation, continue!” And if you stop it you will start something else – because the disease doesn’t change by changing the symptoms. Then you will chew pan, then you will chew gum; and there are even more dangerous things. These are innocent because if you are chewing gum, you are chewing gum by yourself. You may be a fool, but you are not a violent man; you are not destructive to anybody else. If you stop chewing gum, smoking, then what will you do? Your mouth needs activity; it is violent. Then you will talk, then you will talk continuously; yakety-yakety-yak – and that is more dangerous!Mulla Nasruddin’s wife came just the other day. She rarely comes to see me, but when she comes I immediately understand there must be some crisis. So I asked, “What is the matter?”Thirty minutes she took, and thousands of words, to tell me: “Mulla Nasruddin talks in his sleep, so suggest something – what should be done? He talks too much and it is difficult to sleep in the same room. And he shouts and says nasty things.”So I said, “Nothing is to be done. Simply give him a chance to talk while you are both awake.”People go on talking, they don’t give any chance to anybody else. Talking is the same as smoking. If you talk twenty-four hours… And you talk while you are awake… You talk, your body is tired, you fall asleep, but the talk continues. Twenty-four hours, round the clock, you go on talking and talking and talking. This is like smoking because the phenomenon is the same: the mouth needs movement. And the mouth is the basic activity because that is the first activity you started in your life.The child is born: he starts sucking the mother’s breast; that is the first activity, and the basic activity. And smoking is just like sucking the breast: warm milk flows in. In smoking, warm smoke flows in, and the cigarette in your lips feels just like the breast of the mother, the nipple. If you are not allowed to smoke, chew gum, and this and that, then you will talk, and that is more dangerous because you are throwing your garbage on other people’s minds.Can you remain silent for a long time? Psychologists say that if you remain silent for three weeks, you will start talking to yourself. Then you will be divided into two: you will talk and you will also listen. And if you remain silent for three months, you will be completely ready for the madhouse because then you will not bother whether somebody is there or not. You will talk, and not only talk, you will answer too. Now you are complete, now you don’t depend on anybody. This is what a lunatic is.A lunatic is a person whose whole world is confined within himself. He is the talker and he is the listener; he is the actor and he is the spectator; he is all, his whole world is confined in himself. He has divided himself into many parts and everything has become fragmentary. That’s why people are afraid of silence – they know they may crack up. And if you are afraid of silence that means you have an obsessive, feverish, diseased mind inside, which is continuously asking to be active.Activity is your escape from yourself. In action you are; in activity you have escaped from yourself – it is a drug. In activity you forget yourself, and when you forget yourself there are no worries, no anguish, no anxiety. That’s why you need to be continuously active, doing something or other, but never in a state when non-doing flowers in you and blooms.Action is good. Activity is ill. Find the distinction within yourself: what is activity and what is action; that is the first step. The second step is to be more involved in action so that the energy moves into action; and whenever there is activity, be more watchful about it, more alert. If you are aware, activity ceases, energy is preserved, and the same energy becomes action.Action is immediate. It is nothing readymade; it is not prefabricated. It doesn’t give you any chance to prepare, to go through a rehearsal. Action is always new and fresh like the dewdrops in the morning. And a person who is a person of action is also always fresh and young. The body may become old, but his freshness continues. The body may die, but his youth continues. The body may disappear, but he remains because existence loves freshness. Existence is always for the new and the fresh.Drop activity more and more. But how can you drop it? You can make dropping itself an obsession. This is what has happened to your monks in the monasteries: dropping activity has become their obsession. They are continuously doing something to drop it: prayers, meditation, yoga, this and that – now that is also activity. You cannot drop it in that way; it will come from the back door.Be aware! Feel the difference between action and activity. And when activity takes hold of you – in fact it should be called a possession when the activity possesses you, like a ghost… And activity is a ghost, it comes from the past, it is dead – when activity possesses you and you become feverish, then become more aware; that’s all that you can do. Watch it. Even if you have to do it, do it with full awareness. Smoke, but smoke very slowly, with full awareness so that you can see what you are doing.If you can watch smoking, suddenly some day, the cigarette will fall from your fingers because the whole absurdity of it will be revealed to you. It is stupid; it is simply stupid, idiotic! When you realize that, it simply falls. You cannot throw it away because throwing is an activity. That’s why I say it simply falls just like a dead leaf from the tree, falling; just like that it falls. If you have thrown it, you will pick it up again in some other way, in some other form.Let things drop; don’t drop them. Let activity disappear, don’t force it to disappear because the very effort of forcing it to disappear is again activity in another form. Watch, be alert, conscious, and you will come to a very, very miraculous phenomenon: when something drops by itself, on its own accord, it leaves no trace on you. If you force it, then a trace is left, then a scar is left. Then you will always brag that you smoked for thirty years, and then you dropped it. Now this bragging is the same; talking about it you are doing the same thing – not smoking, but talking too much about having dropped smoking. Your lips are again in activity, your mouth is functioning; your violence is there.If a man really understands, things drop – and then you cannot take the credit of, “I have dropped it.” It dropped itself! You have not dropped it. The ego is not strengthened through it. And then more and more actions will become possible. And whenever you have an opportunity to act totally, don’t miss it, don’t waver, act.Act more, and let activities drop on their own accord. A transformation will come to you by and by. It takes time, it needs seasoning, but there is no hurry.Now we will enter into the sutra.Do naught with the body but relax; shut firm the mouth and silent remain; empty your mind and think of naught.Do naught with the body but relax… Now you can understand what relaxation means. It means no urge for activity in you. Relaxation doesn’t mean lying down like a dead man; and you cannot lie down like a dead man, you can only pretend. How can you lie down like a dead man? You are alive; you only can pretend. Relaxation comes to you when there is no urge for activity; the energy is at home, not moving anywhere. If a certain situation arises you will act, that’s all, but you are not finding some excuse to act. You are at ease with yourself. Relaxation is to be at home.I was reading a book a few years ago. The title of the book is: You Must Relax. This is simply absurd because the must is against relaxation, but such books can only sell in America. Must means activity; it is an obsession. Whenever there is a must, an obsession is hidden behind it. There are actions in life, but there is no must, otherwise the must will create madness. You must relax – now relaxation has become the obsession. You have to do this posture and that, and lie down, and suggest to your body from the toes to the head. Tell the toes, “Relax!” and then go upward.Why must? Relaxation comes only when there is no must in your life. Relaxation is not only of the body, it is not only of the mind, it is of your total being.You are in activity too much, of course tired, dissipated, dried up, frozen. The life energy doesn’t move. There are only blocks and blocks and blocks. And whenever you do something you do it in madness. Of course the need to relax arises. That’s why so many books are written every month about relaxation, and I have never seen a person who has become relaxed through reading a book about relaxation – he has become more hectic because now his whole life of activity remains untouched. His obsession to be active is there, the disease is there, and he pretends to be in a relaxed state so he lies down. All turmoil within, a volcano ready to erupt, and he is relaxing, following the instructions from a book: how to relax.There is no book that can help you to relax, unless you read your own inner being, and then relaxation is not a must. Relaxation is an absence, absence of activity, not of action. So there is no need to move to the Himalayas. A few people have done that: to relax, they move to the Himalayas. What is the need to move to the Himalayas? Action has not to be dropped because if you drop action you drop life. Then you will be dead, not relaxed. So in the Himalayas you will find sages who are dead, not relaxed. They have escaped from life, from action.This is the subtle point to be understood: activity has to go, but not action – and both are easy. You can drop both and escape to the Himalayas, that’s easy. Or, the other thing is easy: you can continue in the activities, forcing yourself every morning or every evening, for a few minutes, to relax. You don’t understand the complexity of the human mind, the mechanism of it. Relaxation is a state. You cannot force it. Simply drop the negativities, the hindrances, and it comes; it bubbles up by itself.What do you do when you go to sleep in the night? Do you do something? If you do, you will be an insomniac, you will move into insomnia. What do you do? You simply lie down and go to sleep. There is no “doing” to it. If you “do,” it will be impossible to sleep. In fact, to go to sleep, all that is needed is that the continuity in the mind of the activities of the day has to discontinue. That’s all! When the activity is not there in the mind, the mind relaxes and goes to sleep. If you do something in order to go to sleep, you will be at a loss, then sleep will be impossible. Doing is not needed at all.Says Tilopa: Do naught with the body but relax… Don’t do anything! No yoga posture is needed; no distortions and contortions of the body are needed. Do naught… Only an absence of activity is needed. And how will it come? It will come by understanding. Understanding is the only discipline. Understand your activities and suddenly, in the middle of the activity, if you become aware, it will stop. If you become aware why you are doing it, it will stop. And that stopping is what Tilopa means: Do naught with the body but relax…What is relaxation? It is a state of affairs where your energy is not moving anywhere, not to the future, not to the past; it is simply there with you. In the silent pool of your own energy, in the warmth of it, you are enveloped. This moment is all. There is no other moment. Time stops; then there is relaxation. If time is there, there is no relaxation. Simply, the clock stops; there is no time. This moment is all. You don’t ask for anything else, you simply enjoy it. Ordinary things can be enjoyed because they are beautiful. In fact, nothing is ordinary – if God exists then everything is extraordinary.People come to me and ask, “Do you believe in God?” I say, “Yes, because everything is so extraordinary, how can it be without a deep consciousness in it?” Just small things: walking on the lawn when the dewdrops have not evaporated yet, and just feeling totally there – the texture, the touch of the lawn, the coolness of the dewdrops, the morning wind, the sun rising. What more do you need to be happy? What more is possibly needed to be happy? Just lying down in the night on the cool sheet on your bed, feeling the texture, feeling that the sheet is getting warmer and warmer, and you are shrouded in darkness, the silence of the night… With closed eyes you simply feel yourself. What more do you need? It is too much, a deep gratitude arises; this is relaxation.Relaxation means this moment is more than enough, more than can be asked and expected; nothing to ask, more than enough, more than you can desire – then the energy never moves anywhere. It becomes a placid pool. In your own energy, you dissolve. This moment is relaxation. Relaxation is neither of the body nor of the mind, relaxation is of the total. That’s why buddhas go on saying, “Become desireless,” because they know that if there is desire, you cannot relax. They go on saying, “Bury the dead,” because if you are too concerned with the past, you cannot relax. They go on saying, “Enjoy this very moment.”Jesus says, “Look at the lilies. Consider the lilies in the field, they toil not and they are more beautiful, their splendor is greater than King Solomon. They are arrayed in more beautiful aroma than King Solomon ever was. Look, consider the lilies!”What is he saying? He is saying, “Relax! You need not toil for it – in fact, everything is provided.” Jesus says, “If he looks after the birds of the air, the animals, wild animals, trees and plants, then why are you worried? Will he not look after you?” This is relaxation. Why are you so worried about the future? Consider the lilies, watch the lilies, and become like lilies – and then relax. Relaxation is not a posture; relaxation is a total transformation of your energy.Energy can have two dimensions. One is motivated, going somewhere, a goal somewhere; this moment is only a means and the goal is somewhere else to be achieved. This is one dimension of your energy; this is the dimension of activity, goal-oriented. Then everything is a means; somehow it has to be done and you have to reach the goal, then you will relax. But for this type of energy the goal never comes because this type of energy goes on changing every present moment into a means for something else, in the future. The goal always remains on the horizon. You go on running, but the distance remains the same.Now, there is another dimension of energy; that dimension is unmotivated celebration. The goal is here now; the goal is not somewhere else. In fact, you are the goal. In fact, there is no other fulfillment than of this moment – consider the lilies. When you are the goal and when the goal is not in the future, when there is nothing to be achieved, rather you have to just celebrate it, you have already achieved it, it is there. This is relaxation, unmotivated energy.So, to me, there are two types of people: the goal-seekers and the celebrators. The goal-oriented, they are the mad ones; they are going crazy, by and by, and they are creating their own craziness. And then the craziness has its own momentum. By and by, they move deeper into it; then they are completely lost. The other type of person is not a goal-seeker – he is not a seeker at all, he is a celebrator.And this I teach you: be the celebrators, celebrate! Already there is too much: the flowers have bloomed, the birds are singing, the sun is there in the sky – celebrate it! You are breathing and you are alive, and you have consciousness – celebrate it! Then suddenly you relax, then there is no tension, then there is no anguish. The whole energy that becomes anguish becomes gratitude; your whole heart goes on beating with a deep thankfulness – that is prayer. That’s all prayer is about: a heart beating with a deep thankfulness.Do naught with the body but relax… No need to do anything for it. Just understand the movement of the energy, the unmotivated movement of the energy. It flows, but not toward a goal, it flows as a celebration. It moves, not toward a goal, it moves because of its own overflowing energy.A child is dancing and jumping and running around; ask him, “Where are you going?” He is not going anywhere – you will look foolish to him. Children always think that adults are foolish. What a nonsense question, “Where are you going?” Is there any need to go anywhere? A child simply cannot answer your question because it is irrelevant. He is not going anywhere. He will simply shrug his shoulders. He will say, “Nowhere.” Then the goal-oriented mind asks, “Then why are you running?” To us an activity is relevant only when it leads somewhere.And I tell you, there is nowhere to go: here is all. The whole of existence culminates in this moment; it converges into this moment. The whole existence is already pouring into this moment; all that is there is pouring into this moment; it is here now. A child is simply enjoying the energy. He has too much. He is running, not because he has to reach somewhere, but because he has too much; he has to run.Act unmotivated: just an overflow of your energy. Share, but don’t trade, don’t make bargains. Give because you have, don’t give to take back – because then you will be in misery. All traders go to hell. If you want to find the greatest traders and bargainers, go to hell, there you will find them. Heaven is not for traders. Heaven is for celebrators.In Christian theology, again and again, for centuries it has been asked, “What do angels do in heaven?” This is a relevant question for people who are goal-oriented: “What do angels do in heaven?” Nothing seems to be done; there is nothing to do. Somebody asked Meister Eckhart, “What do angels do in heaven?” He said, “What type of a fool are you? Heaven is a place to celebrate. They don’t do anything. They simply celebrate the glory of it, the magnificence of it, the poetry of it, the blooming of it; they celebrate. They sing and they dance and they celebrate.” But I don’t think that man was satisfied by Meister Eckhart’s answer because to us an activity is meaningful only if it leads somewhere, if there is a goal.Remember, activity is goal-oriented; action is not. Action is overflowing of energy; action is in this moment, a response, unprepared, unrehearsed. Just the whole existence meets you, confronts you, and a response comes. The birds are singing and you start singing – it is not an activity. Suddenly it happens. Suddenly you find it happens that you have started humming – this is action.And if you become more and more involved in action, and less and less occupied in activity, your life will change and it will become a deep relaxation. Then you do but you remain relaxed. A buddha is never tired. Why? – because he is not a doer, whatsoever he has, he gives, he overflows.Do naught with the body but relax; shut firm the mouth and silent remain… The mouth is really very, very significant because that is where the first activity landed; your lips started the first activity. Surrounding the area of the mouth is the beginning of all activity: you breathed in, you cried, you started groping for the mother’s breast. And your mouth remains always in a frantic activity. That’s why Tilopa suggests: understand activity, understand action, relax, and: …shut firm the mouth…Whenever you sit down to meditate, whenever you want to be silent, the first thing is to shut the mouth completely. If you shut the mouth completely, your tongue will touch the roof of your mouth, both the lips will be completely closed and the tongue will touch the roof. Shut it completely, but that can be done only if you have followed whatsoever I have been saying to you, not before it.You can do it! Shutting of the mouth is not a very big effort. You can sit like a statue, with a completely shut mouth, but that will not stop activity. Deep inside the thinking will continue, and if thinking continues you can feel subtle vibrations in the lips. Others may not be able to observe it because they are very subtle, but if you are thinking then your lips quiver a little: a very subtle quivering.When you really relax, that quivering stops. You are not talking, you are not making any activity inside you: …shut firm the mouth and silent remain… And then don’t think.What will you do? Thoughts are coming and going. Let them come and go, that’s not the problem. Don’t get involved; remain aloof, detached. Simply watch them coming and going, they are not your concern. Shut the mouth and remain silent. By and by, thoughts will cease automatically – they need your cooperation to be there. If you cooperate, they will be there; if you fight, then too they will be there because both are co-operations: one for, the other against. Both are sorts of activity. Simply watch.But shutting the mouth is very helpful. So first, as I have been observing many people, I will suggest that first you yawn: open your mouth as wide as possible, tense your mouth as wide as possible, yawn completely; it even starts hurting. Do this two or three times; this will help the mouth to remain shut for a longer time. And then for two or three minutes, say gibberish, nonsense, loudly. Anything that comes to the mind, say it loudly and enjoy it. Then shut the mouth.It is easier to move from the opposite end. If you want to relax your hand, it is better to first make it as tense as possible. Clench the fist and let it be as tense as possible, do just the opposite and then relax, and you will attain a deeper relaxation of the nervous system. Make gestures, faces, movements of the face, distortions, yawn, speak two or three minutes of nonsense – and then shut the mouth. And this tension will give you a deeper possibility to relax the lips and mouth. Shut the mouth and then just be a watcher. Soon a silence will descend on you.There are two types of silences. One: a silence that you can force upon yourself. That is not a very graceful thing, it is violence; it is a sort of rape of the mind, it is aggressive. Then there is another sort of silence that descends on you, like night descends. It comes upon you; it envelops you. Simply create the possibility for it, the receptivity, and it comes. Shut the mouth, watch; don’t try to be silent. If you try, you can force a few seconds of silence, but they will not be of any value; inside you will go on boiling. So don’t try to be silent. Simply create the situation, the soil, put in the seed and wait.…empty your mind and think of naught. What will you do to empty the mind? Thoughts are coming, you watch. And watching has to be done with a precaution: the watching must be passive, not active. These are the subtle mechanisms and you have to understand everything, otherwise you can miss anywhere. And if you miss a slight point, the whole thing changes its quality. Watch; watch passively, not actively.What is the difference? You are waiting for your girl, or your lover – then you watch actively. Then somebody passes by the door and you jump up to look whether she has come. Then, just leaves fluttering in the wind, and you feel maybe she has come. You go on jumping up; your mind is very eager, active. No, this will not help. If you are too eager and too active this will not bring you to Tilopa’s silence or my silence. Be passive as you sit by the side of a river and the river flows by, and you simply watch. There is no eagerness, no urgency, no emergency. Nobody is forcing you. Even if you miss, there is nothing missed. You simply watch; you just look. Even the word watch is not good because the very word watch gives a feeling of being active. You simply look, not having anything to do. You simply sit by the bank of the river, you look, and the river flows by. Or you look in the sky, and the clouds float passively.This passiveness is very, very essential; it is to be understood because your obsession for activity can become eagerness, can become an active waiting. Then you miss the whole point; then the activity has entered from the back door again. Be a passive watcher: …empty your mind and think of naught.This passivity will automatically empty your mind. Ripples of activity, ripples of mind energy, by and by will subside and the whole surface of your consciousness will be without any waves, without any ripples. It becomes like a silent mirror.Like a hollow bamboo rest at ease with your body.This is one of Tilopa’s special methods. Every master has his own special method through which he has attained, and through which he would like to help others. This is Tilopa’s specialty: Like a hollow bamboo rest at ease with your body.A bamboo: inside, completely hollow. When you rest, you just feel that you are like a bamboo: inside, completely hollow and empty. And, in fact, this is the case, your body is just like a bamboo, and inside it is hollow. Your skin, your bones, your blood; all are part of the bamboo, and inside there is space, hollowness.When you are sitting with a completely silent mouth, inactive, tongue touching the roof and silent, not quivering with thoughts, mind watching passively, not waiting for anything in particular, feeling like a hollow bamboo – suddenly infinite energy starts pouring within you. You are filled with the unknown, with the mysterious, with the divine. A hollow bamboo becomes a flute and the divine starts playing it. Once you are empty there is no barrier for the divine to enter you.Try this; it is one of the most beautiful meditations, the meditation of becoming a hollow bamboo. You need not do anything else. You simply become it, and all else happens. Suddenly you feel something is descending into your hollowness. You are like a womb and a new life is entering you, a seed is falling. And a moment comes when the bamboo completely disappears.Like a hollow bamboo rest at ease with your body. Rest at ease; don’t desire spiritual things, don’t desire heaven, don’t even desire God. God cannot be desired – when you are desireless, he comes to you. Liberation cannot be desired because desire is the bondage. When you are desireless, you are liberated. Buddhahood cannot be desired because desiring is the hindrance. When the barrier is not, suddenly Buddha explodes in you. You already have the seed. When you are empty, space is there – the seed explodes.Like a hollow bamboo rest at ease with your body. Giving not nor taking, put your mind at rest.There is nothing to give, there is nothing to get. Everything is absolutely okay as it is. There is no need for any give and take. You are absolutely perfect as you are.This teaching of the East has been very much misunderstood in the West because they say, “What type of teaching is this? Then people will not strive, and then they will not try to go higher. Then they will not make any effort to change their character, to transform their evil ways into good ways. Then they may become a victim of the Devil.” In the West, “Improve yourself,” is the slogan; either in terms of this world, or in terms of the other, but to improve. How to improve? How to become greater and bigger?In the East we understand it more deeply, that this very effort to become is the barrier because you are already carrying your being with you. You need not become anything. Simply realize who you are, that’s all. Simply realize who is hidden within you. Improving, whatsoever you improve, you will always be in anxiety and anguish because the very effort to improve is leading you on a wrong path. It makes the future meaningful, a goal meaningful, ideals meaningful, and then your mind becomes a desiring.Desiring, you miss. Let desiring subside, become a silent pool of nondesiring, and suddenly you are surprised, unexpectedly it is there. And you will have a belly laugh, as Bodhidharma laughed. Bodhidharma’s followers say that when you become silent, again you can hear his roaring laugh. He is still laughing. He has not stopped laughing since then. He laughed because, “What type of joke is this? You are already that which you are trying to become! How can you be successful if you are already that, and you are trying to become that? Your failure is absolutely certain. How can you become that which you are already?” So Bodhidharma laughed.Bodhidharma was exactly a contemporary of Tilopa. They may have known each other, maybe not physically, but they must have known each other – the same quality of being…Giving not nor taking, put your mind at rest.Mahamudra is like a mind that clings to naught.You have achieved if you don’t cling; nothingness in your hand and you have achieved. Mahamudra is like a mind that clings to naught.Thus practicing, in time you will reach buddhahood.What then, is to be practiced? It is to be more and more at ease, to be more and more here and now, to be more and more in action and less and less in activity. To be more and more hollow, empty, passive. To be more and more a watcher: indifferent, not expecting anything, not desiring anything. To be happy with yourself as you are. To be celebrating.And then, any moment, any moment when things ripen and the right season comes, you bloom into a buddha.Enough for today.

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Tantra Supreme Understanding 01-10Category: TANTRA

Tantra Supreme Understanding 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The song continues:The practice of mantra and paramita, instruction in the sutras and precepts, and teaching from the schools and scriptures, will not bring realization of the innate truth. For if the mind when filled with some desire should seek a goal, it only hides the light.He who keeps tantric precepts yet discriminates, betrays the spirit of samaya. Cease all activity, abandon all desire, let thoughts rise and fall as they will like ocean waves. He who never harms the non-abiding nor the principle of non-distinction, upholds the tantric precepts.He who abandons craving and clings not to this and that, perceives the real meaning given in the scriptures.The Tantra attitude is the very being of Tilopa. You must understand first what the Tantra attitude is; only then it will be possible for you to comprehend what Tilopa is trying to say. So, something about the Tantra attitude: the first thing, it is not an attitude because Tantra looks at life with a total vision. It has no attitude with which to look at life. It has no concepts; it is not a philosophy. It is not even a religion – it has no theology. It doesn’t believe in words, theories or doctrines. It wants to look at life without any philosophy, without any theory, without any theology. It wants to look at life as it is, without bringing any mind in between because that will be a distortion. The mind then will project, the mind then will mix, and you will not be able to know that which is.Tantra avoids mind and encounters life face to face, neither thinking “This is good” nor thinking “This is bad,” but simply facing that which is. So it is difficult to say that this is an attitude; in fact it is a no attitude.The second thing to remember: Tantra is a great yea sayer; it says yes to everything. It has nothing like no in its vocabulary, there is no negation. It never says no to anything because with no the fight starts, with no you become the ego. The moment you say no to anything, you have become the ego already; a conflict has come in, now you are at war.Tantra loves, and loves unconditionally. It never says no to anything whatsoever – because everything is part of the whole, and everything has its own place in the whole, and the whole cannot exist with anything missing from it.It is said that if just a drop of water is missing, the whole of existence will thirst. You pluck a flower in the garden, and you have plucked something out of the whole of existence. You harm a flower, and you have harmed millions of stars because everything is interrelated. The whole exists as a whole, as an organic whole. The whole exists not as a mechanical thing – everything is related to everything else.So Tantra says yes unconditionally. There has never been any other vision of life which says yes without any conditions: simply yes. No disappears; from your very being, no disappears. When there is no no, how can you fight? How can you be at war? You simply float. You simply merge and melt. You become one. The boundaries are no longer there. No creates the boundary. No is the boundary around you. Whenever you say no, watch – immediately something closes in, but your being opens whenever you say yes.The real atheist is one who goes on saying no to life; his saying no to God is just symbolic. You may believe in God, but if you say no to anything, your belief is not of any worth, your God is hocus-pocus – because only a total yes creates a real God, reveals the real God. When you say a total yes to existence, all of existence is suddenly transformed; then there are no longer rocks, no longer trees, no longer people, rivers, mountains, suddenly everything has become one, and that oneness is God.A real theist is one who says yes to everything, not only to God – because mind is very cunning. You can say yes to God and no to the world. This has happened. Millions have lost their whole life because of this. They say yes to God and they say no to life. In fact, they think that unless you say no to life, how can you say yes to God? They create a division: they deny the world in order to accept God. But an acceptance that stands on a denial is no acceptance at all. It is false. It is a pretension.How can you accept the creator without accepting the creation? If you say no to the creation, how can you say yes to the creator? They are one. The creator and the creation are not two things: the creator is the creation. In fact, there is no division between the creator and the creation, it is a continuous process of creativity. At one pole creativity looks like the creator; at the other pole creativity looks like the creation, but they are both poles of the same phenomenon.Tantra says that if you say yes, you simply say yes; you don’t pose it against some no. But all the religions have done that: they say no to the world and yes to God; and they say no to the world forcibly, so that their yes can become stronger. Many so-called saints have said, “God, we accept you, but we don’t accept your world.” But what type of acceptance is this? Is this acceptance? You are choosing. You are dissecting existence into two. You are putting yourself above God. You say, “This we accept and that we deny.” All renunciation comes out of this.One who renounces is not a religious person. In the view of Tantra, one who renounces is an egoist. First he was accumulating things of the world, but his attention was on the world. Now he renounces, but his attention is again on the world and he remains the egoist. The ego has subtle ways of fulfilling itself, and coming again and again in spirals. Again and again it comes back, with a new face, with new colors.It happened…I was staying in my village and Mulla Nasruddin came to visit me. He, in those days, used to live in New Delhi, the capital, and he was so full of the capital that he was almost blind. I took him to the small fort of my village; he said, “What! You call this a fort? You should come to New Delhi and see the Red Fort. This is nothing!” I took him to the river, and he said, “What! You call this a river? I have never seen such a sick and thin river in my life.” And this happened everywhere.Then came the full-moon night, and I thought that at least with the full moon he will be happy and not bring in this small village. But no, I was wrong. I took him to the river. It was a beautiful silent evening, and then the moon came up, very big, simply wonderful. And I looked at Nasruddin and said, “Look! What a big moon.”He looked at the moon, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Not bad for a small village like this.”This is the mind; it persists, it comes in spirals – again and again to the same thing. You can renounce the world, but you will not become otherworldly; you will remain very worldly. And if you want to check, go to the Indian monks, sadhus. They remain very, very worldly, rooted in the world. They have renounced everything, but their focus is on the world, their focus is on renouncing, their focus is ego-centered, ego-oriented. They may be thinking that by renouncing they are nearing God, no! Nobody has ever reached to the divine by saying no to anything.This is the vision of Tantra. Tantra says say yes, say yes to everything. You need not fight, you need not even swim – you simply float with the current. The river is going by itself, on its own accord, everything reaches to the ultimate ocean. You simply don’t create any disturbance, you don’t push the river; you simply go with it. That going with it, floating with it, relaxing with it, is Tantra.If you can say yes, a deep acceptance happens to you. If you say yes, how can you be complaining? How can you be miserable? Then everything is as it should be. You are not fighting, not denying – you accept. And remember, this acceptance is different from ordinary acceptance.Ordinarily a person accepts a situation when he feels helpless; that is impotent acceptance. That will not lead you anywhere; impotence cannot lead you anywhere. A person accepts a situation when he feels hopeless: “Nothing can be done, so what to do? At least accept, to save face.” Tantra acceptance is not that type of acceptance. It comes out of an over fulfillment, it comes out of a deep contentment – not out of hopelessness, frustration, helplessness. It comes when you don’t say no; it suddenly surfaces in you. Your whole being becomes a deep contentment.That acceptance has a beauty of its own. It is not forced; you have not practiced for it. If you practice, it will be false; it will be hypocrisy. If you practice, you will be split in two: on the outside it will be acceptance; deep down, the turmoil, the negation, the denial. Deep down you will be boiling up to explode any moment. Just on the surface you will pretend that everything is okay.Tantra acceptance is total; it doesn’t split you. All the religions of the world, except Tantra, have created split personalities. All the religions of the world, except Tantra, have created schizophrenia. They split you. They make something bad in you and something good. And they say the good has to be achieved and the bad denied, the Devil has to be denied and God accepted. They create a split within you and a fight. Then you are continuously feeling guilty because how can you destroy the part that is organically one with you? You may call it bad, you may call it names; it doesn’t make any difference. How can you destroy it? You never created it. You have simply found it; it was given. Anger is there, sex is there, greed is there; you have not created them; they are given facts of life, just like your eyes and your hands. You can call them names, you can call them ugly or beautiful or whatsoever you like, but you cannot kill them. Nothing can be killed out of existence; nothing can be destroyed.Tantra says a transformation is possible, but destruction, no! And a transformation comes when you accept your total being. Then suddenly everything falls in line, then everything takes its own place; then anger is also absorbed, then greed is also absorbed. Then without trying to cut anything out of your being, your whole being rearranges itself. If you accept and say yes, a rearrangement happens, and whereas before there was a noisy clamor inside, now a melody – music is born, a harmony comes in.What is the difference between noise and harmony? The same sound waves arranged in a different way. In a noise there is no center; the notes are the same. A madman playing on the piano; the notes are the same, the sound is the same, but a madman playing – it has no center to it. If you can give a center to noise it becomes music, then it converges on a center and everything becomes organic. If a madman is playing on the piano, then every note is separate, individual; it is a crowd of notes, not a melody. And when a musician plays on the same piano with the same fingers, there comes an alchemical change: now the same notes have fallen into a pattern, the same notes have joined into an organic unity, now they have a center to them. Now they are not a crowd, now they are a family; a subtle love joins them together, now they are one. And that is the whole art: to bring notes into a loving phenomenon – they become harmonious.Tantra says you are a noise right now as you are. Nothing is wrong in it – simply you don’t have a center. Once you have a center, everything falls in line, and everything becomes beautiful.When Gurdjieff gets angry it is beautiful. When you get angry it is ugly. Anger is neither ugly nor beautiful. When Jesus gets angry it is sheer music – even anger. When Jesus takes a whip into the temple and chases the traders out of the temple, there is a subtle beauty to it. Even Buddha lacks that beauty; Buddha seems to be one-sided. It seems that nothing of anger is left in him to play with; the tension of anger, the salt of it is not there. Buddha doesn’t taste as good as Jesus. Jesus has a little salt in him, he can get angry – even his anger has become part of his whole being; nothing has been denied, everything has been accepted.But Tilopa is incomparable. Jesus is nothing… The Tantra masters are simply wild flowers; they have everything in them. You must have seen Bodhidharma pictures; if you have not seen, look again – so ferocious that if you meditate on Bodhidharma’s picture in the night, alone, you will not be able to sleep: he will haunt you. It is said of him that once he looked at anybody, that man would have nightmares, continuously. Bodhidharma would haunt him, the very look, so ferocious. When Bodhidharma or Tilopa spoke, it is said their speaking was like a lion’s roar, a thundercloud, a tremendous waterfall, wild, fiery.But if you wait a little and don’t judge them too soon, you will find within them the most loving of all hearts. Then you will feel the music, the melody in them. And then suddenly you will realize that they have not denied anything; they have absorbed everything, even ferociousness. A lion is beautiful, even its ferociousness has a beauty of its own. You take the ferociousness out of a lion and he is just a stuffed lion, dead.Tantra says everything has to be absorbed, everything, remember – without any condition. Sex has to be absorbed; then it becomes a tremendous force in you. A Buddha, a Tilopa, a Jesus, they have such a magnetic force around them. What is it? – sex absorbed. Sex is human magnetism. Suddenly you fall into their love. Once you come across their path, you are being pulled to a different world altogether. You are torn from your old world, and you are being pulled to something new, something that you never even dreamed about. What is this force? It is the same sex which has become transformed; now it has become a magnetism, a charisma. Buddha has anger absorbed; that very anger becomes compassion. And when Jesus takes the whip in his hand, it is because of compassion. When Jesus talks in fire, this is the same compassion.Remember this, that Tantra accepts you in your totality. When you come to me, I accept you in your totality. I am not here to help you deny anything. I am here only to help you to rearrange, to get a center of all your energies, to converge them to a center. And I tell you that you will be richer if you have anger absorbed in it; you will be richer if you have sex absorbed in it; you will be richer if you have hatred, jealousy, absorbed in it – they are the spices of life, and you will taste… You will not become tasteless; you will have an enrichment of your taste. You need a little salt. And anger is exactly in the same amount as is needed. When it overpowers you, then it becomes ugly. If you eat only salt then you will die. Salt is needed in proportion, absolutely needed. Remember this.On the path you will meet many people who would like to cripple you, to cut you up, to dissect you. They will say, “This hand is bad, cut it off! This eye is bad; throw it out! Anger is bad, hate is bad, sex is bad.” They will go on cutting you, and by the time they have left you, you are simply paralyzed, a crippled one. You have no life left. That’s how the whole civilization has become paralyzed and crippled.Unless Tantra becomes the foundation of the whole human mind, man will not be complete – because no other vision accepts man in his totality. But the acceptance, remember again, is of overflowing, it is not of impotence.One lives one’s life, one goes through it: each shade of it has to be lived, and each taste of it has to be tasted. Even the wandering, even going astray is meaningful because if you never go astray you will not achieve an enriched enlightenment, you will never be simple. You may be a simpleton, but you will never be simple. A simpleton is not simple.Simplicity needs a very deep and complex experience behind it. A simpleton is simply without experience. He may be a fool, but he cannot be a sage. A sage is one who has lived all the sins of life, who has not denied anything, who has not called anything a sin, who has simply accepted whatsoever has happened, who has allowed it to happen; who has moved with every wave, who has drifted, who went astray, who fell down to the very hell.Somewhere Nietzsche says, “If a tree wants to reach to the sky, its roots need to go to the very hell.” He’s right. If you want a real flowering into the sky, your roots will need to go to the deepest hell in the earth.When a sinner becomes a sage, the sage has a beauty. When a sage is simply a sage, without becoming ever a sinner, he is just a simpleton; he has missed life. And no virtue can come out unless there has been a wandering away, going astray.There is a beautiful parable that Jesus tells:A father had two sons. The younger son asked for his heritage, took it away, wasted it in the city with wine and women and became a beggar. The other son remained with the father, worked hard in the farms and accumulated much wealth. And then one day, the beggar son, the son who had gone astray, informed his father, “I am coming back, I was a fool, I wasted your wealth. Forgive me. Now I have nowhere to go, accept me, I am coming back.”And the father said to his older son, “Celebrate this occasion. Kill the fattest sheep, make many delicious foods, distribute sweets to the whole town, and find the oldest wine for him. This is going to be a feast – my son who had gone astray is coming back.”Some people from the village went to the farm, and they told the other son, “Look – what injustice! You have been with your father, you served him like a servant, you never went astray, you never did anything against him, but a feast was never given in your honor, it was never celebrated. And now that vagabond, that beggar who has wasted all your father’s money and who has lived in sin, is coming back. And look at the injustice, your father is celebrating it: come to the town! Sweets are being distributed, a great feast is being arranged.”Of course, the elder son felt very, very angry. He came back, was very sad, and he told his father, “What type of injustice is this? You never killed any sheep for me; you never gave me any gift. And now that son of yours who has wasted all the wealth that you had given him, and wasted it in wrong ways, is coming back – and you are celebrating it.”The father said, “Yes, because you have always been with me, there is no need. But his coming back has to be celebrated: he had gone astray, he is the sheep lost and found again.”Christians have not understood the full significance of this story. In fact, it says what I am saying, what Tantra means; it is a Tantra story. It means that if you remain always on the right path, you will not be celebrated by existence. You will be a simpleton; you will not be enriched by life. You will not have any salt in you; you may be nutritious, but no spices. You will be very simple, good, but your goodness will not have a complex harmony in it. You will be a single note, not millions of notes falling into a melody. You will be a straight line, with no curves and no corners. Those curves and corners give a beauty, they make life more mysterious, they give depth. You will be shallow in your saintlihood, you will not have any depth in you.That’s why Tantra says everything is beautiful. Even sin is beautiful because sin gives depth to your saintliness. Even going astray is beautiful because coming back becomes more enriched. This world is needed for you to move into it deeply so that you forget yourself completely, and then…a coming back.People ask, “Why does this world exist if God is against it? Why does he throw us into the world, into the world of karmas, sins and wrongs? Why does he throw us in? He can simply redeem us.” That is not possible. Then you would be shallow, superficial. You have to be thrown to the farthest corner of the world, and you have to come back. That coming back has something in it; that something is the crystallization of your being.Tantra accepts everything, lives everything. That’s why Tantra never could become a very accepted ideology. It always remained a fringe ideology, just somewhere on the boundary, outside the society, civilization, because civilization has chosen to be shallow, good but shallow. Civilization has chosen to deny: to say no to many things. Civilization is not courageous enough to accept all, to accept everything that life gives.The greatest courage in the world is to accept all that life gives to you. And this is what I am trying to help you toward, to accept all that life gives you, and accept it in deep humbleness, as a gift. And when I say this, I mean even those things which society has conditioned you to call wrong and bad. Accept sex, and then there will come a flowering out of it; brahmacharya will come, a purity, an innocence will come; a virginity will come out of it – but that will be a transcendence. Through experience one transcends.Moving in the dark valleys of life, one’s eyes become trained, and one starts seeing the light even in darkness. What beauty is there if you can see light while there is day? The beauty is there when there is the darkest night, and your eyes are so trained in darkness that you can see the day hidden there. When in the darkest night you can see the morning, then there is beauty, then you have achieved. When in the lowest you can see the highest, when even in hell you can create a heaven, then, then you have become the artist of life. And Tantra wants to make you the artists of life – not deniers, but great yea sayers.Accept, and by and by you will feel the more you accept, the less there is desire. If you accept, how can desire stand there? Whatsoever the case is in this moment, you accept it. Then there is no movement for anything else. You live it moment to moment in deep acceptance. You grow, without there being any goal, without there being any desire to go somewhere and be something else or somebody else.Tantra says, “Be yourself,” and that is the only being you can ever achieve. With acceptance desires fall, with acceptance desirelessness comes into being by itself. You don’t practice it; you don’t force it upon yourself. You don’t cut off your desires – just by accepting, they disappear.And when suddenly a moment happens that you accept totally and all desires have gone, there is a sudden enlightenment. Suddenly, without doing anything on your part, it happens. That’s the greatest gift this existence can give to you.This is the Tantra attitude toward life. There is no other life than this, and there is no other world than this. This very samsara is the nirvana. You just have to be a little more understanding, more accepting, more childlike, less egoistic.Now the sutras of Tilopa:The practice of mantra and paramita, instruction in the sutras and precepts, and teaching from the schools and scriptures, will not bring realization of the innate truth.No Vedas will help, no Bibles. The practice of mantra will not be of any help; rather, it can become a hindrance. What is a mantra in fact? What are you doing when you are chanting a mantra? What is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi teaching to people when he is teaching transcendental meditation? He is saying to repeat a certain word or a certain mantra continuously inside: Ram, Ram, Ram; om, om, om; anything, even your own name will do; even if you repeat H2O, H2O, H2O, that will do because the point is not the sound or the word. The point is that if you continuously repeat something, by the very repetition something happens.What is that? When you repeat a certain word continuously, a rhythm is created inside: Ram, Ram, Ram, a rhythm is created, and the rhythm is monotonous. Whenever you repeat a certain word continuously, monotony happens. Repeating a certain word continuously, you start feeling sleepy. This is what hypnosis is, this is autohypnosis; repeating a mantra is auto hypnotizing. You become drunk from your own monotonous sound rhythm.It is good! Nothing is bad in it; it gives you a good sleep, very refreshing. If you are tired, it is a good mental trick; you will feel fresh, even fresher than you can feel in ordinary sleep because the ordinary sleep cannot go as deep as mantra sleep can go. Because in ordinary sleep many thoughts continue, dreams continue, they continuously disturb. But if you continuously repeat a certain mantra, nothing else can be there, only the mantra. It takes you to very, very deep sleep.In Yoga we have a special word for it: in Sanskrit sleep is called nidra, and a sleep created by mantra chanting is called tandra. That is a deeper sleep but still sleep, it is called yoga tandra: sleep created by mantra yoga, chanting.If you are disturbed in your sleep, TM can be helpful. That’s why in America it seems that Maharishi’s influence has been great because America is the most disturbed country as far as sleep is concerned. So many tranquilizers are being used; so many sleeping pills are being used. People have lost the natural capacity to sleep – hence the influence. In India, nobody bothers about TM because people are already sleeping so deeply that it is difficult to wake them.A mantra gives you a subtle sleep; as far as it goes it is good, but don’t think that it is meditation; then you become a victim. Don’t think that it is a meditation; it is just a mental tranquilizer. And it is as chemical as any sleeping pill because sound changes the chemistry of your body. Sound is part of the chemistry of your body. That’s why with a certain type of music you feel very, very refreshed; the music falls on you, cleanses you, as if you have taken a bath. Sound changes the chemistry of your body. There are certain types of music which will make you very passionate and sexual; just their hitting sounds change the chemistry of your body.A mantra is creating inner music with a single note; monotony is basic to it. And there is no need to ask Maharishi Mahesh Yogi about it – every mother in the world knows about it. Whenever the child is restless, she hums a lullaby. A lullaby is a mantra: just two or three words, even meaningless, no need for any meaning to be there. She sits by the side of the child, or takes the child near her heart – that too, the beating of the heart, is monotonous music. So whenever a child is restless, the mother puts his head on her heart, the beat of the heart becomes a mantra and the child is befooled, he falls asleep. Or, if the child has grown a little and cannot be befooled so easily, then she chants a lullaby; she goes on repeating just two or three words, monotonous, simple words. Monotony helps, the child falls asleep, nothing bad in it – better tranquilizer than any chemical pill. But still a tranquilizer, a pill, subtle, a sound pill; it affects the chemistry of the body.So if you are disturbed in your sleep, if you have a certain degree of insomnia, a mantra is good, but don’t think that it is meditation. It will make you more and more adjusted, but it will not transform you. And the whole society is always trying to make you more adjusted to it. It has tried religion to make you adjusted to it. It has tried morality; it has tried mantra and yogas. It has tried psychoanalysis, and many types of psychiatry, to bring you back to the adjusted society. The whole goal of the society is how to create an adjusted individual. But if the whole society is wrong, being adjusted to it cannot be good. If the whole society is mad, then being adjusted to it means only becoming mad.Somebody asked Sigmund Freud once, “In fact, what exactly are you doing in psychoanalysis, and what is the goal of it?”He said – and he was a really authentic person – he said, “At the most what we can do is this: we make hysterical, unhappy people normally unhappy. That’s all: hysterically unhappy people, normally unhappy; we bring them back to the normal unhappiness, like everybody else. They were going a little too much; they were creating too much unhappiness and they were becoming neurotic. We bring them back to the normal neurosis of humanity.”Freud says, “Man can never be happy. Man can only be either neurotically unhappy or normally unhappy, but man can never be happy.”As far as ordinary humanity is concerned, his diagnosis seems to be exactly right, but he is not aware of a Buddha or a Tilopa; he is not aware of those who have achieved a total, blissful state of being. And it is as it should be because a Buddha will not go to be treated by Freud – for what? Only hysterical persons come to Freud, and then he treats them. His whole knowledge, his whole experience, is of hysterically neurotic people. In all his forty years’ experience with patients, he has not known a single individual who is happy. So he is right, empirical. His experience shows that there are only two types of people: normally unhappy and hysterically unhappy. And at the most we can help this much: we can make you more adjusted.Mantras, psychoanalysis, religion, morality, churches, and prayers have all been used to make you adjusted. And the real religion starts only when you start on a journey of transformation, not to be adjusted to the society, but to be in harmony with the cosmos. To be adjusted to the society you have to fall down.It happens many times that a madman has nothing wrong in him. The madman is simply too much of an energy and he cannot adjust himself to the society – he goes astray. A madman is too much of an individual; a madman is so talented in certain things that he cannot get adjusted to the society. And you must remember all geniuses always remain maladjusted in the society, and out of one hundred geniuses, almost eighty percent always have a trip to the madhouse. They have to because they go beyond society. They have much more than ordinary society allows.The ordinary society is like a paperweight on you: it won’t allow you to fly. A genius throws away the paperweight and would like to be on the wing and go to the farthest corner of the sky. The moment you go beyond the line of society, the boundary, you are mad. And the whole society tries to readjust you.Tantra says readjustment, adjustment, is not the goal; it is not worth much. Transformation is the goal. What to do? Don’t try tricks to be readjusted. A mantra is a trick. If you are feeling that you cannot sleep, then don’t try to find sleep through a mantra. Rather, on the contrary, try to find what the restlessness is that is causing you sleeplessness. You may desire too much, you may be too ambitious. Your ambition won’t allow you to sleep, your restlessness continues, your desiring mind goes on and on and on, and the thinking process continues. That’s why you cannot sleep. Now there are two ways: one is of mantra and the other is of Tantra.Mantra says: don’t bother about the causes; simply repeat a mantra and fall asleep. This is so superficial. Don’t bother about the causes, just repeat a mantra – fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen in the evening – and you will be able to sleep; and you will feel good and you will feel healthy. But even if you feel good and healthy, what will happen out of it? There are many healthy people who sleep beautifully, but nothing has happened to them; the ultimate blooming has not come. Health is good in itself, but it cannot be the goal. To sleep is good, but cannot be the goal. Tantra says find the cause of your restlessness.A minister in the Indian government used to come to me. He was always worried about his sleep, and he would say, “Just give me some technique so that I can sleep.”But I told him, “A politician cannot sleep – that is not possible. A politician is not meant to sleep; he is not expected to sleep. That is good, and I am not going to give you any technique. Go to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, he will give you a technique without asking why.” And in fact he went.Then he came after three months. He said, “You suggested and it worked! Now it is beautiful, now I can sleep.”Then I told him, “Whenever you need, and you feel that sleep is not enough, that awakening is needed, then come to me because you can sleep, but what will happen out of it? You will remain the same; in the morning you will again be on the same ambitious trip. You may think something good has happened, but only one thing has happened: now you will not be aware of the causes; they have been forced by the mantra into the deeper unconscious, and the possibility of transformation has been postponed.”I cannot give you better sleep. I would like to give you better awakening, better awareness.A politician continuously desires, is fighting, competing, jealous, trying to reach higher and higher in the hierarchy. In the end nothing is achieved.Mulla Nasruddin worked his whole life in politics and went to the highest post possible. Then I asked him, “What have you attained?”He said, “To be frank, I’m the greatest ladder climber in the world. That is my achievement: the greatest ladder climber.”But even if you reach the highest rung of the ladder, what to do then? Your presidents and prime ministers have reached, they are the greatest ladder climbers, but ladder climbing is not life. And what is the point of just going on and on climbing bigger and bigger ladders?Ambition creates restlessness. I would like you to understand your ambition. Desiring creates restlessness. I would like you to be aware of your desiring. This is the way of Tantra. When the cause disappears, the disease disappears. And if the cause disappears, then you are transformed. The disease is just a symptom – don’t try to hide the symptom; let it be there, it is good because it goes on poking, goes on hitting you and saying that something is wrong. If you cannot sleep, it is good because it shows that something is wrong in your very style of life.I am not going to help you to attain better sleep. I will say, “Try to understand, this is a symptom.” This symptom is a friend; it is not an enemy. It is simply showing that deep down in your unconscious there are undercurrents which won’t allow you to sleep. Understand them, absorb them, go through them, transcend them; and then there will be a deep sleep, not because you have forced the symptom underground, but because the disease has disappeared. And in that sleep a totally different quality of consciousness comes into existence. Then you can be deeply asleep and still alert. It is not hypnosis then, it is not like a drunken state, it is not through a drug. And all mantras are drugs; very subtle, but still drugs. Don’t become a drug addict.Says Tilopa: The practice of mantra and paramita, instruction in the sutras and precepts, and teaching from the schools and scriptures, will not bring realization of the innate truth.Paramita is a Buddhist word; it means compassion, serving the people. Whatsoever the Christian missionaries are doing all over the world is paramita. Serve! Help! Sympathize! Be compassionate! But Tilopa says that will also not help.I have also observed that. I know many people who are social reformers, great servants of society; they have devoted and sacrificed their whole life for the uplift of people, but no transformation has happened to them. It cannot happen because serving the people, serving the society, becomes an occupation; they become occupied.In fact, if the society is suddenly transformed by a divine miracle, and there is no beggar to be served, no poor man to be served, no ill person, no hospitals, no mad people – if this suddenly happens, can you conceive what will happen to your great servants of the society? They will commit suicide! Not finding anybody to serve, what will they do? They will simply be at a loss. What will happen to Christian missionaries? If there is nobody to be converted and forced and led and seduced to their path; if everybody becomes Christian, what will they do? Where will they go on their great missions? They will have to commit suicide. If the revolution really happens, what will be the fate of your revolutionaries? What will they do? Suddenly out of a job, unemployed, they will start praying to God, “Bring back the old society; we need lepers to serve, we need beggars to help.”You can be occupied either in your own business, or you can be occupied with other people, but the mind needs occupation. The mind needs that you should forget yourself and be occupied with something. This is an escape from the innate truth. And Tilopa says these are not the ways.

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Tantra Supreme Understanding 01-10Category: TANTRA

Tantra Supreme Understanding 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The Song of Mahamudra continues:In Mahamudra all one’s sins are burned; in Mahamudra one is released from the prison of this world. This is the dharma’s supreme torch. Those who disbelieve it are fools who ever wallow in misery and sorrow.To strive for liberation one should rely on a guru. When your mind receives his blessing emancipation is at hand.Alas, all things in this world are meaningless, they are but sorrow’s seeds. Small teachings lead to acts; one should only follow teachings that are great.Tantra believes, not in gradual development of the soul, but in sudden enlightenment. Yoga believes in gradual development: inch by inch, step by step, you progress toward the final.Yoga is very arithmetical: for each sin that you have committed you have to balance it by a virtuous act; your account has to be closed completely. Without completing the account with this world, you cannot become enlightened. It is a mathematical conception, scientific, and the mind will say, “Of course, it has to be so. You committed sins, who is going to suffer for them? You committed the sins; you have to suffer for them. And only through suffering can you become liberated. Your acts have been evil; you have to balance them, you have to pay for them, and you have to perform good acts. When the balance is complete, only then is liberation possible; otherwise you will have to be thrown again and again to the earth, to be reborn, to move, to grow.” That is the whole philosophy of transmigration, rebirth.Tantra says just the opposite. Tantra is a very, very poetic approach, not arithmetical. And Tantra believes in love, not in mathematics; it believes in sudden enlightenment. And it says that small teachings teach you about action; great teachings don’t teach you about how to act, they teach you what to be, how to be.Actions are millions, and if you have to pay for all the actions, it seems almost impossible that you are ever going to be liberated. You have lived millions of lives; in each life, you have committed millions of acts. If you are going to pay, suffer for all those acts, and you have to balance each bad act with a good one, it will again take you millions of lives. And meanwhile, in the complex relationship of life, you will be committing many more actions. So where will this chain end? It seems impossible. Liberation becomes almost impossible; it cannot happen. If this is the way, that inch by inch one has to grow, then growth seems an impossible dream.If you understand the attitude of Yoga, you will feel very, very hopeless, but Tantra is a great hope. Tantra is like an oasis in a world of deserts.Tantra says that acts are not the point at all: acts are not the question. You committed them because you were ignorant; they came out of your ignorance. In fact, Tantra says you are not responsible for them. If somebody is responsible, then the whole – you may call it existence – existence may be responsible, but you cannot be responsible. Tantra says that even to take on this responsibility is very egoistic. To say, “I will have to balance that, I will have to do good acts, I will have to liberate myself inch by inch and step by step,” this too is a very egoistic, ego-centered attitude.Why do you even think you are responsible? If responsibility has to be somewhere, then it has to be with existence, with the whole. You have not created yourself, you have not given birth to yourself. You have been given birth, you have been created; then the creator must be responsible, not you.And you committed all your actions in ignorance, you were not aware of what you were doing – you were completely drunk with ignorance. In darkness you were groping, in darkness you came in conflict with others, in darkness you stumbled upon things and something happened. Tantra says the only thing that is needed is light, awareness. Millions of acts don’t have to be answered; only one thing has to be done and that is: don’t remain ignorant, become aware.Once you become aware, all that belongs to the world of darkness disappears. It will look like a dream, a nightmare. It will not look like reality. It has not been a reality because when you are unconscious deep down, only dreams can exist, not reality. You have been dreaming that you loved. You cannot love. You are not there to love. You still don’t exist; you don’t have any center. How can you love? You only believe that you love, and then your love life and the acts concerned with it become a dream. When you awaken out of this dreaming, you will simply say, “How could I have loved? Impossible! I was not there in the first place. I was non-existential in fact.” Without awareness, what does it mean to say “I am”? It means nothing.You are fast asleep, so deeply asleep, as if you are not there. A person fast asleep, in a coma in the house – is he really there? There is no distinction to be made. Whether he is there or not makes no difference; he is in a coma. If thieves come and rob the whole house, will you call that man responsible who is lying down in a coma unconscious? Will he be responsible? Will he be asked and judged: “Thieves came! What were you doing here?” How can you make a man responsible who is in a coma, unconscious?Tantra says in all your lives you have remained in a coma – you are not responsible. This is the first liberation that Tantra gives you. And on the basis of it, many things immediately become possible. Then you need not wait for millions of lives – this very moment the door can open. It is not a gradual process, it is a sudden awakening – and it has to be so.When you are fast asleep and somebody tries to wake you up, is it a gradual process or a sudden thing? Even in ordinary sleep, is it a gradual process? Is it like this: that first you become a little awake, then a little more, and then a little more; ten percent, twenty percent, thirty percent, fifty percent; does it happen that way? No. You are awake or you are asleep; there are no gradual steps in it. If you have heard the man who is calling your name, you are awake, not ten percent awake. The eyes may be closed, but if you have become aware that somebody is calling you, then you are already awake.It is not a gradual process; it is a sudden jump. At one hundred degrees, the water jumps and becomes vapor. Is there any gradual transformation? Does the water first become ten percent, twenty percent, thirty percent? No, it is either water or it is vapor; there is no middle ground to be divided.When a person dies, is he dead by and by, in a gradual process? Can you say that he is half alive and half dead? What will it mean? How can a person be half alive? Either he is dead or he is not dead. Half alive means he is not dead.When you love a person, do you love ten percent, twenty percent, thirty percent? Either you love or you don’t love. Is there any possibility of dividing your love? There is no possibility.Love, life, death, they all happen suddenly.When a child is born, he is either born or not born. And the same is true about enlightenment because that is the ultimate birth, ultimate death, ultimate life, ultimate love – everything comes to its ultimate peak in enlightenment. It is a sudden thing.Tantra says: don’t focus your attention on the acts; focus your attention on the person who has done the acts. Yoga focuses on the acts. Tantra focuses on the person, on the consciousness, on you.If you are ignorant, Tantra says you are bound to commit sin. Even if you try to be virtuous, your virtue will be a sort of sin because how can an ignorant man, fast asleep, be virtuous? How can virtue arise out of ignorance, unconsciousness? Impossible! Your virtue must be just a mask; behind it will be the real face, the real face of sin.You may talk about love, but you cannot love – you will hate. You can talk about compassion, but compassion must be just a covering of your anger, greed, jealousy. Your love is poisonous. Deep inside your love is the worm of hate, eating it continuously. Your love is like a wound; it hurts. It is not like a flower, it cannot be. And those who expect love from you are fools; they are asking the impossible. Those who ask morality of you are fools, they are asking the impossible. Your morality is bound to be a sort of immorality.Look at your moral persons, your so-called saints. Watch and observe them and you will find their faces are just the faces of hypocrisy, deception. They say something; they do something else. They do something, and they not only hide it from you – they have become so clever in hiding, they hide it from themselves.In ignorance, sin is natural. In enlightenment, virtue is natural. A buddha cannot sin; you cannot do otherwise – you can only sin. Sin and virtue are not your decisions, they are not your acts; they are shadows of your being. If you awaken, then the shadow falls and the shadow is full of light. And the shadow never harms anybody, it cannot harm; it has a flavor of the unknown, of the immortal. It can only shower on you like a blessing; otherwise is not possible. Even if a buddha gets angry with you, it is compassion; it cannot be otherwise. Your compassion is not true; a buddha’s anger cannot be true. Your sin, your natural shadow, whatsoever you do – you can decorate it, you can make a temple on top of it, you can hide it, you can beautify it, but that won’t help. Deep inside you will find it there because it is not a question of what you do, it is a question of what you are.Look at the emphasis. If you understand this change of emphasis, and this change of emphasis is a great point, only then you will be able to understand Tantra.Tantra is a great teaching. It doesn’t teach about acts, it teaches only about your being. Who you are, is the point: fast asleep, snoring, or awake? Who are you: alert, conscious, or moving in a hypnotic state? Are you a sleepwalker or are you awake, alert, whatsoever you do? Do you do it with self-remembrance? No, it happens. You don’t know why or from where it comes, from what part of the unconscious an urge comes which possesses you and you have to act.Whatsoever the society says about this act – moral or immoral, sin or virtue – Tantra doesn’t bother about it. Tantra looks at you, at the very center of your being from where it comes. Out of the poison of your ignorance, life cannot come, only death. Out of your darkness, only darkness is born. And that seems to be absolutely natural. So what to do? Should we try to change the acts? Should we try to become more moral, virtuous, respectable? Or should we try to change the being?The being can be changed. There is no need to wait for it for infinite lives. If you have the intensity of understanding, if you bring your total effort, energy, being, to understand it, in that very intensity, a light suddenly burns in you. A flame comes up from your being like lightning, and your whole past and your whole future is suddenly in your vision. You understand what has happened, you understand what is happening, you understand what is going to happen. Suddenly everything has become clear, as if it was dark and somebody brought a light, and suddenly everything is clear.Tantra believes in burning your inner light. And Tantra says that with that light, the past simply becomes irrelevant. It never belonged to you. Of course, it happened, but happened as if in a dream and you were fast asleep. It happened, you did many things, good and bad, but they all happened in unconsciousness, you were not responsible. And suddenly everything of the past is burned down, a fresh and virgin being comes up – this is sudden enlightenment.Yoga appeals to people because it looks very businesslike. You can understand Patanjali very easily because he fits with your own mind, the logical mind, the mathematical thinking. Tilopa is difficult to comprehend, but Tilopa is rare. Patanjali’s understanding is common – that’s why there has been so much influence by Patanjali all through history.People like Tilopa have simply disappeared without leaving any trace on the human mind because they couldn’t find affinity with you. Patanjali may be very, very great, but still he belongs to the same dimension. You may be a very, very small thinker, and Patanjali may be a great, great thinker, but you belong to the same dimension. If you make a little effort you can understand Patanjali; if you make a little effort you can practice Patanjali. Only a little effort is needed, nothing more.But to understand Tilopa you have to enter a completely unknown dimension. To understand Tilopa you have to move through chaos. He will destroy all your conceptions, all your mathematics, all your logic, all your philosophy. He will simply destroy you completely. He will not be satisfied unless you are completely destroyed and a new being arises.With Patanjali you will be modified, you will become better and better and better; and the process is infinite, you can go on for many lives becoming better and better and better. With Tilopa, in a second, you can reach to the ultimate. “Better” is not the question because he doesn’t think in degrees.It is just as if you are standing on top of a hill, you can take a path of steps and one by one you go downward to the valley, or from the valley you go up to the hill, but by steps. With Tilopa you simply jump into the abyss, no steps are there; or you simply spread your wings and you start flying. With Patanjali you move in a bullock cart, very slowly, safe, secure, no fear of any accident, the bullock cart always in control. You can step down any moment, you can stop at any moment; nothing beyond you, you remain the master. And the dimension is horizontal: a bullock cart moves from A to B, from B to C, from C to D, but the dimension is the same, the same plane. With Tilopa, the dimension changes: it becomes vertical; it is not from A to B, from B to C; no, it is just like an aircraft, not like a bullock-cart, not moving forward but moving upward. With Tilopa you can transcend time. With Patanjali you move in time. With Tilopa eternity is the dimension.You may not be aware, but within these few ten, twelve years, a miracle has happened, and that is: new spaceships have destroyed the old time concept completely because a new spaceship can move around the earth, within seconds it can make one circle. You may not be aware of the theoretical problem. It means a spaceship takes off from Pune, it is Sunday; then it goes around the earth – somewhere it must be Monday, somewhere it may still be Saturday. So the spaceship moves from Sunday, goes back into Saturday, jumps forward into Monday, comes back to Pune on Sunday. The whole time concept is lost. It looks absurd. You start on the sixteenth, you move into the seventeenth, and you come back on the same date, the sixteenth. And now this can be done many times in twenty-four hours. What does it mean? It means you can go backward in time, from Sunday to Saturday, from the sixteenth to the fifteenth. You can go forward into the seventeenth, into Monday, and you can come back on the same date.With speed and a different dimension – vertical – time becomes irrelevant. Time is relevant with a bullock-cart; it is a bullock cart world. Tilopa is a vertical mind, a vertical consciousness. That is the difference between Tantra and Yoga: Yoga is horizontal and Tantra is vertical. Yoga takes millions of lives to reach; Tantra says within a second. Tantra says time is irrelevant; don’t bother about time. Tantra has a technique, a method – which Tantra says is a no-method, a no-technique – through which you can suddenly surrender everything and take a jump into the abyss.Yoga is effort; Tantra is effortlessness. With effort, with your tiny energy, and your tiny ego, you fight with the whole. It will take millions of lives. Then too it doesn’t seem possible that you will ever become enlightened. Fighting with the whole is stupid; you are just a part. It is as if a wave is fighting with the ocean, a leaf is fighting with the tree, or your own hand fighting with your body. With whom are you fighting?Yoga is effort, intense effort. And Yoga is a way to fight the current, to move against the current. So whatsoever is natural, Yoga has to drop; and whatsoever is unnatural, Yoga has to strive for. Yoga is the unnatural way: fight with the river and move against the current. Of course, there is challenge and the challenge may be enjoyed. But who enjoys the challenge? – your ego does.It is very difficult to find a yogi who is not an egoist, very difficult, rare. If you can find a yogi who is not an egoist, it is a miracle. It is difficult because the whole effort creates the ego, the fight. You may find humble yogis, but if you watch a little deeper, in their humbleness you will find the most subtle ego hidden, the most subtle ego. They will say, “We are just dirt on the ground.” But look in their eyes – they are bragging about their humility. They are saying, “There is nobody more humble than us. We are the humblest people.” But this is what ego means.If you move against nature you will be strengthened in your ego. That is the challenge, that’s why people like challenges. A life without challenges becomes dull because the ego feels hungry. Ego needs food, challenge gives food; so people seek challenges. If there are no challenges, they create them; they create hurdles so that they can fight with the hurdles.Tantra is the natural way; the loose and the natural is the goal. You need not fight with the current; simply move with it, float with it. The river is going to the sea so why fight? Move with the river, become one with the river: surrender. Surrender is the keyword for Tantra; will is the keyword for Yoga. Yoga is the path of will; Tantra is the path of surrender.That’s why Tantra is the path of love – love is surrender. This is the first thing to understand; then Tilopa’s words will become very, very crystal clear. The different dimension of Tantra has to be understood – the vertical dimension, the dimension of surrender, of not fighting, of being loose and natural, relaxed – what Chuang Tzu calls, “Easy is right.” With Yoga, difficult is right; with Tantra, easy is right.Relax and be at ease, there is no hurry. The whole itself is taking you on its own accord. You need not make any individual striving, you are not asked to reach before your time, you will reach when the time is ripe – simply wait. The whole is moving; why are you in a hurry? Why do you want to reach before others?There is a beautiful story about Buddha:He reached the gate of heaven. Of course, the people there were waiting. They opened the door, they welcomed him, but he turned his back toward the door, looked at samsara, the world: millions of souls on the same path, struggling, in misery, in anguish, striving to reach this gate of heaven and bliss. The doorkeeper said, “Come in please! We have been waiting for you.”And Buddha said, “How can I come when others have not reached? It doesn’t seem to be the right time. How can I enter when the whole has not entered? I will have to wait. It is just as if my hand has reached into the door, and my feet have not reached yet. I will have to wait. Just the hand cannot enter alone.”This is one of the most profound insights of Tantra. Tantra says nobody can become enlightened, in fact, alone. We are parts of each other, we are members of each other; we are a whole. One person may become the peak, may become a very great wave, but it remains connected with the small waves all around. It is not alone; it remains one with the ocean and all the waves there. How can a wave become enlightened alone?It is said in this beautiful story that Buddha is still waiting. He has to wait – nobody is an island, we make a continent, we are together. I may have stepped a little further than you, but I cannot be separate. And now I know it deeply, now it is not a story for me; I am waiting for you. Now it is not just a parable, now I know that there is no individual enlightenment. Individuals can step a little ahead, that’s all, but they remain joined together with the whole.And if an enlightened person is not aware that he is part of others, one with the others, then who will know this? We move as one being, and Tantra says, “So don’t be in a hurry, and don’t try, and don’t push others, and don’t try to be first in the queue – be loose and natural. Everything is going toward enlightenment. It is going to happen; don’t create anguish about it.” If you can understand this, already you are near it; you relax. Otherwise, religious people become very, very tense; even ordinary worldly people are not so tense as religious people.Ordinary worldly people are for worldly goals; of course, tense, but not so much as religious people who are tense for the other world, and their world is very far away, invisible. They are always in doubt whether it is there or not. And then a new misery arises: maybe they are losing this world and the other doesn’t exist. They are always in anguish, mentally very disturbed. Don’t become that type of religious man.To me a religious man is loose and natural. He is not worried about this world or the other world. He is not worried about it at all; he simply lives and enjoys. This moment is the only moment for him; the next moment will take care of itself. When the next moment comes, he will receive it also enjoying, blissful. A religious man is not goal-oriented. To be goal-oriented is to be worldly. Your goal may be God – it makes no difference.Tantra is really beautiful. Tantra is the highest understanding, and the greatest principle. If you cannot understand Tantra, then Yoga is for you. If you can understand Tantra, then don’t bother about small teachings. When the great vehicle is there, why bother about small boats?In Buddhism, there are two sects. The names of the sects are very, very significant. One sect is known as Hinayana, the small vehicle; it is the path of Yoga, a small boat: you alone can sit in it. It is so small that you cannot have anybody else in it. The yogi moves alone. Hinayana means the very small boat. And then there is another sect of Buddhists that is called Mahayana, the great boat: the great vehicle. Millions can enter into it; the whole world can be absorbed into it.Mahayana is the path of Tantra and Hinayana is the path of Yoga. Tilopa is a mahayanist, a man who believes in the great vehicle, the great principle.Small boats are for egoistic people who cannot tolerate anybody else in the boat, who can only be alone, who are great condemners, who look at the other always with condemnation. “You – and trying to reach there? You cannot reach, it is very difficult, only rare persons reach.” They will not allow you to enter the boat. Mahayana has a deep love for all. Everybody can enter. In fact, no conditions exist.People come to me and they say, “You give sannyas to everybody and anybody?” Sannyas has not been given that way ever. It is for the first time in the whole history of the world that sannyas is given without any conditions. Sannyas has always been for very egoistic people: the otherworldly, the condemners, the poisoners, who say everything is wrong, everybody is wrong, this whole life is a sin; who have a look always in their eyes of holier-than-you, you are always condemned. Hell is for you. They are great sannyasins; they have renounced the world, the world of sin and dirt and poison, and you are still in it. The sannyasins have been the great egoists.For the first time I have allowed everybody, I have opened the door. In fact I have thrown the door away completely. Now it cannot be closed, now anybody and everybody are welcome. Why? It is because my attitude is that of Tantra, it is not of Yoga. I talk on Patanjali also, for those who are not able to comprehend Tantra; otherwise, my attitude is that of Tantra: everybody is welcome. When existence welcomes you, who am I…? When the whole world supports you and existence tolerates you, not only tolerates, gives you energy and life… Even if you are committing sin, existence never says, “No, no more energy for you. Now you cannot get any more gas. Stop! You are doing too much nonsense.” No. The energy goes on being given. There is never any gas crisis; the existence goes on supporting you.It happened…A Mohammedan mystic, Junnaid, once asked God about one of his neighbors, “This man is so evil and he is creating so much mischief for the whole village, and people come to me and they say, ‘Ask your God, pray to God, if he can get rid of this man.’”And Junnaid heard in his prayer the voice: “When I am accepting him, who are you to reject him?”Junnaid has written in his autobiography, “Never again did I ask him such a thing because it was really foolish of me. If he has given birth to this man, if he is still helping him to be alive, not only alive but flourishing, blooming, then who am I…?”Existence gives you life unconditionally. I give you sannyas unconditionally. If existence hopes about you so infinitely that you cannot destroy its hope, who am I…?Tantra is for all. It is not for the chosen few. It became a path for the chosen few because not everybody can understand it, but it is not for the chosen few; it is for all, it is for everybody who is ready to take the jump.Now try to understand:In Mahamudra all one’s sins are burned…They are not to be balanced by good acts.In Mahamudra all one’s sins are burned… What is this Mahamudra again and again? What happens? Mahamudra is a state of your being when you are not separate from the total. Mahamudra is like a deep sexual orgasm with the whole.When two lovers are in deep sexual orgasm, they melt into each other; then the woman is no longer the woman, the man is no longer the man. They become just like the circle of yin and yang, reaching into each other, meeting in each other, melting, their own identities forgotten. That’s why love is so beautiful. This state is called mudra, this state of deep orgasmic intercourse is called mudra. And the final state of orgasm with the whole is called Mahamudra, the great orgasm.What happens in orgasm, in sexual orgasm? You have to understand it because only that will give you the key for the final orgasm. What happens? When two lovers are there… And always remember: two lovers, not wife and husband, because with a wife and husband it almost never happens because wives and husbands become more and more fixed roles, they are not melting and flowing. “Husband” has become a role, “wife” has become a role. They act. The wife has to act as a wife whether she likes it or not; the husband has to act as a husband. It has become a legal thing.Once I asked Mulla Nasruddin, “How many years have you been married, Nasruddin?”He said, “Twenty odd years.”So I asked, “Why do you call them ‘odd’?”He said, “When you see my wife you will understand.”Wives and husbands are a social phenomenon, an institution; it is not a relationship. It is an institution; it is a forced phenomenon, not for love, but other reasons: economic security, safety, children, society, culture, religion – everything except love.Orgasm almost never happens between a wife and a husband – unless they are lovers also. That is possible: you can be a wife or a husband and a lover; you can love your wife. Then it is totally different, but then it is not a marriage at all, it is no longer an institution.In the East, because marriage has existed for thousands of years, people have completely forgotten what orgasm is. I have not come across a single Indian woman who knows what orgasm is. Some Western women, just within a few years, twenty-five years, have become aware that orgasm is something worth achieving; otherwise, women have completely forgotten that they have any possibility of orgasm within their bodies.This is one of the most unfortunate things that could have happened to humanity. And when the woman cannot have an orgasm, the man cannot really have it because orgasm is a meeting of the two. Only two, when they melt into each other, can have it. It is not that one can have and another may not have; it is not possible. Release is possible, ejaculation is possible, relief is possible, but not orgasm. What is an orgasm?Orgasm is a state where your body is no longer felt as matter; it vibrates like energy, electricity. It vibrates so deeply, from the very foundation, that you completely forget that it is a material thing. It becomes an electric phenomenon – and it is an electric phenomenon.Now physicists say that there is no matter, all matter is only appearance; deep down, that which exists is electricity, not matter. In orgasm you come to this deepest layer of your body where matter no longer exists, just energy waves; you become a dancing energy, vibrating. No longer any boundaries to you – pulsating, but no longer substantial. And your beloved pulsates also.And by and by, if they love each other and they surrender to each other, they surrender to this moment of pulsation, of vibration, of being energy. And they are not scared – it is deathlike when the body loses boundaries, when the body becomes like a vaporous thing, when the body evaporates substantially and only energy is left, a very subtle rhythm, but you feel as if you are not. Only in deep love can one move into it. Love is like death; you die as far as your material image is concerned, you die as far as you think you are a body; you die as a body and you evolve as energy, vital energy.And when the wife and the husband, or the lovers, or the partners, start vibrating in a rhythm, the beats of their hearts and bodies become synchronous, it becomes a harmony – then orgasm happens, then they are no longer two. That is the symbol of yin and yang: yin moving into yang, yang moving into yin; man moving into the woman, the woman moving into the man. Now they are a circle, and they vibrate together, they pulsate together. Their hearts are no longer separate, their beats are no longer separate; they have become a melody, a harmony. It is the greatest music possible; all other music is just a faint thing compared to it, a shadowy thing compared to it.This vibration of two as one is orgasm. When the same thing happens, not with another person, but with the whole of existence, then it is Mahamudra; then it is the great orgasm. It happens. I would like to tell you how you can try it, so that the Mahamudra becomes possible, the great orgasm.In Indonesia, there is a very rare man, Bapak Subud. He has come unknowingly to a method known as Latihan. He stumbled upon it, but Latihan is one of the oldest Tantra methods. It is not a new phenomenon; Latihan is the first step toward Mahamudra. It is allowing the body to vibrate, allowing the body to become energy, non-substantial, non-material: allowing the body to melt and dissolve the boundaries.Bapak Subud is a Mohammedan but his movement is known as Subud. That word is Buddhist. Subud comes from three words: su, bu, dha: su stands for sushil, bu stands for Buddha, dha stands for dharma. Subud means sushil-Buddha-dharma. The meaning is: the law of great virtue derived from Buddha, Buddha’s law of great virtue. This is what Tilopa calls the great teaching.Latihan is simple. It is the first step. One has to stand relaxed, loose and natural. It is good if you stand alone, and nobody is there to disturb you. Close your room and be alone. If you can find someone who has already stepped into Latihan, his presence can be helpful, his very presence works like a catalytic agent; he becomes the opener. So somebody who is already a little advanced can open you very easily; otherwise, you can open yourself also. A little more time will be needed, that’s all. Otherwise an opener is good.If an opener is standing just by your side, and he starts his Latihan, you simply stand and his energy starts pulsating with you, his energy starts moving around you. Like a fragrance he surrounds you – suddenly you feel the music. Just as if there is a good singer, or somebody is playing on an instrument, you start beating your feet, or you start tapping the chair, or you start pulsating with it – just like that, a deep energy inside him moves and the whole room and the quality of the room is changed immediately.You have not to do anything; you have simply to be there, loose and natural, just waiting for something to happen. And if your body starts moving, you have to allow it, you just have to cooperate and allow. The cooperation should not become too direct, it should not become a pushing; it should remain just an allowing. Suddenly your body starts moving, as if you are possessed, as if a great energy from above has descended on you, as if a cloud has come and has surrounded you – and now you are possessed by that cloud, and the cloud is penetrating within your body, and your body starts making movements. Your hands are raised, you make subtle movements, you start a small dance, soft gestures; your body is taken up.If you know anything about automatic writing it will be easy to follow what happens in Latihan. In automatic writing you take a pencil in your hand; you close your eyes, you wait. Suddenly you feel a jerk in the hand: your hand is possessed, as if something has entered. You are not to do anything because if you do then it will not be from the beyond; it will be your doing. You simply have to allow. Loose and natural – Tilopa’s words are wonderful; they cannot be improved upon. Loose and natural, you wait with the pencil, with closed eyes; when the jerk comes and the hand starts moving, you have to allow it, that’s all. You have not to resist it because you can resist. The energy is very subtle, and, in the beginning, not very powerful. If you just stop it, it can be stopped.And the energy is not aggressive; if you don’t allow, it will not come. If you doubt, it will not happen because with doubt your hand will be resisting. With doubt, you will not allow; you will fight. So that’s why trust is so meaningful, shraddha. You simply trust and leave your hand there; by and by the hand starts moving, now the hand starts making wiggles on the paper. Allow it! Then somebody simply asks a question, or you yourself ask a question; let the question be there, loose in the mind, not very persistent, not forcing, just raise the question and wait. And suddenly the answer is written.If ten persons try, at least three persons will be absolutely capable of automatic writing. Thirty percent of people are not aware that they can become so receptive. And this can become a great force in your life. Explanations differ; what happens is not important. The deepest explanation that I find true is: your own highest center possesses your lowest center; your own highest peak of consciousness catches hold of your lowest unconscious mind. You ask and your own inner being answers. Nobody else is there, but your inner being, which you don’t know, is very superior to you.Your own innermost being is your ultimate flowering possibility. As if the flower takes possession of the seed and answers. The seed doesn’t know, but the flower…as if your possibility takes possession of your actuality and answers; as if your ultimate potentiality takes possession of whatsoever you are, and answers. Or the future takes possession of the past, the unknown takes possession of the known, the formless takes possession of the form – all metaphors, but I feel you will understand the significance – as if your old age takes possession of your childhood, and answers.The same happens in Latihan with the whole body. In automatic writing you leave only your hand loose and natural. In Latihan you leave your whole body loose, and you wait and you cooperate, and suddenly you feel an urge. The hand is rising by itself, as if somebody is pulling it by some invisible strings. Allow it! And the leg moves; you take a turn, you start a small dance; very chaotic, with no rhythm, with no manipulation, but by and by, as you get deeper, it takes on its own rhythm. Then it is no longer chaotic, it takes on its own order, it becomes a discipline, but not forced by you. This is your highest possibility taking possession of your lowest body and moving it.Latihan is the first step. And, by and by, you will feel so beautiful doing it that you will feel a meeting is happening between you and the cosmos. But this is only the first step. That’s why in Subud something is missing. The first step in itself is very beautiful, but it is not the last step. I would like you to complete it. For thirty minutes at least – sixty will be wonderful – by and by from thirty you reach to sixty minutes of Latihan dancing.In sixty minutes your body, from pore to pore, from cell to cell, is cleansed; it is a catharsis, you are completely renewed, all the dirt is burned. That’s what Tilopa says: In Mahamudra all one’s sins are burned. The past is thrown into the fire. It is a new birth, a rebirth. And you feel a showering energy all over you, in and out. And the dance is not only outside. Soon, when you get attuned to it, you will feel an inner dance also. It is not only that your body is dancing; inside the energy is dancing and they both cooperate with each other. And then a pulsation happens, and you feel yourself pulsating with the universe, you have found the universal rhythm.Thirty to sixty minutes is the time: start at thirty and end at sixty. Somewhere in between you will have the right time. And you will come to know: if you feel attuned near about forty minutes, then that is your right time; if you feel attuned at twenty minutes, then that is your right time. Then your meditation must go beyond that: if you feel attuned at ten minutes, twenty minutes will do; if you feel attuned at fifteen minutes, thirty minutes will do. Do it double, don’t take any chances, so really you are completely cleaned. And end it with prayer.When you are completely cleaned and feeling that your body is refreshed – you have been under a shower of energy, and your whole body is feeling one, undivided; and the substantialness of the body is lost, you feel it more like an energy, a movement, a process, not material – now you are ready. Then kneel down on the earth.Kneeling down is beautiful; just like Sufis kneel down, or Mohammedans do their prayer in the mosque, kneel down like them because that is the best posture for Latihan. Then raise both your hands toward the sky with closed eyes, and feel yourself like a hollow vessel, hollow bamboo: inside, hollow, just like an earthen pot. Your head is the mouth of the pot, and tremendous energy is falling on your head as if you are standing under a waterfall. And you will be standing actually… After the Latihan you will feel it; it is like a waterfall, not like a shower. When you are ready it falls in greater strength, strong, and your body will start trembling, shaking, like a leaf in a strong wind; or, if you have stood under a waterfall sometime, then you will know. If you have never stood under one, go to a waterfall and stand under it and feel how it feels. That same feel will come after Latihan. Feel yourself hollow inside, nothing inside, just emptiness, and the energy is filling you, filling you completely.Allow it to fall into you as deeply as possible, so it can reach to the farthest corner of your body and mind and soul. And when you feel it – you are so filled, and the whole body is shaking – kneel down, put your head down on the earth, and pour the energy into the earth. When you feel the energy is overflowing, pour it down into the earth. Take from the sky; give it back to the earth, and you just be a hollow bamboo in between.This has to be done seven times. Take from the sky and pour down into the earth and kiss the earth, and pour down – and be empty completely. Pour down as completely as you did for filling; be completely empty. Then raise your hands again, fill again, pour down again. Seven times it has to be done because each time it penetrates one chakra of the body, one center of the body; each time it goes deeper in you. And if you do less than five times, then you will feel restless after it because the energy will be hanging somewhere in-between.No, it has to penetrate all the seven chakras of your body so that you become completely hollow, a passage. The energy falls from the sky and goes into the earth, you are earthed; you simply pass the energy to the earth, just like electricity. For electricity we have to put an earth wire. The energy comes from the sky and goes into the earth, you become earthed: just a vessel, a hollow bamboo passing the energy. Seven times. You can do more, but not less. And this will be a complete Mahamudra.If you do it every day, soon within three months, somewhere one day you will feel you are not there. Just the energy is pulsating with the universe. Nobody is there, the ego is completely lost, the doer is not. The universe is there, and you are there, the wave pulsating with the ocean: that is Mahamudra. That is the final orgasm, the most blissful state of consciousness that is possible.This is just like two lovers making love, but a million-fold, and the same phenomenon multiplied by millions because now you are making love with the whole universe. That’s why Tantra is known as the yoga of sex; Tantra is known as the path of love.In Mahamudra all one’s sins are burned; in Mahamudra one is released from the prison of this world. This is the dharma’s supreme torch. Those who disbelieve it are fools who ever wallow in misery and sorrow.And Tilopa is perfectly clear. He is absolutely frank. He says: Those who disbelieve it are fools…Why call them fools? He does not call them sinners, he does not call them irreligious, he simply calls them fools because not believing it they are missing the greatest bliss that life can give them. They are simply fools. And it cannot happen unless you trust. Unless you trust so much that you can surrender completely, it cannot happen. All bliss, all moments of bliss, happen only when you surrender. Even death becomes beautiful if you can surrender to it, then what to say about life? If you surrender, of course life is the greatest blessing; it is a benediction. You are missing the ultimate gift because you cannot trust.If you want to learn anything, learn trust. Nothing else is needed. If you are miserable, nothing else will help – learn trust. If you don’t feel any meaning in life and you feel meaninglessness, nothing will help – learn trust. Trust gives meaning because trust makes you capable of allowing the whole to descend upon you.Those who disbelieve it are fools who ever wallow in misery and sorrow.To strive for liberation one should rely on a guru. When your mind receives his blessing emancipation is at hand.Why believe in a guru? Why believe in a master? It is because the unknown is very far from you. It is just a dream, a hope at the most, a wish fulfillment.You listen to me; I may talk about the bliss, but that bliss remains a word. You may desire it, but you don’t know what it is, you don’t know the taste of it. It is very, very far away from you. You are deep in misery, in anguish. In your misery and anguish you may start hoping, expecting, desiring bliss, but that will not help – you need a real taste of it. Who will give it to you? Only one who has tasted it: he can become the opener. He can act like a catalytic agent. He will not do anything; just his presence, and from him the unknown flows toward you. He is just like a window. Your doors are closed; his doors are not closed. Your windows are closed and you have forgotten how to open them; his windows are not closed. Through his window you can have a look at the sky; through him you can have a glimpse.A master, a guru, is nothing but a window. One has to pass through him, one has to have a little taste – then, then you can also open your own windows; otherwise the whole thing remains verbal. You can read Tilopa, but unless you find Tilopa nothing will happen to you. Your mind may go on, saying, “Maybe this man is mad, in some hallucination, dreaming, a philosopher thinking, a poet.” But how can this happen? How is it possible for you to be blissful? You have known only misery and suffering, you have known only poison. You cannot believe in elixir; you have not known it, how can you believe it?A master is nothing but a personified phenomenon of the total bliss. In him it is there, vibrating. If you trust him, his vibrations can reach you. A master is not a teacher, he doesn’t teach you. A master is not concerned with doctrines and principles; a master is a presence. If you trust him, he is available. A master is an availability. Through him you will have the first glimpse of the divine. Then you can go on your own. To strive for liberation one should rely – on a master – on a guru.When your mind receives his blessing emancipation is at hand. A master cannot give you emancipation, but he can bring you to the very brink of it. He cannot give you the emancipation – that has to be achieved by you, because a thing given by one person can be taken away by someone else. Only that which is yours can be yours. A master cannot give you, he can only bless you – but his blessing is a vital phenomenon. Through him you can look into your own future. Through him you can be aware of your own destiny. Through him the farthest peaks come nearer, closer. Through him you start coming up, like a seed trying to sprout toward the sky. His blessing can water your seed.In the East, the blessing of the master is very, very significant. The West has remained completely unaware of the phenomenon. The West knows teachers, not masters. Teachers are those who teach you about truth. A master is one who gives you the taste of it. A teacher may be someone who does not know himself, he may have learned from other teachers. Seek a master: teachers are many; masters are few.And how will you seek a master? Just move. Whenever you hear a rumor that somebody has become enlightened, go and remain available. Don’t be much of a thinker, be more of a lover because a master is found through feeling. A teacher is found through thinking. Listen to the teacher; his logical appeal will be there, his arguments. Eat the master; drink the master. Listening won’t help because he is a living phenomenon; the energy is there. If you drink and eat him, only then you will become aware of a different quality of being.A great receptivity is needed; a great feminine receptivity is needed to find the master. And if you are available and a living master is there, suddenly something clicks. There is nothing to do on your part – simply be there. It is such a vital energy phenomenon that if you are available, something simply clicks; you are caught. It is a love phenomenon. You cannot prove to anybody else: “I have found the master.” There is no proof. Don’t try that because anybody can prove against it. You have found and you know it; you have tasted and you know it. This knowledge is of the heart, of the feeling.Says Tilopa: To strive for liberation one should rely on a guru. When your mind receives his blessing emancipation is at hand.The very word guru is meaningful. The master doesn’t carry that significance. The master seems to be as if someone has mastered a thing, gone under a long training, has become disciplined, has become a master. Guru is totally different.The word guru means one who is very, very heavy, a heavy cloud and just waiting for your thirst to pour down; a flower heavy with perfume just waiting for your nostrils to be there, and it will penetrate. The word guru means heavy, very heavy, heavy with energy and the unknown, heavy with the divine, heavy like a woman who is pregnant.A master is pregnant with God. That’s why in the East we call the guru, God itself. The West cannot understand it because they think God means the creator of the world. We don’t bother much about the creator here. We call the guru God. Why? – because he is pregnant with the divine, he is heavy with the divine. He is ready to pour down; only your thirst, a thirsty earth, is needed.In fact, he has not mastered anything, he has not gone through any training, he has not disciplined himself. It is not an art that he has become a master of, no. He has lived life in its totality, not as a discipline, but natural and loose. He has not forced himself. He has been moving with the winds; he has allowed nature to have its own course. And through millions of experiences of suffering and pain, and bliss and happiness, he has become mature; he has become ripe. A guru is a ripe fruit just waiting to fall, heavy. If you are ready to receive, he can fall into you.A guru is a totally Eastern phenomenon. The West is not yet aware of it. In the West it is difficult to feel. Why go and bow down to a guru? Why put your head at his feet? Looks humiliating! But if you want to receive, you have to bow down. He is heavy, he can pour, but then you have to bow down, otherwise you won’t receive it.When a disciple with total trust bows down at the feet of his master, something is happening there which is not visible to the eyes. Energy is falling from the master, entering the disciple. Something invisible to the eyes is happening there. If you become aware you can see it also: the aura of the master, his rainbow, pouring himself down into the disciple. In fact you will see it happening.The master is heavy with divine energy. And he has infinite energy now; he can pour it down to infinite disciples. He can work with millions of disciples alone. He is never exhausted because now he is connected with the whole; he has found the source of all. Through him you can also take the jump into that abyss. Surrender toward God is difficult because you don’t know where God is. He has never given his address to anybody ever. But a guru can be found. If you ask me what a guru is, I will tell you: a guru is the address of existence.When your mind receives his blessing emancipation is at hand. Then you can be certain that you have been accepted. When you can feel the master’s blessings pouring on you, showering on you like flowers, you can be certain emancipation is at hand.It happened…One of Buddha’s disciples, Sariputta, one day bowed down at Buddha’s feet. Suddenly he felt the energy falling on him. He felt a sudden transformation, a mutation of his whole mind, as if he was being destroyed and created again. He cried, “No! Wait a little.” The whole assembly of Buddha’s disciples could not understand what was happening. And he said, “Wait a little, not so soon!”Buddha said, “But why?”He said, “Then these feet will be lost to me. Wait a little. Emancipation is at hand and I would like to be with you a little longer. Don’t push me away so soon” – because once the master has blessed and the emancipation is at hand, this is the last thing: one has to say goodbye to the master. Says Sariputta, “Wait!”Sariputta became enlightened later on. Buddha told him, “Now go. I waited long enough. Now go and spread whatsoever I have given to you; go and give it to others.”Sariputta had to go, weeping and crying. Somebody asked, “You have become enlightened and you weep and cry?”He said, “Yes, I have become enlightened, but I can throw away the bliss of enlightenment if Buddha allows me to live at his feet.”Such deep gratitude – and then wherever Sariputta lived, every day, in the morning, he would bow down in the direction where he knew Buddha was moving. And people asked him again and again, “Why do you do this? To whom do you bow down?”He said, “Buddha is moving in the south.”When the last days of Sariputta came, he inquired, “Where is Buddha right now because I would like to die bowing down in that direction?” And he died bowing down in the direction where Buddha was.When the energy is received, when the final benediction comes from the master, the emancipation is at hand – one has to say goodbye.In Zen, when a disciple comes to a master in Japan, he brings his mat. He unrolls his mat before the master, sits on the mat, listens to the master; every day he comes, follows whatsoever the master says, leaves the mat there, for years together. Then the day he receives the final blessing, he rolls the mat again, takes the mat back, bows down and leaves the master. That mat is symbolic. Whenever a disciple rolls the mat again, others know he has received the benediction. Now this is the final goodbye.Alas, all things in this world are meaningless, they are but sorrow’s seeds. Small teachings lead to acts; one should only follow teachings that are great.Tantra is the great teaching. Small teachings tell you what to do, what not to do. They give you Ten Commandments: do this; don’t do that – small teachings! Great teaching doesn’t give you any commandments. It is not concerned with what you do; it is concerned with what you are, your being, your center, your consciousness; that is the only significant thing.Says Tilopa: Alas, all things in the world are meaningless, they are but sorrow’s seeds. Small teachings lead to acts; one should follow teachings that are great.In this world, everything is the seed of sorrow. But a ray of light enters the world whenever a person becomes enlightened. In this world, everything is a seed of sorrow, but a light ray comes from the above whenever a person becomes enlightened. Follow that ray of light and you can reach to the very source of the light: the sun.“And remember,” says Tilopa, “don’t become a victim of small teachings.” Many are. People come to me, they say, “We are vegetarians, will it lead us to enlightenment?” It is a very small teaching. They say, “We don’t eat in the night, will it lead us to enlightenment?” – a very small teaching. They say, “We believe in celibacy” – a very small teaching. They do many things, but one thing they never touch: their being. They manage their character, they try to be as sagely as possible, but the whole thing remains a decoration. A discipline from without is a decoration. It should come from within; it should spread toward the periphery from the center. It should not be forced from the periphery toward the center.The great teaching is: You are already that which you can be – realize this. You are already the goal – be aware of this. This very moment your destiny can be fulfilled. For what are you waiting? Don’t believe in gradual steps, take the jump – be courageous. Only one who is courageous can follow the great teaching of Tantra.Afraid, scared – afraid of dying, scared of losing yourself, fearful of surrender – you will become a victim of small teachings because you can manage small teachings. Not to eat this, not to do this, you can manage; you remain in control. The great teaching is to surrender, to surrender your control and let the whole take you away wherever it would like to take you. Don’t swim against the current. Stay in the river, become the river; and the river is already going to the sea. This is the great teaching.Enough for today.

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Tantra Supreme Understanding 01-10Category: TANTRA

Tantra Supreme Understanding 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The song continues:To transcend duality is the kingly view. To conquer distractionsis the royal practice. The path of no-practice is the way of all buddhas. He who treads that path reaches buddhahood.Transient is this world, like phantoms and dreams, substance it has none. Renounce it and forsake your kin, cut the strings of lust and hatred, meditate in woods and mountains.If without effort you remain loosely in the natural state, soon Mahamudra you will win, and attain the nonattainment.There are two paths: one is the path of the warrior, the soldier; the other is the path of the king, the royal path. Yoga is the first; Tantra is the second. So first you will have to understand what is the path of a soldier, a warrior, only then will you be able to understand what Tilopa means by the royal path.A soldier has to fight inch by inch; a soldier has to be aggressive, a soldier has to be violent, the enemy has to be destroyed or conquered.Yoga tries to create a conflict within you. It gives you a clear cut distinction as to what is wrong and what is right, what is good and what is bad, what belongs to God and what belongs to the Devil. And almost all religions, except Tantra, follow the path of Yoga. They divide reality and they create an inner conflict – they proceed through conflict.For example, you have hate in you: the path of the warrior is to destroy the hate within. You have anger and greed and sex, and millions of things. The path of the warrior is to destroy all that is wrong, negative, and develop all that is positive and right. Hate has to be destroyed and love evolved. Anger has to be completely destroyed and compassion created. Sex has to go and give place to brahmacharya, to pure celibacy. Yoga immediately cuts you with a sword into two parts: the right and wrong; the right has to win over the wrong.Anger is there. What will you do? What will Yoga suggest to do? It suggests: create the habit of compassion, create the opposite, make it so habitual that you start functioning like a robot. Hence it is called the way of the soldier. All over the world, throughout history, the soldier has been trained in a robotlike existence; he has to create habits.Habits function without consciousness; they don’t need any awareness, they can move without you. If you have habits – and everybody has habits, you can see it… A man takes out his packet of cigarettes from a pocket, watch him, he may not be at all aware what he is doing. Just robotlike he reaches into the pocket. If there is some inner restlessness, immediately his hand goes into his pocket; he brings out the cigarette, starts smoking. He may throw away the remaining part, the last part of the cigarette; he may have moved through all the gestures without even being aware of what he was doing.We teach a robotlike existence to the soldier. The soldier has to do and follow, he has not to be aware. When he is commanded to turn to the right, he has to turn; he has not to think about it, about whether to turn or not because if he starts thinking then it is impossible, then wars cannot continue in the world. Thinking is not needed, nor is awareness needed. He should simply be this much aware, that he understands the order, that’s all. The minimum of awareness: here the order is given and there, immediately, like a mechanism, he starts following. It is not that he turns to the left when he is ordered to turn left; he listens and turns. He is not turning; he has cultivated the habit. It is just like putting the light off or on: the light is not going to think about it, whether to be on or off; you push the button and the light is on. You say “Left turn,” and the button is pushed and the man moves left.William James has reported that once he was sitting in a coffeehouse and an old soldier – retired, retired for almost for twenty years – was passing by with a bucket of eggs. Suddenly William James played a joke. He called loudly, “Attention!” and the poor old man stood to attention. The eggs fell from his hands; they were destroyed.He was very angry; he came running and said, “What type of joke is this?”But William James said, “You need not follow it. Everybody is free to call ‘Attention!’ You are not forced to follow it. Who told you to follow it? You should have gone on your way.”The man said, “That is not possible; it is automatic. Of course twenty years have passed since I was in the military, but the habit is deep rooted.”Many years of training, and a conditioned reflex is created. This phrase conditioned reflex is good; Pavlov, a Russian psychologist, coined it. It says that you simply reflect: somebody throws something into your eye; you don’t think to blink or close it, your eye simply closes. A fly comes flying and you close your eye; you need not think, there is no need, it is a conditioned reflex – it simply happens. It is in your body-habit, it is in your blood, in your bones. It simply happens – nothing has to be done about it.The soldier is trained to behave in a completely robotlike way. He has to exist in conditioned reflexes. The same is done by Yoga. You get angry, Yoga says, “Don’t get angry, rather cultivate the opposite: compassion.” By and by, your energy will start moving in the habit of compassion. If you persevere for a long time, anger will disappear completely, you will feel compassion. But you will be dead, not alive. You will be a robot, not a human being. You will have compassion not because you have compassion, but only because you have cultivated a habit.You can cultivate a bad habit; you can cultivate a good habit. Somebody can cultivate smoking, somebody can cultivate non-smoking; somebody can cultivate nonvegetarian styles of food, somebody can cultivate vegetarian styles, but both are cultivating, and in the final judgment both are the same because both live through habits.This point has to be pondered very deeply because it is very easy to cultivate a good habit and it is very difficult to become good. And the substitute of a good habit is cheap; it can be done very easily.Now, particularly in Russia, they are developing a therapy: conditioned reflex therapy. They say people cannot leave their habits. Somebody has been smoking for twenty years – how can you expect him to leave it? You may try to explain to him that it is bad, the doctors may say he could even be in a dangerous situation, cancer may be developing, but twenty years of a long habit – now it is engrained, now it has moved into the deepest core of his body, now it is in his metabolism. Even if he wants, even if he desires, even if he sincerely desires, it is difficult because it is not a question of sincere desire. Twenty years of continuous practice; it is almost impossible. So what to do?In Russia they say there is no need to do anything, and no need to explain to him. They have developed a therapy: the man starts smoking and they give him an electric shock. The shock, the pain of it and the smoking become joined together, become associated. For seven days he is hospitalized and whenever he starts smoking, immediately, automatically, he gets an electric shock. After seven days the habit is broken. Even if you persuade him to smoke he will be trembling. The moment he takes a cigarette in his hand his whole body will tremble because of the idea of the shock.They say now he will never smoke; they have broken the habit by a very sharp shock treatment. But he will not now become a buddha just because, through shock treatment, he does not have his old habit. All habits can be changed through shock treatment. Will he become a buddha, enlightened because he has no bad habits anymore? No, now he will not even be a human being – he will be a mechanism. He will be afraid of things, he will not be able to do them because you have given him new habits of fear.That is the whole meaning of hell; all the religions have used it as a shock treatment. Hell is nowhere, nor is there any heaven. Both are tricks, old psychotherapeutic concepts. They have painted hell so horrible that a child can become afraid from the very childhood. The mention of the name of hell and fear arises and he trembles. This is just a trick to prevent bad habits. And heaven is also a trick to help good habits: so much pleasure, happiness, beauty, eternal life is promised in heaven if you follow good patterns. Whatsoever the society says is good you have to follow. Heaven is to help you toward positivity and hell is to prevent you from going in the negative direction.Tantra is the only religion which has not used any such conditioned reflexes. Tantra says you have to flower into a perfectly awakened being, not a robotlike mechanism. So if you understand Tantra, habit is bad; there are no bad habits, there are no good habits. Habit is bad, and one should be awake so there are no habits. You simply live moment to moment with full awareness, not by habits. If you can live without habits, that is the royal path.Why is it royal? A soldier has to follow, a king need not. The king is above, he gives orders; he receives no orders from anybody. A king never goes to fight; only soldiers go. A king is not a fighter. A king lives the most relaxed of all lives. This is just a metaphor: a soldier has to follow; a king simply lives loose and natural, there is nobody above him. Tantra says there is nobody above you to whom you have to follow, from whom you have to get your pattern of life, through whom you have to become imitators. There is nobody. You live a loose, natural and flowing life – the only thing is, just be aware.Through fighting you can cultivate good habits, but they will be habits, not natural. People say a habit is second nature, maybe – but remember the word second. It is not natural; it may look almost natural, but it is not.What will be the difference between real compassion and a cultivated compassion? A real compassion is a response – the situation and the response. A real compassion is always fresh; something has happened and your heart flows toward it. A child has fallen and you run and help the child to stand back up, but this is a response – a false compassion, a cultivated compassion, is a reaction.These two words are very, very meaningful: response and reaction. Response is alive to the situation; reaction is just an engrained habit. You simply go and help because in the past you have been training yourself to help somebody if he has fallen, but there is no heart in it. Somebody is drowning in the river: you run and help the person just because you have been taught to do so. You have cultivated the habit of helping, but you are not involved. You remain out of it, your heart is not there, you have not responded. You have not responded to this man, to this man drowning in this river; you have not responded to this moment, you have followed an ideology.To follow an ideology is good: help everybody, become a servant to people, have compassion! You have an ideology, and through the ideology you react. It is out of the past that the action comes, it is already dead. When the situation creates the action and you respond with full awareness, only then something of beauty happens to you.If you react because of the ideology, old habit patterns, you will not gain anything out of it. At the most you can gain a little ego, which is not a gain at all. You may start bragging that you have saved a man who was drowning in the river. You may go to the marketplace and shout loudly, “Look, I have saved another human life!” You may gain a little more ego, that you have done something good, but it is not a gain. You have lost a great opportunity of being spontaneous, of being spontaneous in compassion.If you had responded to the situation, then something would have flowered in you, a blossoming; you would have felt a certain silence, a stillness, a blessing. Whenever there is a response you feel a blossoming inside. Whenever there is a reaction you remain dead: corpselike you behave, robotlike you act. Reaction is ugly; response is beautiful. Reaction is always of the part; reaction is never of the whole. Response is always of the whole, your whole totality jumps into the river. You don’t think about it, the situation simply lets it happen.If your life becomes a life of response and spontaneity, you will some day become a buddha. If your life becomes a life of reaction, dead habits, you may look like a buddha but you will not become a buddha. You will be a painted buddha: inside you will be just a corpse. Habit kills life. Habit is against life.Every day in the morning you have made it a habit to get up early: you get up at five. In India I have seen many people – because in India, for centuries it has been taught that the brahmamuhurt, before the sun has risen, is the most auspicious moment, the holiest. It is, but you cannot make a habit out of it because the holy exists only in a living response. They get up at five, but you will never see on their faces the glory that comes if you get up early as a response.All life is awakening all around you; the whole earth is waiting for the sun, the stars are disappearing. Everything is becoming more conscious. The earth has slept, the trees have slept; the birds are ready to take to the wing. Everything is getting ready. A new day starts, a new celebration.If it is a response, then you get up like a bird, humming, singing; you have a dance to your step. It is not a habit, it is not that you have to get up; it is not that because it is written in the scriptures and you are a devoted Hindu, you have to get up in the early morning. If you make a habit out of it you will not listen to the birds because birds are not written in the scriptures; you will not see the sun rising because that is not the point – you are following a dead discipline.You may even be angry; you may even be against it because last night you were late to bed and you are not feeling well enough to get up. It would have been better if you could have slept a little more. You were not ready; you were tired. Or last night was not good, and you have dreamed too much and your whole body feels lethargic; you would like to have a little more sleep. But no, the scriptures are against it and you have been taught from your very childhood…In my childhood my grandfather was very much for the morning. He would drag me out of my sleep nearabout three in the morning – and since then I have not been able to get up early. He would drag me and I would curse him inside, but I couldn’t do anything and he would take me for a walk, and I was sleepy but I had to walk with him. He destroyed the whole beauty.Later, whenever I had to go for a morning walk, I could not forgive him. I will always remember him. He destroyed… For years he was continuously dragging me – and he was doing something good, he thought that he was helping to create a lifestyle. This was not the right way. I was sleepy and he was dragging me, and the path was beautiful and the morning was beautiful, but he destroyed all the beauty. He put me off. Only after many years could I regain it, and move in the morning without remembering him; otherwise his memory was with me. Even when he was dead he would follow me like a shadow in the morning.If you make a habit, if you make it a forced thing, then the morning becomes ugly. Then it is better to go to sleep. But be spontaneous! Some days you may not be able to get up, nothing is wrong in it, you are not committing a sin. If you are feeling sleepy, sleep is beautiful – as beautiful as any morning and as beautiful as any sunrise because sleep belongs to the divine as much as to the sun. If you are feeling to rest the whole day, it is good!This is what Tantra says: the royal way – behave like a king, not like a soldier. There is nobody on top of you to force you and order you; there should not really be a style of life. That is the royal way. You should live moment to moment, enjoying moment to moment – spontaneity should be the way. And why bother about tomorrow? This moment is enough. Live it! Live it in totality. Respond, but don’t react. “No habits” should be the formula.I am not saying to live in chaos, but don’t live through habits. Maybe, just living spontaneously a way of life evolves in you, but it is not forced. If you enjoy the morning every day, and through enjoyment you get up early in the morning, not as a habit, and you get up every day… And you may get up early for your whole life, but it is not a habit. You are not forcing yourself to get up, it happens. It is beautiful; you enjoy it, you love it.If it happens out of love it is not a style, it is not a habit, not a conditioning, not a cultivated, dead thing. The fewer habits, the more you will be alive. No habits – you will be perfectly alive. Habits surround you with a dead crust and you become enclosed in them, you become encapsulated. Like a seed, a hard shell surrounds you. Be flexible.Yoga teaches you to cultivate the opposite of all that is bad. Fight with the evil and attend to good. There is violence – kill the violence within you and become nonviolent, cultivate nonviolence. Always do the opposite and force the opposite to become your pattern. This is the soldier’s way: a small teaching.Tantra is the great teaching, the supreme. What does Tantra say? Tantra says: don’t create any conflict within yourself. Accept both, and through the acceptance of both, transcendence happens – not victory but transcendence. In Yoga there are victories, in Tantra there are none. In Tantra there is simply transcendence. Not that you become nonviolent against violence, you simply go beyond both, you simply become a third phenomenon: a witness.I was sitting once in a butcher’s shop. He was a very good man and I used to go to visit him. It was evening and he was just going to close the shop when a man came and asked for a hen. Just a few minutes before he had told me that everything was sold that day, only one hen was left. So he was very happy; he went in, brought the hen out, threw it on the scale and said, “It will be five rupees.”The man said, “It is good, but I am going to give a party and many friends are coming and this hen seems to be too small. I would like to have one a little bigger.”Now I knew that he had no other hen left, this was the only one. The butcher brooded a little, took the hen back inside the room, stirred here and there a little, came back again, threw the hen on the scale, the same hen, and said, “This will be seven rupees.”The man said, “Tell you what, I shall take both of them.”Then the butcher was really in a fix.And Tantra gives the same fix to the whole, to existence itself. Tantra says, “I will take both of them.”There are not two. Hate is nothing but another aspect of love. Anger is nothing but another aspect of compassion, and violence is nothing but another face of nonviolence. Tantra says, “Tell you what, I will take both of them. I accept both.” And suddenly through this acceptance there is transcendence because there are not two. Violence and nonviolence are not two. Anger and compassion are not two. Love and hate are not two.That’s what you know, you observe, but you are so unconscious that you don’t recognize the fact. Your love changes into hate within a second. How is it possible if they are two? Not even a second is needed: this moment you love, and next moment you hate the same person. In the morning you love the person, by the afternoon you hate, in the evening you love again. This game of love and hate goes on. In fact, love and hate is not the right word. Love-hate, anger-compassion: they are one phenomenon; they are not two. That’s why love can become hate, hate can become love, anger can become compassion, and compassion can become anger.Tantra says the division is brought about by your mind and then you start fighting. First you create the division; you condemn one aspect and you appreciate another. First you create the division, then you create the conflict and then you are in trouble. And you will be in trouble. A yogi is constantly in trouble because whatsoever he does the victory cannot be final, at the most temporary.You can push down anger and act up compassion, but you know well that you have pushed it down into the unconscious and it is there. Any moment, a little unawareness and it will bubble up; it will surface. So, one constantly has to push it down. And this is such an ugly phenomenon, if one has to constantly push down negative things, then the whole life is wasted. When will you enjoy the divine? You have no space, no time. You are fighting with the anger and greed and sex and jealousy, and a thousand things. And those thousand enemies are there; you have to be constantly on watch, you can never relax. How can you be loose and natural? You will always be tense, strained, always ready to fight, always afraid.Yogis even become afraid of sleep because in sleep they cannot be on watch. In sleep all that they have forced down surfaces. They may have attained to celibacy while they are awake, but in dreams it becomes impossible: beautiful women come on floating inside, and the yogi cannot do anything. Those beautiful women are not coming from some heaven – it is written in Hindu stories that God sent them. Why should God be interested in you, a poor yogi not doing anybody any harm, simply sitting in the Himalayas with closed eyes, fighting with his own problems? Why should God be interested in him? And why should they send apsaras, beautiful women, to distract him from his path? Why? Nobody is there. There is no need for anybody to send anybody. The yogi is creating his own dreams.Whatsoever you suppress surfaces in dreams. Those dreams are the part the yogi has denied. And your waking hours are as much yours as your dreams are yours. So whether you love a woman in your waking hours, or you love a woman in dream, there is no difference. There cannot be because it is not a question of a woman being there or not, it is a question of you. Whether you love a picture, a dream picture, or you love a real woman, there is in fact no difference, there cannot be because a real woman is also a picture inside. You never know the real woman, you only know the picture.I am here. How do you know that I am really here? Maybe it is just a dream: you are dreaming me here. What will be the difference if you dream me here and you see me actually here? And how will you make out the difference? What is the criterion? Whether I am here or not makes no difference, you see me inside your mind. In both cases, dream or real, your eyes take in the rays and your mind interprets that somebody is there. You have never seen any actual person, you cannot.That’s why Hindus say this is maya; this is an illusory world. Tilopa says, “Transient, ghostlike, phantomlike, dreamlike is this world.” Why? It is because there is no difference between dream and actuality. In both cases you are confined in your mind. You only see pictures, you have never seen any reality – you cannot because reality can only be seen when you become real. You are a ghostlike phenomenon, a shadow – how can you see the real? The shadow can see only the shadow. You can see reality only when the mind is dropped. Through the mind everything becomes unreal. The mind projects, creates, colors, interprets – everything becomes false; hence the emphasis, continuous emphasis how to be no-minds.Tantra says don’t fight. If you fight you may continue fighting for many lives and nothing will happen out of it because in the first place you have missed – where you have seen two there was only one. And if the first step is missed, you cannot reach the goal. Your whole journey is going to be continuously a missing. The first step has to be taken absolutely rightly; otherwise you will never reach the goal.And what is the absolutely right thing? Tantra says it is to see the one in two, to see the one in many. Once you can see one in duality, already the transcendence has started. This is the royal path.Now we will try to understand the sutra.To transcend duality is the kingly view.It says: To transcend… not to win, but to transcend. This word is very beautiful. What does it mean to transcend?It is just as if a small child is playing with his toys. You tell him to put them away and he becomes angry. Even when he goes to sleep he goes with his toys, and his mother has to remove them when he has fallen asleep. In the morning the first thing that he demands is where his toys are and who has taken them away. Even in his dreams he dreams about the toys. Then suddenly one day he forgets about the toys. For a few days they remain in the corner of his room, and then they are removed or thrown away; never again does he ask for them. What has happened?He has transcended; he has become mature. It is not a fight and a victory; it is not that he was fighting against the desire to have toys. No, suddenly one day he sees this is childish and he is no longer a child; suddenly one day he realizes that toys are toys, they are not real life and he is ready for the real life. His back is turned toward the toys. Never again will they come into dreams; never again will he think about them. And if he sees some other child playing with toys, he will laugh; he will laugh a knowing laugh, a wise laugh. He will say, “He’s a child, still childish, playing with toys.” He has transcended.Transcendence is a very spontaneous phenomenon. It has not to be cultivated. You simply become more mature. You simply see the whole absurdity of a certain thing, and you transcend.One young man came to me and he was very worried. He had a beautiful wife, but her nose was a little too long. So he was worried and he said, “What to do?” Even plastic surgery was done. The nose became a little more ugly because there was nothing wrong, and when you try to improve something where nothing is wrong, it becomes more ugly; it makes more of a mess. Now he was more troubled and he asked me what he should do.I talked to him about the toys and I told him, “One day you will have to transcend. This is just childish – why are you so obsessed with her nose? The nose is just a tiny part, and your wife is so beautiful and such a beautiful person – and why are you making her so sad because of her nose?” She had also become touchy about her nose, and her nose had become as if it was the whole problem of her life.And all problems are like this! Don’t think that your problem is something greater; all problems are like this. All problems are out of childishness, juvenile, they are born out of immaturity.He was so concerned with her nose that he would not even look at his wife’s face because whenever he saw her nose he would be troubled – but you cannot escape things so easily. If you are not looking at the face because of the nose, still you are reminded of the nose. Even if you are trying to avoid the issue, the issue is there. You are obsessed. So I told him to meditate on his wife’s nose.He said, “What? I cannot even look.”I told him, “This is going to help – simply meditate on her nose. In ancient days people used to meditate on the tip of their own nose, so what is wrong in meditating on the tip of your wife’s nose? Beautiful! Try it.”He said, “But what will happen through it?”“Just try,” I told him, “and after a few months tell me. Every day, let her sit before you and meditate on her nose.”One day he came running to me and he said, “What nonsense I have been doing! Suddenly, I have transcended. The whole foolishness of it has become apparent, now it is no longer a problem.”He had not become victorious because, in fact, there is no enemy there so that you can win, there is no enemy – this is what Tantra says. All life is in deep love with you. There is nobody who has to be destroyed, nobody who has to be beaten – nobody who is an enemy, a foe to you. All life loves you. From everywhere love is flowing.And within you also, there are no enemies. They were created by priests, who have made you into a battleground. They say, “Fight this – this is bad! Fight that – that is bad!” And they have created many enemies, so that you are surrounded by enemies, and you have lost contact with the whole beauty of life.I say to you anger is not your enemy, greed is not your enemy; neither is compassion your friend, nor nonviolence is your friend – because friend or foe, you remain with the duality.Just look at the whole of your being and you will find they are one. When the foe becomes the friend and the friend becomes the foe, all duality is lost. Suddenly there is transcendence, suddenly an awakening. And I tell you it is sudden because when you fight you have to fight inch by inch. This is not a fight at all. This is the way of the kings: the royal path.Says Tilopa: To transcend duality is the kingly view. Transcend duality! Just watch and you will see there is no duality.Bodhidharma, one of the most rare jewels ever born, went to China. The king came to see him, and the king said, “Sometimes I am very disturbed. Sometimes there is much tension and anguish within me.”Bodhidharma looked at him and said, “Come early tomorrow morning at four o’clock, and bring all your anguish, anxieties, disturbances with you. Remember, don’t come alone; bring all of them!”The king looked at this Bodhidharma – he was a very weird looking fellow; he could have scared anybody to death – and asked, “What are you saying? What do you mean?”Bodhidharma said, “If you don’t bring those things, then how can I set you right? Bring all of them and I will set everything right.”The king thought, “It is better not to go. Four o’clock in the morning – it will be dark, and this man looks a little mad. With a big staff in his hand, he can even hit. And what does he mean that he will put everything right?”He couldn’t sleep the whole night because Bodhidharma haunted him. By the morning he felt that it would be good to go because who knows, maybe he could do something.So he went, grudgingly, hesitatingly, but he reached. And the first thing Bodhidharma said – he was sitting there before the temple with his staff, was looking even more dangerous in the dark, and he said – “So you have come! Where are the other fellows that you were talking about?”The king said, “You talk in puzzles, because they are not things that I can bring, they are inside.”Bodhidharma said, “Okay. Inside, outside, things are things. Sit down, close your eyes and try to find them inside. Catch hold of them and immediately tell me. Look at my staff – I am going to set them right!”The king closed his eyes – there was no other way to do – he closed his eyes, a little afraid, looked inside here and there, watched, and suddenly he became aware the more he looked in, there was nothing – no anxiety, no anguish, no disturbance. He fell into a deep meditation. Hours passed, the sun started rising, and on his face there was tremendous silence.Then Bodhidharma told him, “Now open your eyes. Enough is enough! Where are those fellows? Could you get hold of them?”The king laughed, bowed down, touched the feet of Bodhidharma, and he said, “Really, you have set them right because I could not find them, and now I know what is the matter. They were not there in the first place. They were there because I never entered within myself and looked for them. They were there because I was not present inside. Now I know – you have done a miracle.”And this is what happened. This is transcendence: not solving a problem, but looking to see whether there really is a problem in the first place. First you create the problem and then you start asking for the solution. First you create the question and then you roam around the world asking for the answer. This has been my experience also, that if you watch the question, the question will disappear; there is no need for any answer. If you watch the question, the question disappears, and this is transcendence. It is not a solution because there was no question at all to solve. You don’t have a disease. Just watch inside and you will not find the disease; then what is the need of a solution?Every man is as he should be. Every man is a born king. Nothing is lacking, you need not be improved upon. And people who try to improve you, destroy you, they are the real mischief makers. And there are many who are just watching like cats for mice: you come near them and they pounce upon you and they start improving you immediately. There are many improvers; that’s why the world is in such chaos, there are too many people trying to improve you. Don’t allow anybody to improve upon you. You are already the last word. You are not only the alpha you are the omega also. You are complete, perfect.Even if you feel imperfection, Tantra says that imperfection is perfect. You need not worry about it. It will look very strange to say that your imperfection is also perfect, nothing is lacking in it. In fact, you appear imperfect not because you are imperfect but because you are a growing perfection. This looks absurd, illogical, because we think perfection cannot grow – by perfection, we mean that which has come to its last growth, but that perfection will be dead. If it cannot grow, then that perfection will be dead.Existence goes on growing. Existence is not perfect in the way of having no growth. It is perfect because it lacks nothing, but it goes from one perfection to another; the growth continues. Existence is evolution: not from imperfection to perfection, it is from perfection to more perfection, to still more perfection.When perfection is without any future, it is dead. When perfection has a future to it, still an opening, a growth, still a movement, then it looks like imperfection. And I would like to tell you: be imperfect and growing because that is what life is. And don’t try to be perfect; otherwise you will stop growing. Then you will be like a Buddha statue: stone, but dead.Because of this phenomenon – that perfection goes on growing – you feel it is imperfect. Let it be as it is. Allow it to be as it is. This is the royal way.To transcend duality is the kingly view. To conquer distractions is the royal practice.Distractions will be there when you will lose your consciousness again and again. You meditate, you sit for meditation, a thought comes, and immediately you have forgotten yourself; you follow the thought, you have got involved in it. Tantra says only one thing has to be conquered, that is distractions.What will you do? Only one thing: when a thought comes, remain a witness. Look at it, observe it, allow it to pass your being, but don’t get attached to it in any way, for or against. It may be a bad thought, a thought to kill somebody – don’t push it away, don’t say, “This is a bad thought.” The moment you say something about the thought you have become attached, you are distracted. Now this thought will lead you to many things, from one thought to another. A good thought comes, a compassionate thought. Don’t say, “Aha, so beautiful! I am a great saint. Such beautiful thoughts are coming to me that I would like to give salvation to the whole world. I would like to liberate everybody.” Don’t say that. Good or bad, remain a witness.Still, in the beginning, you will be distracted many times. Then what to do? If you are distracted, be distracted. Don’t be too worried about it, otherwise that worry will become an obsession. Be distracted! For a few minutes you will be distracted, then suddenly you will remember, “I am distracted.” Then it is okay, come back. Don’t feel depressed. Don’t say, “It was bad that I was distracted.” Again you are creating a dualism: bad and good. Distracted, okay – accept it; come back. Even with distraction you don’t create a conflict.That’s what Krishnamurti goes on saying. He uses a very paradoxical concept for it. He says if you are inattentive, be attentively inattentive. That’s okay! Suddenly you find you have been inattentive, give attention to it and come back home. Krishnamurti has not been understood and the reason is that he follows the royal path. If he had been a yogi he would have been understood very easily. That’s why he goes on saying there is no method – on the royal path there is no method. He goes on saying that there is no technique – on the royal path there is none. He goes on saying no scripture will help you – on the royal path there is no scripture.Distracted? The moment you remember, the moment this attention comes to you that, “I have been distracted,” come back. That’s all! Don’t create any conflict. Don’t say, “This was bad”; don’t feel depressed, frustrated that you have been distracted again. Nothing is wrong in distraction, enjoy it also.If you can enjoy the distraction, it will happen less and less to you. And a day comes when there is no distraction – but this is not a victory. You have not pushed the distracting trends of your mind deep into the unconscious. No. You allowed it also. It too is good.This is the mind of Tantra: that everything is good and holy. Even if there is distraction, somehow it is needed. You may not be aware why it is needed; somehow it is needed. If you can feel good about everything that happens in you, only then are you following the royal path. If you start fighting with anything whatsoever, you have fallen from the royal path and you have become an ordinary soldier, a warrior.To transcend duality is the kingly view. To conquer distractionsis the royal practice. The path of no-practice is the way of all buddhas.Nothing has to be practiced because practice creates habits. One has to become more aware, not more practiced. The beautiful happens through the spontaneous, not through the practiced. You can practice love; you can go through some training. In America they are thinking to create a few training courses for love because people have even forgotten how to love. It is really strange! Even birds, animals, trees don’t ask anybody, they don’t go to any college, and they love. And many people come to me…Just a few days ago one young man wrote a letter to me, and he said, “I understand – but how to love? How to proceed? How to approach a woman?” It seems ridiculous but we have completely lost the natural, loose way. Not even love is possible without training. And if you are trained you will become absolutely ugly because then everything you do will be part of the training. It will not be real; it will be acting. It will not be real life; it will be just like actors. They create love, they act in a loving way, but have you noticed actors are the greatest failures as far as love is concerned? Their love life is almost always a failure. This should not be so because twenty-four hours a day with so many women, with so many stories, in different ways they are practicing love. They are professional lovers, they should be perfect when they fall in love, but when they fall in love they are always failures.The life of actors and actresses, their love life, is always a failure. What is the matter? Practice is the matter; they have practiced it too much; now the heart cannot function. They simply go on making impotent gestures: they kiss, but the kiss is not there, only lips meet. Only lips meet. The inner energy, the transfer of inner energy is not there; their lips are closed, cold. And if lips are cold, closed, and energy is not being released through them, the kiss is an ugly thing, unhygienic. It is just a transfer of millions of cells, germs, diseases – that’s all. A kiss is ugly if the inner energy is not present.You can embrace a woman or a man – only bones meet, bodies clash – but there is no jump of the inner energy. The energy is not there. You are just moving through an impotent gesture. You can even make love, you can move through all the gestures of love, but that will be more like gymnastics and less like love.Remember: practice kills life. Life is more alive when unpracticed. When it flows in all directions without any pattern, without any forced discipline, then it has its own order and discipline.The path of no-practice is the way of all buddhas. He who treads that path reaches buddhahood.Then what to do? If no-practice is the path, what to do? Then just live spontaneously. What is the fear? Why you are so afraid to live spontaneously? Of course there may be dangers, there are hazards, but that is good! Life is not like a railway track, with trains moving on the same track again and again, shunting. Life is like a river; it creates its own path. It is not a channel. A channel is not good – a channel means a life of habits. Danger is there, but danger is life, it is involved in life. Only dead persons are beyond danger. That’s why people become dead.Your houses are more like graves. You are too concerned with security, and too much concern for security kills because life is insecure. It is so; nothing can be done about it, nobody can make it secure. All securities are false; all securities are imagined. A woman loves you today – tomorrow, who knows? How can you be secure about tomorrow? You may go to the court and register, and make a legal bond that she will also remain your wife tomorrow. She may remain your wife because of the legal bond, but love can disappear. Love knows no legality. And when love disappears and the wife remains the wife and the husband remains the husband, then there is deadness between them.Because of security we create marriage. Because of security we create society. Because of security we always move on the channelized path.Life is wild. Love is wild. And God is absolutely wild. He will never come into your gardens; they are much too human. He will not come to your houses; they are too small. He will never be met on your channelized paths. He is wild.Remember, Tantra says that life is wild. One has to live it through all the dangers, hazards. And it is beautiful because then there is adventure. Don’t try to make a fixed pattern of your life. Allow it to have its own course. Accept everything! Transcend duality through acceptance and allow life to have its own course and you will reach; you will certainly reach. This certainly I say, not to make you secure – this is a fact, that’s why I say it. This is not your certainty of security. Those who are wild always reach.Transient is this world; like phantoms and dreams, substance it has none. Renounce it and forsake your kin, cut the strings of lust and hatred, and meditate in woods and mountains.If without effort you remain loosely in the natural state, soon Mahamudra you will win, and attain the nonattainment.The non-attainable… This sutra has to be understood very deeply because misunderstanding is possible. There has been much misunderstanding about this sutra of Tilopa. And all those who have commented before me have missed the point. There is a reason. This sutra says: Transient is this world… this world is made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. There is no difference between dreams and this world. Waking or asleep you live in a dream world of your own. Remember there is not one world; there are as many worlds as there are people; everybody lives in his own world. Sometimes our worlds meet and clash, sometimes merge, but we remain enclosed in our own worlds.Transient is this world – mind created – like phantoms and dreams, substance it has none. This is what physicists say also: …substance it has none. Matter has disappeared completely from the vocabulary of the physicist within just thirty, forty years. Seventy, seventy-five years ago, Nietzsche declared: “God is dead.” And he said it to emphasize that only matter exists – and the century was not even complete. Just twenty-five years after Nietzsche died – Nietzsche died in 1900 – in 1925, physicists came to understand that we don’t know anything about God, but one thing is certain: matter is dead. There is no material thing around you, everything is just vibrations; crisscrossing vibrations create the illusion of matter.It is the same when you watch a movie, there is nothing on the screen – only crisscrossing electric lights, and they create the whole illusion. Now there are three-dimensional films, they create the complete illusion of three-dimensionality. The whole world is exactly like a movie film on the screen because it is all an electric phenomenon. Only you are real, only the witness is real, and everything is a dream. And buddhahood means that when you transcend all these dreams and there is left nothing to be seen – only the seer sits silently, there is nothing, no object to be seen, only the seer is left – then you have attained to buddhahood, to reality.Transient is the world; like phantoms and dreams, substance it has none. Renounce it and forsake your kin… These words Renounce it and forsake your kin… have been misunderstood. There was a reason why. They were all renouncers, and they thought that Tilopa was saying what they believed. Tilopa could not say it because it was against Tilopa’s whole trend.If they are like dreams, what is the meaning of renouncing them? You can renounce reality, you cannot renounce dreams; it will be too foolish. You can renounce a substantial world; you cannot renounce a phantom world. In the morning do you say, declare, go to the housetop and call everybody around and say, “I have renounced the dreams! Last night there were many dreams and I have renounced!” They will laugh, they will think you have gone crazy – nobody renounces dreams. One simply awakes; nobody renounces dreams.A Zen master woke up one morning and he asked one of his disciples, “I had a dream last night. Would you interpret it for me, what it means?”The disciple said, “Wait! Let me bring a cup of tea for you.”The master took the cup of tea and then asked, “Now what about the dream?”The disciple said, “Forget about it because a dream is a dream and needs no interpretation. A cup of tea is enough of an interpretation. Awake!”The master said, “Right, absolutely right! If you had interpreted my dream I would have thrown you out of my monastery because only fools interpret dreams. You did well; otherwise you would have been thrown completely out, and I would not have looked at your face again.”When there is a dream, you need a cup of tea and be finished with it. Freud and Jung and Adler would have been very worried had they known this story because they wasted their whole lives interpreting others’ dreams. A dream has to be transcended. Simply by knowing it is a dream, you transcend. This is the renunciation.Tilopa has been misunderstood because in the world there are so many renouncers, condemners. They thought he was saying to renounce the world. He was not saying that. He was saying, know that it is transient, and this is renunciation. Renounce it… he says, means know it, know that it is a dream.…forsake your kin… It has been thought that he is saying, “Leave your family, your relations, your mother, your father, your children.” No, he is not saying that; he cannot. It is impossible for Tilopa to say that. He is saying renounce the inner relationship with people. You should not think somebody is your wife. That “yourness” is a phantom; it is a dream. You should not say, “This child is my son” – that “myness,” that mine, is a dream. Nobody is yours; nobody can be yours. Renounce these attitudes that somebody is yours: husband, wife, friend, enemy; renounce all these attitudes. Don’t bridge with mine, thine – these words, drop them!Suddenly, if you drop these words, you have renounced your kin: nobody is yours. That doesn’t mean that you escape, you run away from your wife because the running away will show that you think she is substantial. Running away will show that you still think she is yours, otherwise why are you running?It happened…A Hindu sannyasin, Swami Ramteerth, came back from America. He was staying in the Himalayas; his wife came to see him; he became a little disturbed. His disciple, a very penetrating mind, Sardar Poorn Singh, was sitting beside him. He watched, he felt that he was disturbed. When his wife went, Ramteerth suddenly threw off his orange robes.Poorn Singh asked, “What is the matter? I was watching; you were a little disturbed. It felt you were not yourself.”Ramteerth said, “That’s why I’m throwing off these robes. I have met so many women, and I was never disturbed. Nothing is special about this woman – except that she is my wife. That my is still there. I am not worthy to wear these robes. I have not renounced the mine, I have renounced only the wife. And the wife is not the problem. No other woman has ever disturbed me; I have walked all over the earth, but my wife comes – she is as ordinary a woman as any – and suddenly I am disturbed. The bridge is still there.”He died in ordinary clothes; he never again used the orange. He said, “I am not worthy.”Tilopa cannot say renounce your wife and children and your kin. No. He is saying renounce the bridges; drop them. That is your affair; it is not concerned with the wife. If she continues to think about you as her husband that is her problem not yours. If the son continues to think of you as his father, that is his problem; he is a child, he needs maturity.I say to you that Tilopa means renouncing the inner dreams and bridges, the inner worlds.…meditate in woods and mountains. And that too – he is not saying to run away to the mountains and the woods. It has been interpreted like that, and many have escaped from their wives and children and gone to the mountains. That is absolutely wrong. What Tilopa is saying is deeper; it is not so superficial because you can go to the mountains and remain in the market. Your mind is the question. You may sit in the Himalayas and think of the market and your wife and your children and what is happening to them.It happened…A man renounced his wife, children and family, and came to Tilopa to be initiated as his disciple. Tilopa was staying in a temple outside the town. The man came.He went inside alone and Tilopa was alone. Tilopa looked around him and said, “You have come, that’s okay, but why this crowd?” The man looked back because there was no one. Tilopa said, “Don’t look back! Look in! The crowd is there!”And the man closed his eyes and the crowd was there: the wife was still there crying, the children were weeping and sad; they were standing there. They had come to leave him at the boundary of the town: friends, family, others, they were all there.And Tilopa said, “Go out, leave the crowd! I initiate persons, not crowds.”No, Tilopa cannot mean that you renounce the world and go to the mountains. He is not so foolish. He cannot mean it; he is an awakened man. What he means is this: if you renounce the dreams, the bridges, and the relationships, not the relations; if you renounce your mind, suddenly you are in the woods and in the mountains. You may be sitting in the market but the market has disappeared. You may be sitting in your house; the house has disappeared. Suddenly you are in the woods and in the mountains. Suddenly you are alone. Only you are there, nobody else.You can be in the crowd and alone, and you can be alone and in the crowd. You can be in the world and not of the world. You can be in the world, but you belong to the mountains and the woods.This is an inner phenomenon. There are inner mountains and inner woods. Tilopa cannot say anything about the outer mountains and woods because they are also dreams. A Himalaya is as much a dream as the marketplace in Pune, because a Himalaya is as outer a phenomenon as the marketplace is. The woods are also a dream. You have to come to the inner; the reality is there. You have to move deeper and deeper, into the depths of your being, then you will come to the real Himalayas, then you will come to the real woods of your being, peaks and valleys of your being, heights and depths of your being. Tilopa means that.If without effort you remain loosely in the natural state, soon Mahamudra you will win, and attain the nonattainment. And he has to mean that because he is for a loose and natural state. To escape from the wife and the children is not natural, and it is not loose at all. A man who leaves his wife and children and friends and the world becomes tense; he cannot be loose. In the very effort of renouncing, tension comes in.To be natural means to be there where you are. To be natural means to be wherever you have found yourself. If you are a husband, good; if you are a wife, beautiful; if you are a mother, right; it has to be so. Accept wherever you are and whatsoever you are and whatsoever is happening to you, only then you can be loose and natural. Otherwise you cannot be loose and natural. Your so-called monks, sadhus, people who have escaped from the world, in fact, cowards sitting in their monasteries, cannot be loose and natural – they have to be uptight. They have done something unnatural, they have gone against the natural flow.Yes, to a few people it can be natural. So I am not saying force yourself to be in the marketplace because then you will commit the other extreme, and you will again do the same foolishness. To a few people it may be absolutely natural to be in a monastery; then they have to be in a monastery. To a few people it may be absolutely natural to move into the mountains; they have to be in the mountains. The thing to be remembered as a criterion is being loose and natural. If you are natural in the market, beautiful – the market is also divine. If you feel loose and natural in the Himalayas, beautiful – nothing is wrong in it. Remember only one thing: Be loose and natural. Don’t strain, and don’t try to create a tension within your being. Relaxed …soon Mahamudra you will win…Remaining loose and natural, soon you will come to the orgasmic peak with existence …and attain the nonattainment. And you will attain that which cannot be attained. Why? Why say it cannot be attained? It cannot be attained because it cannot be made a goal. It cannot be attained by a goal-oriented mind. It cannot be attained by an achieving mind.Here many people are of the same trend of the achieving mind. They are uptight because they have made it a goal, and it cannot be made a goal. It happens to you. You cannot attain it, you cannot reach for it; it comes to you. You can only be passive, loose and natural, and wait for the right time because everything has its own season. It will happen in its own season. What is the hurry? If you are in a hurry then you will become uptight, then you will be constantly expecting.That’s why Tilopa says: …and attain the nonattainment. It is not a goal. You cannot make a target out of it: “I am going to attain it.” You cannot reach to it like an arrow, no. The mind which is arrowed toward a goal is a tense mind.Suddenly it comes, when you are ready. Not even the footsteps are heard. Suddenly it comes. You are not even aware that it is coming. It has bloomed. Suddenly you see the blooming; you are filled with the fragrance.Enough for today.

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Tantra Supreme Understanding 01-10Category: TANTRA

Tantra Supreme Understanding 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The song continues:Cut the root of a tree and the leaves will wither; cut the root of your mind and samsara falls. The light of any lamp dispels in a momentthe darkness of long kalpas; the strong light of the Mind in but a flash will burn the veil of ignorance.Whoever clings to mind sees not the truth of what’s beyond the mind.Whoever strives to practice dharma, finds not the truth of beyond-practice. To know what is beyond both mind and practice, one should cut cleanly through the root of mind and stare naked. One should thus break away from all distinctions and remain at ease.Choice is bondage, choicelessness freedom. The moment you choose something, you have fallen into the trap of the world. If you can resist the temptation to choose, if you can remain choicelessly aware, the trap disappears on its own accord because when you don’t choose, you don’t help the trap to be there – the trap is also created by your choice. So this word choice has to be understood very deeply because only through that understanding, can choicelessness flower in you.Why can’t you remain without choosing? Why does it happen that the moment you see a person or a thing, immediately a subtle wave of choice has entered in you, even if you are not aware that you have chosen? A woman passes by and you say she is beautiful. You are not saying anything about your choice, but the choice has entered because to say of a person that she is beautiful means, “I would like to choose her.” In fact, deep down you have chosen; you are already in the trap. The seed has fallen to the soil; soon there will be sprouts, there will be a plant and a tree.The moment you say “This car is beautiful,” choice has entered. You may not be aware at all that you have chosen, that you would like to possess the car, but in the mind a fantasy has entered, a desire has arisen. When you say something is beautiful, you mean that you would like to have it. When you say something is ugly, you mean that you would not like to have it.Choice is subtle and one has to be very minutely aware of it. Whenever you say something, remember that saying is not only saying, not a mere saying; something has happened in the unconscious. Don’t make the distinction: this is beautiful and that is ugly, this is good and that is bad. Don’t make the distinction. Remain aloof. Things are neither bad nor good. The quality of goodness or badness is introduced by you. Things are neither beautiful nor ugly; they are simply there, as they are – the quality of being beautiful or ugly is introduced by you; it is your interpretation.What do you mean when you say something is beautiful? Is there any criterion of beauty? Can you prove it that it is beautiful? Just standing by your side, somebody may think “This is ugly!” – so it is nothing objective; nobody can prove anything beautiful. Thousands and thousands of books have been written on aesthetics, and it has been a long, arduous journey for intellectuals, thinkers and philosophers to define what beauty is – they have not yet been able. They have written great books, great treatises, they go round about and round about, but nobody has ever been able to pinpoint what beauty is. No, it seems impossible because nothing like beauty or ugliness exists, it is your interpretation.First you make a thing beautiful. This is why I say first you create the trap and then you fall into it. First you think, “This face is beautiful” – this is your creation, this is just your imagination, this is just your mind interpreting; this is not existential, this is just psychological – and then you yourself fall into the trap. You dig the hole and then you fall into it, and then you cry for help, and then you cry for people to come to your salvation.Nothing is needed, says Tantra. Simply see the whole trick – it is your own creation.What do you mean when you say something is ugly? If man is not on the earth will there be ugliness and beauty? Trees will be there, of course, and they will bloom; of course, rains will come, and summer and seasons will follow – but there will be nothing like beautiful and ugly, they will disappear with man and his mind. The sun will rise, and in the night the sky will be filled with stars, but nothing will be beautiful and nothing will be ugly. It was just man creating noise. Now he is no longer there the interpretations have disappeared, what will be good and what will be bad?In nature nothing is good and nothing is bad. And remember, Tantra is the loose and the natural way. It wants to bring you to the deepest, natural phenomena of life. It wants to help you drop from the mind – and mind creates distinctions, mind says, “This is to be chosen and that has to be avoided.” To “this” you cling, and “that” you avoid and escape from. Look at the whole phenomenon. Just a look is needed, nothing else; no practice is needed – just a look at the whole situation.The moon is beautiful, why? For centuries you have been indoctrinated that the moon is beautiful. For centuries poets have been singing about the moon, for centuries people have believed it, now it has become engrained. Of course there are a few things which happen with the moon: it is very soothing, you feel calmed down, and the light of the moon gives a mysterious aroma to the whole of nature; it gives a sort of hypnosis, you feel a little sleepy and awake and things look more beautiful; it gives a dreamlike quality to the world – that’s why we call madmen lunatics. The word lunatic comes from the word luna, the moon. They have gone mad, moonstruck.The moon creates a sort of lunacy, a sort of madness, neurosis. It may be concerned with the water in your body, just as the moon affects the sea, and tides come. Your body is sixty percent seawater. If you ask the physiologists, they will say that something must be happening in the body because of the moon, because your body remains a part of the sea. Man has come from the sea to the land; basically life was born in the sea. When the whole of the sea is affected – of course, the moon affects all sea animals; they are part of the sea, and man has also come from the sea. He has traveled very, very far, but it makes no difference; the body still reacts in the same way. And sixty percent of your body is water, and not only water, seawater, with the same chemicals, same saltiness.In the womb the child swims for nine months, floats in seawater; the mother’s womb is filled with seawater. That’s why when women are pregnant they start using, eating, more salt. More salt is needed for their body to keep the same balance of saltiness. And the child passes through all the phases human evolution has passed. In the beginning he is just like a fish, moves in the ocean of the mother’s womb, floats. By and by, in nine months he passes millions of years. Physiologists have come to realize that he passes through all the stages of life in nine months.It may be that the moon affects you, but there is nothing like beauty – it is a chemical phenomenon.You feel that certain eyes are very beautiful. What is happening? Those eyes must have a quality, a chemical quality, an electric quality in them, they must be releasing some energy: you become affected by them. You say some eyes are hypnotic, like Adolf Hitler’s eyes. Just the moment he looks at you something happens in you. You say eyes are very beautiful. What do you mean by beauty? You mean that you are affected.In fact, when you say something is beautiful you are not saying that something is beautiful; you are saying that you are affected in a nice way, that’s all. When you say something is ugly, you are saying that you are affected in an antagonistic way. You are repelled or you are attracted. When you are attracted it is beauty, when you are repelled it is ugly. But it is you, not the object because the same object can attract somebody else.It happens every day – people are always amazed about other people. They say, “That man has fallen in love with that woman – amazing!” Nobody can believe that this can happen; the woman is ugly. But to that man, the woman is the very incarnation of beauty. What to do? There can be no objective criterion; there is none.Tantra says: remember, whenever you choose something, whenever you decide for this or against this, it is your mind playing tricks. Don’t say the thing is beautiful; just simply say, “I am affected in a nice way,” but the base remains I. If you once transfer the whole phenomenon onto the object, then it can never be solved because from the first step you missed, you missed the root. The root is you, so if you are affected it means your mind is affected in a certain way. And then that affection, that affectedness creates the trap and you start moving.First you create a beautiful man and then you start chasing, then you run after. And after few days living with a beautiful woman or a man, all fantasies fall to the ground. Suddenly you become aware, as if you have been deceived, that this woman looks ordinary. And you were thinking she was a Laila or a Juliet, or you were thinking he is a Majnu or a Romeo, and suddenly, after a few days, the dreams have evaporated and the woman has become ordinary and the man has become ordinary. Then you feel disgusted, as if the other has deceived you.Nobody has deceived and nothing has fallen from the man or woman; it was your own fantasy that has fallen because fantasies cannot be maintained. You can dream about them but you cannot maintain them for a long time. Fantasies are fantasies! So if you really want to continue in your fantasy, then when you see a woman as beautiful, immediately escape from her as far as you can. Then you will always remember her as the most beautiful woman in the world. Then the fantasy will never come in contact with reality. Then there will be no shattering. You can always sigh and sing and weep and cry for the beautiful woman, but never go near her!The nearer you come, the more reality, the more objective reality reveals itself. And when there is a clash between objective reality and your fantasy, of course you know which is going to be defeated: your fantasy. Objective reality cannot be defeated. This is the situation.Tantra says become aware that nobody is deceiving you except yourself. The woman was not trying to be very beautiful, she was not creating the fantasy around her, you created it around her; you believed it, and now you are at a loss what to do because the fantasy cannot be continued against reality. A dream has to break; that is the criterion.Hindus in the East have made a criterion of truth: they say truth is that which lasts forever, forever and forever; and untruth is that which lasts only for a moment. No other distinction is there. The momentary is the untrue and the everlasting is the truth. And life is everlasting; existence is everlasting. The mind is momentary – so whatsoever mind gives to life remains momentary; it is a color that the mind gives to the life, it is an interpretation. By the time the interpretation is complete, the mind has changed. You cannot maintain the interpretation because the mind cannot be maintained for two consecutive moments in the same situation in the same state. The mind goes on changing; the mind is a flux. It has already changed – by the time you realize that this man is beautiful, the mind has already changed. Now you will be falling in love with something which is no longer there, not even in your mind.Tantra says: understand the mechanism of the mind and cut the root. Don’t choose because when you choose you get identified. Whatsoever you choose you become one with, in a certain way.If you love a car, in a certain way you become one with it. You come closer and closer, and if the car is stolen, something of your being is stolen. If something goes wrong with the car, something goes wrong with you. If you fall in love with a house, you become one with the house. Love means identification: coming so close, as if you put two wax candles closer, closer and closer, and put them very close, they become one. The heat, the burning of the flame, by and by they become one. This is identification. Two flames coming closer and closer and closer, they become one.And when you are identified with something you have lost your soul. This is the meaning of losing your soul in the world: you have become identified with millions of things, and with everything a part of you has become a thing. Choice brings identification. Identification brings a hypnotic state of sleep.Gurdjieff has only one thing to teach to his disciples, and that is not to be identified. His whole school, all his techniques, methods, situations, are based on one single base, and that base is: not to be identified.You are crying… When you are crying, you have become one with the crying; there is nobody to watch it, nobody is there to see it. Be alert and aware of it. You are lost in crying, you have become the tears and the red, swollen eyes and your heart is in a crisis. Teachers like Gurdjieff, when they say not to be identified, say, “Cry, nothing is wrong in it, but stand by the side and look at it, don’t be identified.” And it is a wonderful experience if you can stand by the side. Cry, let the body cry, let the tears flow, don’t suppress it because suppression helps nobody, but stand by the side and watch.This can be done because your inner being is a witness, it is never a doer. Whenever you think it is a doer there is identification. It is never a doer. You can walk the whole earth – your inner being never walks a single step. You can dream millions of dreams – your inner being never dreams a single dream. All movements are on the surface. Deep in the depth of your being there is no movement. All movements are on the periphery, just like a wheel moves, but at the center nothing moves. At the center everything remains as it is, and the wheel moves on the center.Remember the center. Watch your behavior, your actions, your identifications, and a distance is created; by and by a distance comes into existence: the watcher and the doer become two. You can see yourself laughing, you can see yourself crying, you can see yourself walking, eating, making love; you can see many things, whatsoever is going around, and you remain the seer. You don’t jump and become one with whatsoever you are seeing.This is the trouble, whatsoever happens. You start saying you are hungry, you say, “I am hungry” – you have become identified with the hunger. But just look inside – are you hunger or is hunger happening to you? Are you hunger or you are simply aware of the hunger happening in the body? You cannot be hunger; otherwise, when the hunger has disappeared, where will you be? When you have eaten well and the belly is full and you are satiated, where you will be if you are hunger? Evaporated? No. Then immediately you become the satiety. Before the hunger disappears a new identification has to be created; you become the satiety.You were a child and you thought you were a child; now where are you because you are no longer a child? You have become a youth or you have become old – who are you now? Again you are identified with youth or old age.The innermost being is just like a mirror. Whatsoever comes before it, it mirrors, it simply becomes a witness. Disease comes or health, hunger or satiety, summer or winter, childhood or old age, birth or death; whatsoever happens, happens before the mirror, it never happens to the mirror.This is non-identification, this is cutting the root, the very root –become a mirror. And to me this is sannyas: to become like a mirror. Don’t become like a very sensitive photo plate – that is identification. Whatsoever comes before the lens of the camera, the photo plate immediately takes it in, becomes one with it. Become like a mirror. Things come and pass and the mirror remains vacant, empty and void.This is the no-self of Tilopa. The mirror has no self with which to be identified. It simply reflects. It does not react, it simply responds. It doesn’t say, “This is beautiful, that is ugly.” An ugly woman stands before it, the mirror is as happy as when a beautiful woman stands there. It makes no difference. It reflects whatsoever is the case but it doesn’t interpret. It doesn’t say, “Go away, you disturb me very much,” or “Come a little closer, you are so beautiful.” The mirror says nothing. The mirror simply watches without any distinction, friend or foe. The mirror has no distinctions to make.And when somebody passes, goes away from the mirror, the mirror doesn’t cling to it. The mirror has no past. It is not that you have passed and the mirror will cling a little to your phantom. It is not that the mirror will cling to your shadow a little while. It is not that the mirror will try to retain the reflection that has happened in it. No. You have passed, the reflection has gone; not even for a single second does the mirror retain it. This is the mind of a buddha. You come before it, he is filled with you; you go away, you have gone. Not even a memory flashes. A mirror has no past, neither has a buddha. A mirror has no future, neither has a buddha. The mirror doesn’t wait: “Now who is coming before me; now who am I going to reflect? I would like this person to come and not like that person.” The mirror has no choice; it remains choiceless.Try to understand this metaphor of the mirror because this is the real situation of the inner consciousness. Don’t get identified with things that are happening around you. Remain centered. Remain centered and rooted in your being. Things are happening and they will continue to happen, but if you can be centered in your mirror-like consciousness, nothing will be the same; the whole has changed. Remain virgin, innocent, pure. Nothing can become an impurity to you, absolutely nothing because nothing is retained. You reflect, for a moment somebody is there and then everything is gone. Your emptiness is untouched. Even while a mirror is reflecting somebody, there is nothing happening to the mirror. The mirror is not changing in any way; the mirror remains the same. This is cutting the very root.There are two types of people. One, who goes on fighting with the symptoms, who goes on fighting, not with the root cause, but just the symptoms of the disease. For example, you have a fever, a hundred-and-five degrees fever. You can do one thing: you can go and take a good shower, a cold shower; that will cool down the body, that will bring the fever low, but you are fighting with the symptom because the temperature is not the disease. The temperature is simply an indication that something has gone wrong in the body. The body is in a turmoil, that’s why the temperature is high. The body is in a crisis. There is something like a war going on inside the body. Some germs are fighting with other germs; that’s why the temperature has gone high. You are feeling hot – this heat is not the problem, this heat is just a symptom. This heat is very, very friendly to you, this heat simply shows you, “Do something!” Inside there is a crisis, and if you treat the symptom you will kill the patient. Putting ice on his head won’t do. Giving him a cold shower won’t help. It is destructive because it will give a false coolness on the surface. But how, just by giving a cold shower, can you hope that the inner turmoil and the inner fight in the germs will stop? They will continue and they will kill you.The fool is always treating the symptoms. The wise man looks to the root, to the very cause. He doesn’t try to cool down the body; he tries to change the root cause of why the body is becoming hot. And when that root is changed, the cause is changed, the cause is treated, the temperature comes down by itself. The temperature is not the problem. But in life there are more fools than wise men. In medicine we have become wiser but in life, still not.In life we go on doing foolish things. If you are angry you start fighting with the anger. Anger is nothing but a temperature; it is exactly a temperature, it is a fever. If you are really angry your body becomes hot, but that shows only that in your bloodstream some chemicals are being released. But that too is not the root. Those chemicals are released for a certain reason because you have created a situation in which you will either have to “fight or flight.”When an animal is in a situation of danger he has two choices: one choice is to fight, another choice is to escape. For both these choices certain poisons are needed in the blood because when you fight you will need more energy than ordinarily. When you fight you will need more blood circulating than ordinarily. When you fight you will need emergency sources of energy to work, to function. The body has emergency sources. It collects poisons, hormones, and many things in the glands; when the time comes and the need is there it releases them into the bloodstream.That’s why when you are angry you become almost thrice powerful than you are ordinarily. If your anger can be created, you can do many things you can never do ordinarily: you can throw a big rock; ordinarily you cannot even move it. In fight it will be needed – nature provides. Or if you have to escape and run away, then too energy will be needed because the enemy will chase you, follow you.Everything has changed – man has created a civilization, a society, a culture, where animal situations no longer exist, but deep inside the mechanism remains the same. Whenever you are in a situation when you feel somebody is going to be aggressive to you, somebody is going to hit you, insult you, do some harm, immediately the body comes into the situation; it releases poisons into the bloodstream, your temperature rises high, your eyes become red, your face is more filled with blood; you are ready to “fight or flight.”This too is not the deepest thing because this too is just help from the body. Anger on the face and anger in the body are not real things; they follow your mind, they follow your interpretation. It could be that there was nothing: in a lonely street in a dark night, you pass, you see a lamppost; you think it is a ghost. Immediately the body has released something into the bloodstream, the body is preparing to fight the ghost or escape. Your mind interpreted the lamppost as a ghost, immediately the body followed. You think somebody is your enemy; the body follows. You think somebody is a friend; the body follows.So the root cause is in the mind, it is in your interpretation. Buddha says, “Think that the whole earth is your friend.” Why? Jesus says, “Even forgive your enemies,” not only that, “even love your enemies.” Why? Buddha and Jesus are trying to change your interpretations, but Tilopa goes still higher. He says: “Even if you think that all are your friends, you continue to think in terms of friendship and enmity.” Even if you love the enemy you think that he is the enemy. You love because Jesus has said. Of course, you will be in a better situation than an ordinary man who hates his enemy, less anger will happen to you. But Tilopa says, to think that someone is an enemy, to think that someone is a friend, is to divide; you have already fallen into the trap. Nobody is a friend and nobody is an enemy. This is the highest teaching.Sometimes Tilopa surpasses even Buddha and Jesus. Maybe the reason is that Buddha was talking to the masses and Tilopa is talking to Naropa. When you talk to a very developed disciple, you can bring down the highest. When you talk to the masses you have to make compromise. I was talking to the masses for fifteen years continuously; then by and by I felt I had to drop it. I was talking to thousands of people. But when you talk to twenty thousand people you have to compromise, you have to come down; otherwise it will be impossible for them to understand. Seeing this I dropped it. Now I like to talk only to Naropas. And you may not be aware, if even a single new person comes here and I am not aware that a new person is there, he changes the whole atmosphere. He brings you down and suddenly I feel that I have to make a compromise.The higher you go, the higher your energy, the higher teaching can be delivered to you. And a moment comes when Naropa becomes perfect, then Tilopa becomes silent. Then there is no need to say anything because even saying is a compromise. Then silence suffices, then silence is enough; then just sitting together is enough. Then the master sits with the disciple, they don’t do anything; they just remain together – and only then does the highest glimpse happen.So it depends on the disciples. It will depend on you, how much you can allow me to bring to you. It is not only for your own understanding – of course that is there – it will depend on you how much I can bring to the earth because it is going to come through you.Jesus has very ordinary disciples in that way, very ordinary because he is starting something and he has to make a compromise with foolish things. Jesus is going to be caught that night and the disciples are asking, “Master, tell us: in the Kingdom of God you will, of course, be sitting to the right of God, the right side of the throne – but we twelve, what will be our hierarchical situation? How will we be sitting? Who will be sitting by the side of you? And who next?” Jesus is going to die and these foolish disciples are asking something absurd. And they are worried about what the hierarchy will be in the Kingdom of God, who will be next to Jesus. Of course, Jesus – they can see that much – Jesus will be next to God, but then who will be next to Jesus?Foolish egos. And Jesus has to compromise with these people. That’s why Jesus’ teachings could not go to that height where Buddha can easily go because Buddha is not talking to such foolish people; never in his life has a single person asked such a foolish thing. But nothing to compare with Tilopa…He never talked to the masses. He searched for a single man, a single developed soul, Naropa, and said, “Because of you, Naropa, I will tell you things which cannot be told; because of you and your trust, I have to.” That’s why the teaching has gone, taken a flight to the very farthest corner of the sky.Now try to understand the sutra:Cut the root of a tree and the leaves will wither; cut the root of yourmind and samsara……the world……falls. The light of any lamp dispels in a moment the darkness of long kalpas……long ages, millennia……the strong light of the Mind in but a flash will burn the veil of ignorance.Cut the root of a tree and the leaves will wither… But people ordinarily try to cut the leaves. That is not the way; the root cannot wither that way. On the contrary, if you cut the leaves, more leaves will come onto the tree: you cut off one leaf, three will come because by your cutting the leaves, the roots become more active to protect the tree. So every gardener knows how to make a tree dense and thick: you just go on pruning. It will become thicker and thicker and thicker, because you give a challenge to the roots: you cut one leaf and the roots will send three to protect the body of the tree because leaves are the body surface of the tree.Leaves are not just there for your enjoyment, to see and for you to sit under the shade; no, leaves are the tree’s body surface. Through leaves the tree absorbs sunrays, through leaves the tree releases vapors, through leaves the tree is in contact with the cosmos. The leaves are the skin of the tree. You cut one leaf and the roots take the challenge: they send three instead; they become more alert, they cannot remain sleepy. Somebody is trying to destroy them and they have to protect. And the same happens in life as well because life is also a tree.Roots and leaves are there – if you cut anger, three leaves will come instead; you will be thrice angry. If you cut sex, you will become abnormally obsessed with sex. Cut anything and watch and you will see that thrice is happening to you. And then the mind will say, “Cut more, this is not enough!” Then you cut more and then the more comes of it – then you are in a vicious circle. The mind will go on, “Cut more, it is not still enough.” That’s why so many leaves are coming. You can cut all the branches; it will make no difference because the tree exists in the root, not in the leaves.Tantra says, don’t try to cut leaves, anger, greed, sex. Don’t bother about them; it is simply foolish. Just find the root and cut it, and the tree will wither away by itself, on its own accord. The leaves will disappear; the branches will disappear – simply cut the root.Identification is the root and everything else is nothing but leaves. Being identified with greed, being identified with anger, being identified with sex, is the root. And remember, it is the same whether you are identified with greed, or sex, or even meditation, love, moksha, God – it makes no difference; it is the same identification. Being identified is the root, and all else is just like leaves. Don’t cut the leaves; leave them, nothing is wrong in them.That’s why Tantra does not believe in improving your character. It may give you a good shape; if you prune a tree you can make any shape out of it, but the tree remains the same. Character is just an outer shape, but you remain the same, no transmutation happens. Tantra goes deeper and says: Cut the root…! That’s why Tantra was so misunderstood, because Tantra says, “If you are greedy, be greedy; don’t bother about greed. If you are sexual, be sexual; don’t bother about it at all.” The society cannot tolerate such a teaching: “What are these people saying? They will create chaos. They will destroy the whole order.” But they have not understood that only Tantra changes the society, the man, the mind, nothing else; and only Tantra brings a real order, a natural order, a natural flowering of the inner discipline, nothing else. But it is a very deep process; you have to cut the root.Watch the greed, watch sex, watch anger, possessiveness and jealousy. One thing has to be remembered: you don’t get identified, you simply watch; you simply look, you become a spectator. By and by, the quality of witnessing grows; you become able to see all the nuances of greed. It is very subtle. You become capable of seeing how subtly the ego functions, how subtle are its ways. It is not a gross thing; it is very subtle and delicate and deep-hidden.The more you watch, the more your eyes become capable of seeing, become more perceptive: you see more and you can move deeper, and more distance is created between you and whatsoever you do. Distance helps because without distance there can be no perception. How can you see a thing which is too close? If you are standing too close to a mirror, you cannot see your reflection. If your eyes are touching the mirror, how can you see it? A distance is needed, and nothing can give you distance except witnessing. Try it and see.Move into sex, nothing is wrong in it, but remain a watcher. Watch all the movements of the body; watch the energy flowing in and out, watch how the energy is falling downward; watch the orgasm, what is happening – how two bodies move in a rhythm. Watch the heartbeat – faster and faster it goes, a moment comes when it is almost mad. Watch the warmth of the body; the blood circulates more. Watch the breathing; it is going mad and chaotic. Watch the moment when a limit comes to your voluntariness and everything becomes involuntary. Watch the moment from where you could have come back, but beyond that there is no return. The body becomes so automatic all control is lost. Just a moment before ejaculation you lose all control; the body takes over.Watch it: the voluntary processes, the non-voluntary process. The moment when you were in control and you could have gone back, the return was possible; and the moment when you cannot come back, the return has become impossible, now the body has taken over completely, you are no longer in control. Watch everything, and millions of things are there. Everything is so complex and nothing is as complex as sex because the whole body-mind is involved – only the witness is not involved, only one thing remains always outside.The witness is an outsider. By its very nature the witness can never become an insider. Find this witness and then you are standing on a top of the hill, and everything goes in the valley and you are not concerned. You simply see; what is your concern?As if it is happening to somebody else. And the same with greed and same with anger; everything is very complex. And you will enjoy it if you can watch: negative, positive, all the emotions. Simply remember one thing: that you have to be a watcher; then the identification is broken, then the root is cut. And once the root is cut, once you think you are not the doer, everything suddenly changes. And the change is sudden; there is no gradualness to it.Cut the root of the tree and the leaves will wither; cut the root of your mind and samsara falls. The moment you cut the root of the mind, the identification with it, samsara falls; the whole world falls like a house of cards. Just a small wind of awareness and the whole house falls. Suddenly you are here, but no longer in the world: you have transcended. You can live just the old way, doing the old things, but nothing is old because you are no longer the old. You are a perfectly new being; this is rebirth. Hindus call it dwij, twice born, for a man who has attained to this is twice born; this is a second birth, and this is the birth of the soul. This is what Jesus means by resurrection. Resurrection is not the rebirth of the body; it is a new birth of consciousness.Cut the root of your mind and samsara falls. The light of any lamp dispels in a moment the darkness of long, long kalpas… long, long ages.So, don’t be worried about how a sudden light will dispel the darkness of many, many millions of lives. It dispels it because darkness has no density to it; darkness has no substance to it. Whether one moment old or many thousands years old, it is the same. Absence cannot grow more or less; absence remains the same. Light is substantial, it is something – darkness is just an absence. The light is there and darkness is no longer there.It is not really that the darkness is dispelled because there was nothing to be dispelled. It is not that when you burn a light, the darkness goes out – there was nothing to go out. In fact, there was nothing, just the absence of light. Light comes and darkness is not.…the strong light of the Mind in but a flash will burn the veil of ignorance. Buddhists use mind in two senses: mind with a small m and Mind with a capital M. When they use Mind with a capital M, they mean the witness, consciousness. When they use mind with a small m they mean the witnessed. And both are mind, that’s why they use the same word for both, with just a small difference, with a capital M. With a capital M you are the witness and with a small m you are the witnessed: thoughts, emotions, anger, greed, everything.Why use the same word? Why create confusion? There is a reason for it because when the Mind with a capital M arises, the mind with the small m is simply absorbed into it. As rivers fall into the ocean, the millions of minds around the great Mind all fall into it, the energy is reabsorbed.Greed, anger and jealousy were energies moving outward centrifugally. Suddenly, when the Mind with capital M arises, the witness sits there silently watching all the rivers change their course. They were going centrifugally toward the periphery; suddenly they turn back, they become centripetal. They start falling into the great Mind; everything is absorbed. That’s why the same word is used.…the strong light of the Mind in but a flash will burn the veil of ignorance. Just in a single moment all ignorance is burned. This is sudden enlightenment.Whoever clings to the mind sees not the truth of what is beyond the mind.If you cling to the mind, thoughts, emotions, then you will not be able to see that which is beyond the mind: the great Mind, because if you cling, how can you see? If you cling, your eyes are closed, by your clinging. And if you cling to the object, how can you see the subject? This “clinging-ness” has to be dropped.Whoever clings to the mind – is identified – sees not the truth of what is beyond the mind.Whoever strives to practice dharma, finds not the truth of beyond-practice.All practice is of the mind. Whatsoever you do is of the mind. Only witnessing is not of the mind, remember this.So, even while you are doing meditation, remain a witness, continuously see what is happening. You are whirling in a dervish meditation – whirl, whirl as fast as you can, but remain a witness inside and go on seeing that the body is whirling. The body goes on, faster and faster and faster, and the faster the body goes, the deeper you feel that your center is not moving. You are standing still; the body moves like a wheel, you stand still just in the middle of it. The faster the body goes, the deeper you realize the fact that you are not moving, and the distance is created.Whatsoever you are doing, even meditation; I make no exception. Don’t cling to meditation either because a day has to come when even that clinging has to be dropped. Meditation becomes perfect when it too is dropped. When there is perfect meditation, you need not meditate.So, keep it constantly in your awareness that meditation is just a bridge; it has to be passed over. A bridge is not a place to make your house. You have to pass it and go beyond it. Meditation is a bridge; you have to be watchful about it also, otherwise you may stop being identified with anger, greed, and you may start being identified with meditation, compassion. Then you are in the same trap again; from another door you have entered the same house.It happened once…Mulla Nasruddin came to the town bar and he was already much too drunk, so the barkeeper told him, “Go away! You are already drunk and I cannot give you any more. Just go back to your house.” But he was insisting, so the barkeeper had to throw him out.He walked a long distance in search of another bar. Then he came to the same bar from another door, entered, and looked at the man with a little suspicion because he looked familiar. The barman said, “I have told you once and for all that this night I am not going to give you anything. Get away from here!” Again he was insisting, again Mulla Nasruddin was thrown out.He walked a long distance in search of another bar, but in that town there was only one. Again, from the third door, he entered, looked at the man, who looked too familiar. He asked, “What is the matter? Do you own all the bars in the town?”This happens. You are thrown out from one door; you enter through another door. You were identified with your anger, your lust; now you become identified with your meditation. You were identified with your sexual pleasure; now you become identified with the ecstasy that meditation gives. Nothing is different; the town has only one bar. Don’t try to enter the same bar again and again. And from wherever you enter you will find the same owner. That is the witness. Be mindful of it, otherwise much energy is unnecessarily wasted. You travel long distances to enter into the same thing again.Whoever clings to the mind sees not the truth of what’s beyond the mind. What is beyond the mind? – you. What is beyond the mind? – consciousness. What is beyond the mind? – sat-chit-anand: the truth, the consciousness, the bliss.Whoever strives to practice dharma, finds not the truth of beyond-practice. And whatsoever you practice, remember practice cannot lead you to the natural, the loose and the natural because practice means practicing something which is not there. Practicing means always practicing something artificial. Nature has not to be practiced; there is no need, it is already there. You learn something which is not there. How can you learn something which is already there? How can you learn nature, Tao? It is already there! You are born in it. There is no need to find any teacher so that you can be taught. And that is the difference between a teacher and a master.A teacher is one who teaches you something; a master is one who helps you unlearn all that you have already learned. A master is to help you unlearn. A master is to give you the taste of the non-practiced. It is already there; through your learning you have lost it. Through your unlearning you will regain it.Truth is not a discovery; it is a rediscovery. It was already there in the first place. When you came into this world it was with you, when you were born into this life it was with you because you are it. It cannot be otherwise. It is not something external, it is intrinsic to you; it is your very being. So if you practice, says Tilopa, you will not know that which is beyond practice.Remind yourself again and again, that whatsoever you practice will be a part of the mind, the small mind, the outer periphery, and you have to go beyond it. How to go beyond it? Practice! Nothing is wrong in it, but be alert; meditate, but be alert because in the final meaning of the term, meditation is witnessing.All techniques can be helpful but they are not exactly meditation, they are just a groping in the dark. Suddenly one day, doing something, you will become a witness. Doing a meditation like Dynamic or Kundalini or whirling, suddenly one day the meditation will go on but you will not be identified. You will sit silently behind, you will watch it – that day meditation has happened; that day technique is no longer a hindrance, no longer a help. You can enjoy it if you like – like an exercise it gives a certain vitality, but now there is no need. Now the real meditation has happened.Meditation is witnessing. To meditate means to become a witness. Meditation is not a technique at all. This will be very confusing to you because I go on giving you techniques. In the ultimate sense meditation is not a technique; meditation is an understanding, awareness. But you need techniques because that final understanding is very far away from you; hidden deep in you, but still very far away from you. Right this moment you can attain it, but you will not attain it because your moment goes on, your mind goes on. This very moment it is possible and yet impossible. Techniques will bridge the gap; they are just to bridge the gap.So in the beginning techniques are meditations; in the end, you will laugh, techniques are not meditation. Meditation is a totally different quality of being; it has nothing to do with anything. But it will happen only in the end; don’t think it has happened in the beginning, otherwise the gap will not be bridged.This is the problem with Krishnamurti, and this is the problem with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: they are two opposite poles. Mahesh Yogi thinks that technique is meditation, so once you are attuned to a technique – Transcendental Meditation or any other – meditation has happened. This is right and wrong. Right, because in the beginning a beginner has to attune himself with some technique, because his understanding is not ripe enough to understand the ultimate. So, approximately a technique is a meditation.It is just like a small child learning the alphabet – we tell the child that m is the same word as when you use monkey, monkey represents m. With the m, monkey is there; the child starts learning. There is no relationship between monkey and m. M can be represented by millions of things, and still it is different from everything. But a child has to be shown something. Monkey is nearer the child; he can understand monkey, not m. Through monkey he will be able to understand m, but it is just a beginning, not the end.Mahesh Yogi is right, in the beginning, to push you on the path, but if you are stuck with him you are lost. He has to be left, he is a primary school – good as far as it goes, but one need not always remain in primary school. The primary school is not the university, and the primary school is not the universe; one has to pass on from there. It is a primary understanding that meditation is a technique.Then there is Krishnamurti at the other pole. He says, “There are no techniques, no meditations; don’t fool around with techniques. Meditation is simple awareness, choiceless awareness.” Perfectly right, but he is trying to help you enter into the university without the primary school. He can be dangerous because he is talking about the ultimate. You cannot understand it; right now in your understanding it is not possible; you will go mad. Once you listen to Krishnamurti you will be lost because you will always understand intellectually that he is right, and in your being you will know that nothing is happening.Many Krishnamurti followers have come to me. They say intellectually they understand: “Of course it is right, there is no technique and meditation is awareness – but what to do?” And I tell them, “The moment you ask what to do, it means you need a technique. ‘What to do?’ When you ask how to do it, you are asking for a technique. Krishnamurti will not help you. Rather, go to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, that will be better.” But people are stuck with Krishnamurti and there are people who are stuck with Mahesh Yogi.I am neither – or I am both; and then I am very much confusing. They are both clear, their standpoints are simple; there is no complexity in understanding Mahesh Yogi or Krishnamurti. If you understand language, you can understand them, there is no problem. The problem will arise with me because I will always talk about the beginning and will never allow you to forget the end. I will always talk about the end and always help you to start from the beginning. You will be confused because you will say, “What do you mean? If meditation is simply awareness, then why go through so many exercises?”You have to go through them; only then will meditation, which is simple understanding, be of help to you, will happen to you.Or you say, “If techniques are all, then why do you go on saying, again and again, that techniques have to be left, dropped?” Because then you feel that something learned so deeply, with so much effort and arduous labor has to be left again. You would like to cling to the beginning. I will not allow you to. Once you are on the path I will go on pushing you to the very end.This is a problem; with me this problem has to be faced, encountered and understood. I will look contradictory. I am – I am a paradox because I am trying to give you both the beginning and the end, the first step and the last. Tilopa is talking of the ultimate. He is saying:Whoever strives to practice dharma, finds not the truth of beyond-practice. To know what is beyond both mind and practice – one should not cling – one should cut cleanly through the root of mind and stare naked. That’s what I am calling witnessing: stare naked. Just staring naked will do, the root is cut. This staring naked becomes like a sharp sword.One should thus break away from all distinctions and remain at ease.Loose, natural, staring naked within yourself: that is the final word.But go slowly because mind is a very delicate mechanism. If you are in too much of a hurry and you take too great a dose of a Tilopa, you may not be able to absorb and digest it. Go slowly; take only portions which you can digest and absorb.While I am here, I will be talking about many things because you are many, and I will be talking about many dimensions because you are many. But absorb only that which is nourishment to you, and digest it.Just the other day a sannyasin came, a sincere seeker but puzzled because I talked about Yoga and Tantra, and said that Tantra is the higher teaching and Yoga is a lower teaching; and he has been practicing hatha yoga for two years and feeling good. He became puzzled what to do. Don’t get so easily puzzled. If you are feeling good with Yoga, follow your own natural inclination. Don’t allow me to confuse you.I can be confusing to you; simply follow your natural inclination: loose, natural. If it is good, it is good for you. Why bother whether it is higher or lower? Let it be lower. The ego comes in; the ego says, “If it is a lower thing, then why follow it?” That will not help. Follow it; it is right for you. Even if it is lower what is wrong in it? A moment will come, when, through the lower, you will reach to the higher.The staircase has two ends: on one end it is the lowest, on the other it is the highest. So Tantra and Yoga are not opposites but complementary. Yoga is the primary, the basic, from where you have to start. But then one should not cling. A moment comes when one has to transcend Yoga and move into Tantra; and finally you have to leave the whole staircase: both Yoga and Tantra. Alone in yourself, deep in rest, one forgets everything.Look at me: I am neither a yogi nor a tantrika. I do nothing: no practice, no non-practice. I cling neither to method nor to no-method. I am simply here resting, not doing anything. The staircase doesn’t exist for me now, the path has disappeared; there is no movement, it is absolute rest. When one comes home there is nothing to do; one simply forgets everything and rests. Godliness is ultimate rest.Remember this. Sometimes I will be talking of Tantra because there are many who will be helped through it; and sometimes I will be talking about Yoga, and there are many who will be helped by it. Just think of your own inclination, your own feeling – follow it! I am here to help you to be yourself, not to distract you. But I have to talk about many things because I have to help many. So what will you do? Just go on listening to me. Whatsoever you find nourishing, digest. Chew it well, digest it; let it become your blood and bones, the very marrow of your bones, but follow your inclination.And when I talk about Tantra I am so absorbed with it because that’s how I am; I cannot be partial, I am total whatsoever I do. If I am talking about Tantra, I am totally in it; then nothing matters, only Tantra matters. That may give you a false impression. I am not talking comparatively; nothing matters to me. Tantra is the highest ultimate flower. This is because if I look totally at it, it is. When I talk about Yoga, the same will happen because I am total. This has nothing to do with Tantra or Yoga; it is my totality that I bring to anything. When I bring it to Yoga and Patanjali, I will again be saying that this is the last.So don’t be distracted. Always remember, this is my totality and my quality that I bring to it. If you can remember that, you will be helped. Even through my being paradoxical, you will not be confused.Enough for today.

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Tantra Supreme Understanding 01-10Category: TANTRA

Tantra Supreme Understanding 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The song continues:One should not give or take but remain natural, for Mahamudra is beyond all acceptance and rejection. Since alaya is not born, no one can obstruct or soil it. Staying in the unborn realm all appearance will dissolve into dharmata, and self-will and pride will vanish into naught.The ordinary mind wants to take more and more from the world, from everywhere, from every direction and dimension. The ordinary mind is a great taker, it is a beggar, and the begging is such that it cannot be satisfied; it is infinite. The more you get, the more the longing arises; the more you have, the more you desire. It becomes an obsessive hunger. There exists no need for it in your being, but you are obsessed, and you become more and more miserable because nothing satisfies. Nothing can satisfy the mind, which is constantly asking for more. The “more” is feverish, it is not healthy, and there is no end to it.The ordinary mind goes on eating, in a metaphorical sense, not only things but persons also. The husband would like to possess the wife so deeply and so absolutely that it is a sort of eating her; he would like to eat and digest her so she becomes part of him. The ordinary mind is cannibalistic. The wife wants the same: to absorb the husband so totally that nothing is left behind. They kill each other. Friends do the same; parents do the same to children, children to parents. Every relationship of the ordinary mind is of absorbing the other completely. It is a sort of eating.And then there is the extraordinary mind, just the opposite of the ordinary mind. And because of the ordinary mind, the extraordinary mind has come into existence. Religions teach about it. They say, “Give, share, donate!” All the religions basically teach that you should not take; rather on the contrary, you should give. Charity is preached. It is preached to create an extraordinary mind.The ordinary mind will always be in misery because the longing for more cannot be fulfilled; you will find it always depressed, sad. You will find the extraordinary mind the religions have been cultivating always happy; a certain cheerfulness because it is not asking for more; on the contrary, it goes on giving, but deep down it is still the ordinary mind.The cheerfulness cannot be of the deepest being, it can only be of the surface. He has totally turned around and become just the reverse of the ordinary. He is standing on his head, he is in a shirshasan, but he remains the same. Now a new desire arises: to give more and more and more. Again there is no end to it. He will be cheerful, but deep down in his cheerfulness you can detect a certain quality of sadness.You will always find that quality of sadness in religious people: cheerful, of course because they give, but sad because they cannot give more, cheerful because they share, but sad because it is not enough. Nothing will be enough.So there are two types of miseries. The ordinary misery; you can find those miserable people all around, everywhere. The whole earth is filled with them because they ask for more and it cannot be fulfilled. Then there is another misery, which has the face of cheerfulness; you will find in the priests, monks, in the monasteries, the ashrams, people who seem to be always smiling, but their smile carries a certain sadness behind it. If you observe deeply you will find they are also miserable because you cannot give infinitely, you don’t have it.These are the two types of people easily met. This religious man is cultivated by Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism. It is better than the ordinary mind but cannot be the final word about consciousness. It is good to be miserable in a religious way, better to be miserable like an emperor, not like a beggar.A very rich man was dying and he had called me to be near him when he died, so I was there. At the last moment he opened his eyes and he told his son… And it had been always in his mind, he had told me many times he was worried about his son because he was a spendthrift and he loved material things. And this old man was a religious man. The last word he said to his son was, “Listen, money is not everything and you cannot buy everything with money. There are things which are beyond money, and money alone cannot make anybody happy.”The son listened and said, “You may be right, but with money a person can choose the sadness of his own liking.”It may not purchase happiness but you can choose sadness of your own liking, you can be miserable in your own way.A poor man has to be miserable with no choice; a rich man can be miserable with his own choice – that’s the only difference. He chooses his own misery; there is a certain freedom. The poor man’s misery simply happens to him like a fate, a destiny; he has no choice. The religious man has chosen his misery, that’s why he is a little cheerful; and the nonreligious man is suffering his misery because he has not chosen it. Both live in the same world of the “more,” but the religious man lives like an emperor, sharing, giving charity.Buddhism, Jainism and Tao have created a third type of mind, which is neither ordinary nor extraordinary, which in fact is not a mind at all. To give it a name it will be good to call it a no-mind. So try to understand the classification. Ordinary mind, extraordinary mind – just the opposite of it, but still in the same dimension of more – then the no-mind that Buddhism, Jainism, Tao have created. What is this no-mind? It is the third approach toward reality.Buddhism and Jainism don’t preach charity; they preach indifference. They don’t say “Give” because giving is part of taking, the same circle. In taking you take from somebody, in giving you give to somebody, but the same circle. Dimensions don’t change, only the direction changes. Buddhism preaches to be indifferent, to be nonpossessive. The emphasis is on nonpossession, not on giving. You should not possess, that’s all. You should not try to possess things or persons; you simply drop out of the world of possessions. There is no question of taking or giving because both belong to the world of possessions. You can give only that which you possess; how can you give that which you don’t possess? You can give only that which you have acquired before; you can give only that which you have taken before, otherwise how can you give it? You come in the world without anything, with no possessions; you go out of the world without any possessions.In the world you can be on these two sides: either on the side of those who long for more and more, to take more and more and absorb more and more, and go on fattening themselves; and then there is another side who go on giving and giving more and more, and become thinner and thinner and thinner. Buddha says that you should not possess; you should not choose either side. Simply be in the state of nonpossession.This man, this third type of man, whom I call the man of no-mind, will not be as happy, cheerful as the extraordinary man. He will be more silent, he will be quieter; still he will have a deep contentment, but not cheerfulness. You will not even find a smile on his face; you will not find a single statue of Buddha smiling or Mahavira smiling, no. They are not cheerful, they are not happy. They are not miserable, and of course they are not happy; they have dropped out of the world of misery and happiness. They are simply at rest, indifferent to the things and the world of things; nonpossessing, they are aloof, detached. This is what anashakti is: detachment, indifference. This man will have a certain quality of silence around him – you can feel that silence.But Tilopa goes beyond all three. Tilopa goes beyond all three and now it is difficult to know how to classify him. Ordinary mind asking for more; extraordinary mind trying to give more; no-mind: indifferent, unattached, neither giving nor taking. Then what to call Tilopa’s mind? Tilopa is of the fourth type, and the fourth is the last and the highest, there is no beyond to it. It is not even a no-mind; it is not a mind at all because in the no-mind also, the mind is negatively present. And the emphasis is still on being indifferent to the things and the world of things, but your focus is on the things: remain indifferent, unattached! You are not possessing things, but you have to be alert not to possess; you have to remain detached, you have to move very alertly so you don’t possess anything. Make a clear point of it – the emphasis is still on things – be indifferent to the world!Tilopa says the emphasis should be on your own self, not on things. Rest in yourself; don’t even be indifferent to the world because that indifference is still a very subtle bridge with the world. The focus should not be on the other. Turn your lives completely inward. Don’t bother about the world, not even to be indifferent to it. Neither ask for more, nor try to give more; you are indifferent to the world. The world is as if it has simply disappeared. You are self-centered, sitting inside, doing nothing. Your whole focus has turned, taken a total about-turn, as if the world has completely disappeared. There is nothing to give, nothing to take, nothing to be indifferent about. Only you are. You live in your consciousness and that is your only world. Nothing else exists.This is the state of beyond mind and beyond no-mind. This is the supreme-most state of understanding. Nothing is beyond it. And I would like to tell you never to be satisfied unless you attain this. Why? It is because the man, the ordinary man is miserable. He asks for more and it can never be satisfied, so the misery is continuously there, and the misery goes on becoming more and more and more.The man of extraordinary mind, the religions teacher, is cheerful, but sad deep down. Even the very cheerfulness has an undercurrent of sadness. It seems as he is trying to smile, the smile is not coming to him; it seems he is posing, as if some photographers are there and he is posing a certain gesture, which in fact doesn’t exist. Better than the first, at least you can smile; the smile is not very deep but at least it is there. But it will not last for long. Soon, whatsoever you can give will be exhausted; then the smile and cheerfulness will disappear. You would like to give more; then you will be in the same plight as the first, ordinary man.It will take a little longer for the second man to understand and realize the misery, but the misery will come. The cheerfulness that you practice in the mosques, temples, monasteries, cannot go very deep and it cannot become a permanent state of affairs. It cannot be eternal. You will lose it. The very nature of it is such that it can be only momentary. Why can it be only momentary? It is because a point will come, is bound to come, when you cannot give because you don’t have. That’s why people of these two minds settle on a compromise. The ordinary mind and the extraordinary mind are the same in their quality; they settle for a compromise. And the compromise you will find everywhere.First a man goes on taking things and then he starts donating. Or he will earn a hundred rupees and donate ten percent of it because that is the only possible way. If you donate one hundred rupees completely, then you won’t have any more to donate. Go on taking things and then distribute a part of it. The Mohammedans say you should donate one-fifth of your income; be charitable with one-fifth of your income. Why? – because this is a compromise; otherwise, you won’t have anything to donate. So first accumulate and then distribute. Accumulate to distribute, be rich so that you can be charitable, exploit so that you can help. This is absurd! But this is the only possible way: the bridge between the ordinary and the extraordinary.And even the ordinary mind goes on thinking and believing that when he has much he will donate, he will help people. And of course he also does it, when he has enough he gives: a donation to a hospital, a donation to a cancer research center, a donation to a library or a college. First he exploits and then he donates; first he robs you and then he helps you.Helpers and robbers are not different; in fact, they are the same people. By the right hand they rob and by the left hand they help; they belong to the same dimension of affairs.The third man, the man of no-mind, is in a better situation than the first two. His silence can be longer, but he is not blissful. He does not feel blissful. He is not unhappy, he is not miserable, but his state is of the nature of negativity. He is like a man who is not ill because doctors cannot find anything wrong with him, and he is not healthy because he doesn’t feel any well-being. He is not ill and he is not healthy, he is just in the middle. He is not miserable, he is not happy – he is simply indifferent. And indifference may give you silence, but silence is not enough. It is good, it is beautiful, but you cannot be content with it; sooner or later you will be bored with it.That is what happens if you go to the hills. You were too bored with the city life: Mumbai, London, New York. You were bored – the noise, the traffic, and the whole madness going on and on – you escaped to the Himalayas. But after few days – three, four, five, at the most seven – you start feeling bored with the silence. The hills are silent, trees are silent, the valley is silent – no excitement. You start longing for the city life: the club, the movie house, friends.Silence is not enough because silence has the nature of death, not the nature of life. It is good as a holiday, it is good as a picnic, it is good to get out of too many concerns of life for a few days, few moments, and be silent; you will enjoy it, but you cannot enjoy it forever. Soon you will get fed up with it; soon you will feel, “This is not enough. This is not nourishing.” A silence will protect you from misery and happiness, from excitement, but there is no nourishment in it. It is a negative state.The fourth state that Tilopa is indicating – that which cannot be said and he is trying to say for Naropa and his trust and his love and his faith – is a blissful state, silent and blissful. It has a positivity in it. It is not simply silence. It has not come through indifference to life; rather on the contrary, it has come through the deepest experience of one’s own being. It has not been derived through renouncing; it has bloomed by being loose and natural. Subtle are the differences. If you try to understand and meditate on these distinctions, your whole life path will be clear, and then you can travel very easily.Never be satisfied before the fourth state because even if you are satisfied, sooner or later the discontentment will arise. Unless you attain sat-chit-anand – absolute truth, absolute consciousness, and absolute blissfulness – the home has not yet been reached, you are still traveling on the path. Okay, sometimes you rest by the side of the path, but don’t make it a home. The journey has to continue; you have to get up again and you have to move: from the first state of mind move to the second, from the second move to the third, and from the third move to the beyond.If you are in the first state of mind, as ninety-nine percent of people are, then Jewish thinking, Islam, Christianity, will be helpful. They will bring you out of the ordinary trap of misery. It is good, but you are still on the path, and don’t deceive yourself that you have reached. Now you have to get beyond this, beyond this cheerfulness, which has a sadness in it, beyond this taking and giving both, beyond charity. Who are you to give? What do you have to give? Who are you to help? You have not helped even yourself; how can you help others? Your own light is not burning and you are trying to burn others’ lights? You may blow them out, you may put them out; your own inner being is dark. You cannot help, you cannot give; you have nothing to give.Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Lao Tzu, Mahavira and Siddhartha Gautam can help you out of it. But Tilopa says don’t be satisfied even with that indifference, silence, a detached standing, aloofness, because still it is not a happening, still you are concerned with the world.Tilopa can help you beyond that. He can bring you to your innermost center of being. He can help you center: rooted in yourself, unconcerned with the world – not even the unconcern is there. Everything has dissolved; only you remain in your crystal purity, only you remain in your absolute innocence – as if the world has not arisen, was never there. You come to the point in this fourth state of consciousness, to the point where you were not born, to the absolute source of being. Even the first step has not been taken in the world, or you have come to the last, the last step has been taken.This is what Zen people call attaining the original face. Zen masters say to the disciples, “Go, and find your face you had before you were born” or “Go, and find the face you will have when you are dead.” Either when the world was not, or when the world has disappeared, you attain to your original purity. That is what nature is.Now try to understand Tilopa:One should not give or take but remain natural, for Mahamudra is beyond all acceptance and rejection.One should not give or take… because when you give you have moved out of yourself, when you take you have moved out of yourself. Both are distractions, both lead you to the other; you get mixed, your energy has flown outward. Whether you give or take is irrelevant – the other has come into being; your eyes are focused on the other, and when the eyes are focused on the other you forget yourself. This is what is happening to you all. You don’t remember yourself because your eyes have become focused –paralyzed, in fact –on the other. Whatsoever you do, you do it for the other; whatsoever you are, you are for the other.Even if you escape from the world, your mind goes on, continuing: “What are people thinking about me?” Even if you escape to the Himalayas, sitting there you will think, “Now people must be thinking that I have become a great sage, renounced the world; in the newspapers there must be talk about me.” And you will wait for some lonely traveler, wanderer, to reach and give you news of what is happening in the world about you.You don’t have your own face; you have only others’ opinions about you. Somebody says you are beautiful, and you start thinking you are beautiful. Somebody says you are ugly, and you feel hurt and you carry a wound that somebody has said ugly, you have become ugly. You are just an accumulation of the opinions of others, you don’t know who you are. You know only what others think you are. And this is strange because those others who think they know who you are don’t know themselves; they only know themselves through you. This is a beautiful game: I know myself through you, you know yourself through me, and we both don’t know who we are.The other has become much too important, and your whole energy has become obsessed with the other: always thinking of others, always either taking something from them or giving something to them.Tilopa says one should not give or take. What is he saying? Is he saying one should not share? No. If you take it that way you will misunderstand him. He is saying one should not be concerned with taking or giving; if you can give naturally, beautiful, but then there is nothing in the mind, no accumulation that you have given something. That is the difference between giving and sharing.A giver knows that he has given and he would like that you should recognize, give him a receipt: “Yes, you have given me one.” You should thank him; you should feel grateful that he has given it to you. This is not a gift; this is again a bargain. In fact, he would like you to give him something in return, even if just your gratefulness – that’s okay, but he would like something. It is a bargain; he gives to get.Tilopa is not saying don’t share. He is saying don’t be concerned with taking or giving. If you have, and it happens naturally that you feel like giving, give. But it should be a sharing, a gift. This is the difference between a gift and giving.A gift is not a bargain; nothing is expected, absolutely nothing – not even recognition, not even a nod of the head of appreciation, no. Nothing is expected. If you don’t mention anything about it, there will be no scar in the person who has given you a gift. In fact, if you mention it he will feel a little embarrassed because that was expected. On the contrary, he feels grateful toward you that you accepted his gift. You could have rejected; the possibility was there. You could have said no, but how nice of you that you didn’t say no. You accepted it – that’s enough. He feels grateful toward you. A man who gives you a gift always feels grateful that you accepted. You could have rejected, that’s enough.Tilopa is not saying don’t give, and he is not saying don’t take, because life cannot exist without giving and taking. Even Tilopa has to breathe, even Tilopa has to beg for his food; even Tilopa has go to the river to drink water. Tilopa is thirsty, he needs water; Tilopa is hungry, he needs food; Tilopa feels suffocated in a closed room, he comes out and breathes deeply. He is taking life every moment – you cannot exist without taking. People have tried, but those are not natural people, they are the supreme-most egoists.Egoists always try to be independent of everything. Egoists always try not to need anything from anybody. This is foolish, absurd! Tilopa cannot do such a thing. He is a very, very natural man; you cannot find a more natural man than Tilopa. And if you understand nature you will be surprised to find, to discover, a very deep basic fact: no one is dependent, no one is independent, everyone is interdependent. Nobody can claim, “I am independent.” This is foolish! You cannot exist for a single moment in your independence. And nobody is absolutely dependent.These two polarities don’t exist. One who looks dependent is also independent, and one who looks independent is also dependent. Life is an interdependence, it is a mutual sharing. Even the emperor depends on his slaves; and even the slaves are not dependent on the emperor – at least they can commit suicide, that much independence they have.Absolutes don’t exist here; life exists in relativity. Of course, Tilopa knows that. He prescribes the natural way – how can he not know it? He knows it; life is a give and take. You share, but you should not be concerned about it, you should not think about it; you should allow it to happen. Allowing it to happen is totally different. Then you do not ask for more than you can get; neither do you ask to give more than you can give, you simply give what naturally can be given, you simply take what naturally can be taken. You don’t feel obliged to anybody and you don’t make anybody feel obliged to you. You simply know that life is interdependent. We exist mutually: we are members of each other. Consciousness is a vast ocean and nobody is an island. We meet and merge with each other. There are no boundaries; all boundaries are false. Tilopa knows that – then what does he say?One should not give or take but remain natural… The moment you think you have taken you have become unnatural. Taking is okay, but thinking that you have taken, you have become unnatural. Giving is beautiful, but the moment you think that you have given, it has become ugly, you have become unnatural. You simply give because you cannot help it; you have, so you have to give. You simply take because you cannot help it; you are part of the whole. But no unnatural ego is created through taking or through giving – that is the point to be understood. You neither accumulate, nor do you renounce; you simply remain natural.If things come along your way, you enjoy. If you have more, and the more always becomes a burden, you share. It is just a deep balancing; you simply remain natural. No holding and no renouncing, no possessiveness, no nonpossessiveness. Look at the animals or the birds: no taking, no giving. Everybody enjoys out of the whole, out of the whole everybody shares, in the whole everybody shares. Birds and trees and animals exist naturally. Man is the only unnatural animal, that’s why religion is needed.Animals don’t need any religion; birds don’t need any religion because they are not unnatural. Only man needs religion. And the more man becomes unnatural, the more religion is needed. So remember this: whenever a society becomes more and more unnatural, technological, more religion will be needed.People come and ask me, “Why is there so much searching for religion in America, so much turmoil, seeking?” – because America is the most unnatural country today, the most technologized, technical. A technocracy has come into existence, which has made everything unnatural. Your inner being thirsts for freedom from technology. Your inner being thirsts to be natural, and the whole society has become unnatural; more cultured, more civilized, more unnatural. When a society becomes too cultured then religion comes to balance it. It is a subtle balancing. A natural society doesn’t need it.Says Lao Tzu, “I have heard from the ancients that there was a time when people were natural; there was no religion. When people were natural they never thought about heaven and hell. When people were natural they never thought about moral precepts. When people were natural there was no code, no law.” Lao Tzu says that because of the law people have become criminals, and because of morality people have become immoral, and because of too much culture… And China has known too much culture; no other country has known that much culture.Confucius has made an absolute discipline of how to culture a man – three thousand, three hundred rules of discipline. Suddenly, Lao Tzu came into being to balance them because this Confucius will kill the whole society – three thousand, three hundred rules! This is too much. You will culture the man so much that the man will disappear completely. He will not be a man at all! Lao Tzu erupts and Lao Tzu throws all the rules to the dust, and he says the only golden rule is to have no rules. This is a balancing. Lao Tzu is religion; Confucius is culture.Religion is needed like a medicine, it is medicinal. You are ill, you need medicine; more ill, of course, more medicine. A society becomes ill when the natural is lost. A man becomes ill when the natural is forgotten. And Tilopa is all for the natural and the loose.And always remember the loose with the natural because you can try to be natural so hard that the very effort can become unnatural. That’s how fads are created. I have come across many people, faddists, who have made something absolutely unnatural out of a natural teaching. For example, it is good to have organic food; nothing is wrong in it, but if you become too concerned, and you become so minutely concerned that every moment you are thinking of organic food, and nothing inorganic should be allowed in the body, then you have overdone it.I know people who believe in natural therapies, naturotherapy, and they have become so unnatural through their natural therapy that you cannot believe how it could happen. It happens! If it becomes a straining on the mind, then it has become already unnatural. The word loose has to be continuously remembered, otherwise you can become faddists, you can become maniacs, and then you can take one part of it and you can strain so much that even the natural turns into the unnatural.Loose and natural is Tilopa, and that is his whole teaching. He cannot say you should not give and you should not take, but says it; then he must mean something else.One should not give or take but remain natural… The meaning is hidden: remaining natural. And if, remaining natural, it happens that you give – beautiful! If, remaining natural, somebody gives something to you and you take – natural. But don’t make a profession out of it. Don’t make an anxiety out of it.…for Mahamudra is beyond all acceptance and rejection.Lao Tzu teaches acceptance. And Tilopa teaches something beyond both rejection and acceptance. Tilopa is really one of the greatest masters.You reject something and you become unnatural. That we can understand. You have anger inside, and you reject it because of the moral teachings, and because of the difficulties that anger brings you into: conflicts, violence. And to live with anger is not easy because if you want to live with anger you cannot live with anybody else. It creates trouble, and then the moral teachers are there, always ready to help, and they say, “Suppress it, throw it out; don’t be angry, reject it!” You start rejecting.The moment you reject you start becoming unnatural because whatsoever you have, nature has given to you. Who are you to reject it? A part of the mind playing the role of the master with another part of the mind, and both are parts of the same. It is not possible. You can go on playing the game, and the part that is anger does not bother about the other part that is trying to suppress it because when the moment comes it erupts. So there is no trouble for the part which is anger, the part which is sex, the part which is greed. You go on fighting, wasting, putting yourself together in millions of ways and always remaining divided, in conflict, fragmentary.Once you reject, you become unnatural. Don’t reject! Of course, immediately acceptance comes in, if you don’t reject then accept. This is subtle, delicate. Tilopa says even in acceptance there is a rejection because when you say “Yes I accept,” deep down you have already rejected; otherwise why do you say “I accept”? What is the need of saying “I accept”? Acceptance is meaningful only if there is rejection, otherwise it is meaningless.People come to me and they say, “Yes, we accept you.” I see their faces, what they are saying; not knowing what they are doing, they have already rejected me. They are forcing their minds to accept me, and a certain part of the mind is rejecting. Even when they say yes, there is a no; that very yes carries the no in it. The yes is just a superficial garb, a decoration. Inside I can see their no, alive and kicking, and they say, “We accept.” They have already rejected.If there is no rejection how can you accept, how can you say “I accept”? If there is no fight how can you say “I surrender”? If you can see this point, then an acceptance happens which is beyond rejection and acceptance. Then surrender happens which is beyond both fight and surrender, then it is total.…for Mahamudra is beyond all acceptance and rejection. And when you remain simply natural, neither rejecting nor accepting, neither fighting nor surrendering, neither saying no nor saying yes, but allowing things, whatsoever happens, happens. You have no choice of your own. Whatsoever happens, you simply note it down that it has happened; you don’t try to change anything, you don’t try to modify anything. You are not concerned with improving yourself; you simply remain whatsoever you are – very, very arduous for the mind because the mind is a great improver.The mind always says, “You can reach higher. You can become great. You can polish here and there, and you can become pure gold. Improve, transform, transmute, transfigure yourself!” The mind goes on saying again and again and again, “More is possible, more is still possible – do it!” Then rejection comes. And when you reject part of yourself you will be in deep trouble because that part is yours; that part is organically yours; you cannot throw it out. You can cut the body but you cannot cut the being because the being remains the whole. How can you cut the being? There is no sword that can cut the being.If your eyes go against you, you can throw them away; if your hand commits a crime, you can cut it off; if your legs lead you to sin, you can cut them off – because the body is not you, it is already separate, you can cut it. But how will you cut your consciousness? How will you cut your innermost being? It is not substantial; you cannot cut it, it is like emptiness. How can you cut emptiness? Your sword will go through it; it will remain undivided. If you try too much, your sword may break, but the emptiness will remain undivided; you cannot cut it. Your innermost being is of the nature of emptiness. It is a no-self, it is non-substantial. It is, but it is not matter. You cannot cut it – there is no possibility.Don’t reject. But immediately the mind says, “Then okay, we accept.” The mind never leaves you alone. The mind follows you like a shadow; wherever you go the mind says, “Okay, I am with you just as a help, a helper. Whenever you need, I will give you help. Don’t reject! Of course it is right! Tilopa is right, accept!” And if you listen to this mind, again you are in the same trap. Rejection and acceptance are both aspects of the same coin.Says Tilopa: …for Mahamudra is beyond all acceptance and rejection. Don’t accept, don’t reject. There is nothing to do in fact. You are not asked to do anything. You are simply asked to be loose and natural; be yourself and let things happen. The whole world is going on without you: the rivers go to the sea, the stars move, the sun rises in the morning, the seasons follow each other, the trees grow and bloom and disappear, and the whole is going on without you – can’t you leave yourself loose and natural and move with the whole? This is sannyas for me.People come to me and they ask, “Give us definite discipline. You simply give us sannyas and you never talk about discipline. What do you expect us to do?” I don’t expect anything. I want you to be loose and natural. Just be yourself and let things happen, whatsoever happens – whatsoever, unconditionally: good and bad, misery and happiness, life and death. Whatsoever happens let it happen. Just don’t come in the way. Relax! The whole of existence goes on, and goes so perfectly well; why are you worried about yourself? There is no need to improve; there is no need to change. You simply remain loose and natural and improvement happens on its own accord, and changes follow, and you will be transfigured completely – but not by you.If you are trying, you are doing the same as somebody pulling himself up by his own shoestrings. Foolish! Don’t try it. It is just like a dog chasing his own tail. On a winter morning when the sun has risen you can find many dogs doing that. They are sitting silently, enjoying, and then suddenly they see the tail at the side – looks tempting. And how can they know, poor dogs that the tail belongs to them? And the same is your plight: you are also traveling in the same boat. The temptation becomes too much and the tail looks delicious, it can be eaten! The dog tries, first very slowly and silently so the tail is not disturbed, but whatsoever he does, the tail simply moves itself farther and farther. Then a hectic activity starts, then the dog becomes alert: “What does this tail think about herself?” It becomes a challenge. Now he jumps, but the more he jumps, the more the tail jumps. A dog can go crazy.And this is all that spiritual seekers are doing to themselves. Chasing their own tails on a winter morning when everything is beautiful, unnecessarily bothering with their tails. Let it rest, be loose and natural. And who can catch his own tail? You jump, the tail jumps with you and then you feel frustrated. And then you come to me and say, “The kundalini is not rising.” What can I do? You are chasing your own tail and meanwhile missing the beautiful morning. Could you have silently rested with your tail? Many flies were coming on their own accord and there would have been a good breakfast. But chasing the tail – the flies are also scared, and the very possibility of a good breakfast…Simply wait, just knowing that things cannot be improved; they are already the best they can be. You just have to enjoy. Everything is ready for the celebration, nothing is lacking. Don’t get caught into absurd activities – and spiritual improvement is one of the most absurd activities.…remain natural, for Mahamudra is beyond all acceptance and rejection. Since alaya is not born…Alaya is a Buddhist term; it means the abode, the inner abode, the inner emptiness, or the inner sky.Since alaya is not born, no one can obstruct or soil it.Don’t be worried. Since your innermost being is never born, it cannot die; since it is never born, nobody can soil it or obstruct it. It is deathless. And since the whole has given you life, since life comes from the whole, how can the part improve it? From the source comes everything, let the source supply it – and the source is eternal. You unnecessarily get in the way and start pushing the river, which was already flowing toward the sea.…no one can obstruct or soil it. Your inner purity is absolute; you cannot soil it.This is the Tantra essence. All the religions say that you have to attain it; Tantra says it is already attained. All the religions say you have to work hard for it; Tantra says because of your hard activity you are missing it. Please, relax a little; just by relaxation you attain the non-attainable.…no one can obstruct or soil it. You may have done millions of things so don’t be worried about karmas because no act of yours can soil, make your inner being impure.This is the base of the myth of Jesus’ virgin birth. It is not that Jesus’ mother Mary was a virgin; it is a Tantra attitude. And Jesus came across many Tantrikas on his travels in India, and he understood the fact that the virginity cannot be destroyed, and every child is born out of a virgin. Christian theologians have been very worried how to prove that Jesus is born out of a virgin. There is no need. Every child is always born out of a virgin because virginity cannot be soiled.How can you soil virginity? Just two beings, man and wife, or two lovers, moving into a deep sexual orgasm – how can you soil virginity by it? The innermost being remains a witness; it has no part in it. The bodies meet, the energies meet, the mind meets, and there is a blissful moment out of it. But the innermost being remains a witness – out of it. That virginity cannot be soiled.So, in the West they are worried how to prove Jesus is born out of a virgin. And I tell you that not even a single child has ever been born without a virgin mother. All children are born out of virginity.Every moment, whatsoever you do, you remain out of it. No action is a scar on you, cannot be. And once you relax and see this, then you are not worried what to do and what not to do. Then you let things have their own course. Then you simply float like a white cloud, not moving anywhere, simply enjoying the movement. The very wandering is beautiful.…no one can obstruct or soil it. Staying in the unborn realm all appearance will dissolve into dharmata…Dharmata means everything has its own elementary nature. If you remain in your inner abode, everything, by and by, will dissolve in its own natural element. You are the disturber. If you remain inside your being – in the alaya, in the inner sky – in that absolute purity, just like the sky, clouds come and go; no trace is left. Actions come and go, thoughts come and go, many things happen, but inside, deep down, nothing happens. There, you simply are. Only existence is there. No actions reach, no thoughts reach.If you remain loose and natural in that inner abode, by and by you will see all elements move into their own nature. The body is made of five elements. The earth, by and by, will move into the earth, the air into the air, the fire into fire. That is what happens when you die: every element moves to its own resting place. Dharmata means the elementary nature of everything; everything moves to its own abode. You move to your own abode and then everything moves to its own; then there is no disturbance.There are two ways to live and two ways to die. One way is to live like everybody is living: getting mixed up with everything, forgetting completely the inner sky. Then there is another way of living: resting within and allowing the elementary forces to have their own way.When the body feels hunger it will move and seek food. A man who is enlightened remains inside his abode. The body feels the hunger, he watches. The body starts moving to seek food, he watches. The body finds the food, he watches. The body starts eating, he watches. The body absorbs, feels satiated, he watches. He goes on watching; he is no longer an actor. He is not doing anything; he is not a doer. The body feels thirst, he watches. The body stands and moves; these are elementary forces working on their own. You unnecessarily say, “I am thirsty.” You are not! You get mixed up. The body is thirsty and the body will find its own course. It will move to wherever the water is.If you remain inside, you will see that everything happens by itself. Even trees find their water sources with no ego and no mind; the roots will go and seek the source, sometimes they will even travel hundreds of feet to find a source of water. And this has been one of the most amazing things for botanists because they cannot understand how it happens. A tree is there… Toward the north, one hundred feet away, there is a water source, a little spring hidden inside the earth. How does the tree know that the roots have to move toward the north, not to the south? And it is a hundred feet away, so even a guess is not possible; and the tree has no mind of its own, no ego. But the elemental forces by themselves… The tree starts growing roots toward the north, and one day it reaches the water source.The tree reaches toward the sky… In African jungles trees grow very high, they have to because the forest is so dense; if the trees don’t grow very high they will not be able to reach to the sun and the light and the air. So they grow higher and higher and higher, they seek their way. Even trees can find their water source – why are you worried?That’s why Jesus says, “Look, consider the lilies in the field, they toil not.” They don’t do anything, but everything happens.When you sit inside your abode, your elemental forces will start functioning in their crystal purity. You don’t come in to it. The body feels hunger, the body itself moves, and it is so beautiful to see the body moving itself. It is really one of the most wonderful experiences to see one’s own body moving itself and finding the source of water or food. There is a thirst for love and the body moves itself. You go on sitting inside your abode, then suddenly you see actions don’t belong to you: you are not a doer; you are simply a watcher.Realizing this, you have attained the non-attainable. Realizing this, you have realized all that can be realized.Staying in the unborn realm all appearance will dissolve into dharmata, and self-will and pride will vanish into naught.And when you see that things are happening by themselves, then how can you gather an ego, a pride about it? How can you say I when hunger has its own way, fulfills itself, becomes satiety; when life has its own way, fulfills itself, reaches death and rest? Who are you to say, “I am”? The pride, the self, the self-will, all dissolve. Then you don’t do anything, then you don’t will anything; you simply sit in your innermost being and the grass grows by itself. Everything happens by itself.It is difficult to understand this because you have been brought up, conditioned, that you have to do, that you have to be a doer, constantly alert and moving and fighting. You have been brought up in a milieu which says that you have to fight for your survival; otherwise you will be lost, otherwise you will achieve nothing. You have been brought up with the poison of ambition in you. And, particularly in the West a very nonsensical word, willpower, exists. This is simply absurd. There is nothing like willpower; it is a fantasy, a dream. There is no need for any will. Things are happening by themselves, it is their nature.It happened…Lin Chi’s master died. The master was a well-known man, but Lin Chi was even better known than the master because the master was a silent man. In fact, through Lin Chi he had become very famous. Then the master died, and Lin Chi… It was known that he is also enlightened. A crowd of thousands gathered to pay their respects and the last farewell. And they saw Lin Chi crying and weeping, tears flowing down like a small child whose mother has died. People could not believe it because they thought that he had attained, and he was crying like a small child: “This is okay when a person is ignorant, but when a person is awakened, and he himself had been teaching that the innermost nature is immortal, eternal, it never dies… So why now?”A few who were very, very intimate with Lin Chi came and told him, “It is not good, and what will people think about you? Already there is a rumor: people are thinking they were wrong in thinking that you have attained. Your whole prestige is at stake. Stop crying! A man like you need not cry.”Lin Chi said, “But what can I do? Tears are coming! It is their dharmata. And who am I to stop them? I neither reject nor accept; I remain inside myself. Now tears are flowing, nothing can be done. If my prestige is at stake, let it be. If the people think I am not enlightened, that is their own business. But what can I do? I have left the doer long ago; there is no longer any doer. It is simply happening. These eyes are crying and weeping on their own accord because they will not be able to see the master again, and it was nourishment to them, they lived on that food. I know very well that the soul is eternal: nobody ever dies, but how to teach these eyes? What to tell them? They don’t listen; they don’t have any ears. How to teach these eyes: ‘Don’t weep, don’t cry, life is eternal’? And who am I? It is their business. If they feel like crying, they cry.”Remaining natural and loose means this: things happen, you are not the doer. Neither accepting nor rejecting, self-will dissolves. The very concept of willpower becomes empty and impotent; it simply withers away and pride vanishes into nothingness.It is difficult to understand an enlightened person. No concepts will be helpful. What will you think about Lin Chi? He says, “I know, but the eyes are crying; let them cry, they will feel relaxed. And they will not be able to see this man again; the body is to be burned soon. They nourished on him, and they knew no beauty except this man, and they knew no grace. They have lived too long nursing on this man’s form and body. Now they feel thirsty, hungry; now they feel that the very ground is disappearing beneath them. Of course they are crying!”A natural man simply sits inside and allows things to happen. He does not “do.” And, Tilopa says, only then does Mahamudra appear: the final, the utterly final orgasm with existence. Then you are no longer separate. Then your inner sky has become one with the outer sky. There are not two skies then, only one sky.Enough for today.

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Tantra Supreme Understanding 01-10Category: TANTRA

Tantra Supreme Understanding 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The song ends:The supreme understanding transcends all this and that. The supreme action embraces great resourcefulness without attachment. The supreme accomplishment is to realize immanence without hope.At first a yogi feels his mind is tumbling like a waterfall; in mid-course, like the Ganges it flows on slow and gentle; in the end, it is a great vast ocean where the lights of son and mother merge in one.Everybody is born in freedom, but dies in bondage. The beginning of life is totally loose and natural, but then the society enters; then rules and regulations enter, morality, discipline and many sorts of trainings. The looseness and the naturalness and the spontaneous being is lost. One starts to gather around oneself a sort of armor. One starts becoming more and more rigid. The inner softness is no longer apparent.On the boundary of one’s being, one creates a fortlike phenomenon in order to defend, not to be vulnerable – to react, for security, safety; and the freedom of being is lost. One starts looking at others’ eyes: their approvals, their denials, their condemnations. Appreciation becomes more and more valuable. The others become the criterion, and one starts to imitate and follow others because one has to live with others.A child is very soft, he can be molded in any way; and the society starts molding him – the parents, the teachers, the school – and by and by he becomes a character not a being. He learns all the rules. He either becomes a conformist, that is bondage, or he becomes rebellious – that too is another sort of bondage. If he becomes a conformist, orthodox, square, that is one sort of bondage; he can react, can become a hippy, can move to the other extreme, but that is again a sort of bondage – because reaction depends on the same thing it reacts against. You may go to the farthest corner, but deep down in the mind you are rebelling against the same rules. Others are following them, you are reacting, but the focus remains on the same rules. Reactionaries and revolutionaries all travel in the same boat. They may be standing against each other, back to back, but the boat is the same.A religious man is neither a reactionary nor a revolutionary. A religious man is simply loose and natural; he is neither for something nor against, he is simply himself. He has no rules to follow and no rules to deny, he simply has no rules. A religious man is free in his own being; he has no molding of habits and conditionings. He is not a cultured being – not that he is uncivilized and primitive – he is the highest possibility of civilization and culture, but he is not a cultured being. He has grown in his awareness and he doesn’t need any rules, he has transcended rules. He is truthful not because it is the rule to be truthful; being loose and natural he is simply truthful, it happens to be truthful. He has compassion, not because he follows the precept: be compassionate. No. Being loose and natural he simply feels compassion flowing all around. There is nothing to do on his part; it is just a byproduct of his growth in awareness. He is not against society, nor for society – he is simply beyond it. He has again become a child, a child of an absolutely unknown world, a child in a new dimension – he is reborn.Every child is born natural, loose; then the society comes in, has to come in for certain reasons… Nothing is wrong in it because if the child is left to himself or herself, the child will never grow, and will never be able to become religious, he will become just like an animal. The society has to come in; the society has to be passed through, it is needed. The only thing to remember is: it is just a passage to pass through; one should not make one’s house in it. The only thing to remember is that the society has to be followed and then transcended; the rules have to be learned and then unlearned.Rules come into your life because there are others; you are not alone. When the child is in the mother’s womb he is absolutely alone, no rules are needed. Rules come only when the other comes into relationship; rules come with relationship. Because you are not alone, you have to think of others and consider others. In the mother’s womb the child is alone; no rules, no morality, no discipline is needed, no order. But the moment he is born, even the first breath he takes is social. If the child is not crying, the doctors will immediately force him to cry because if he doesn’t cry for a few minutes then he will be dead. He has to cry because the cry opens the passage through which he will be able to breathe; it clears the throat. He has to be forced to cry; even the first breath is social – others are there and the molding has started.Nothing is wrong in it. It has to be done, but it has to be done in such a way that the child never loses his awareness, does not become identified with the cultured pattern, remains, deep inside, still free, knows that rules have to be followed but rules are not life. This has to be taught. And that’s what a good society will do: “These rules are good because there are others. But these rules are not absolute, and you are not expected to remain confined to them; one day you must transcend them.” A society is good if it teaches civilization and transcendence to its members; then the society is religious. If it never teaches transcendence then that society is simply secular and political, it has no religion in it.You have to listen to others up to an extent, and then you have to start listening to yourself. You must come back to the original state in the end. Before you die you must become an innocent child again – loose, natural; because in death you are again entering the dimension of being alone. Just as you were in the womb, in death you will again enter the realm of being alone. No society exists there. And the whole of your life… You have to find a few spaces in your life, a few moments like oases in deserts, where you simply close your eyes and go beyond society, move into yourself, into your own womb. This is what meditation is. The society is there… Simply close your eyes and forget the society, and become alone. No rules exist there, no character is needed, no morality, no words, no language. You can be loose and natural inside.Grow into that loose and naturalness. Even if there is a need for outer discipline, remain wild inside. If one can remain wild inside and still practice things which are needed in the society, then soon he can come to a point where he simply transcends.I will tell you a story and then I will enter into the sutras. This is a Sufi story:An old man and a young man were traveling with a donkey. They had reached near to a town; they were both walking with their donkey.Some school children passed them and they giggled and they laughed and they said, “Look at these fools, they have a healthy donkey with them and they are walking. At least the old man can sit on the donkey.”Listening to those children the old man and the young man decided, “What to do? People are laughing and soon we will be entering the town, so it is better to follow what they are saying.” So the old man sat on the donkey and the young man followed.Then they came near another group of people who looked at them and said, “Look, the old man is sitting on the donkey and the poor boy is walking. This is absurd! The old man can walk, but the boy should be allowed to sit on the donkey.” So they changed – the old man started walking and the boy was allowed to sit.Then another group came and said, “Look at these fools. And this boy seems to be too arrogant. Maybe the old man is his father or his teacher and he is walking, but the boy is sitting on the donkey – this is against all the rules!”So what to do? They both decided, “Now there is only one possibility: we should both sit on the donkey.” So they both sat on the donkey.Then other groups came and they said, “Look at these people, so violent! The poor donkey is almost dying – two people on one donkey. It would have been better if they carried the donkey on their shoulders.”So they again discussed. And then there was the river and the bridge; they had now almost reached the boundary of the town. So they thought, “It is better to behave as people think in this town, otherwise they will think we are fools.” So they found a piece of bamboo, put the bamboo on their shoulders, hung the donkey by his legs, tied them to the bamboo and carried him. The donkey tried to rebel; as donkeys are, they cannot be very easily forced. He tried to escape because he was not a believer in society and what others are saying. But the two men were too much and they forced him, so the donkey had to yield.Just in the middle of the bridge, a crowd passed. Then they all gathered and said, “Look, these fools! We have never seen such idiots – a donkey is to ride upon, not to carry on your shoulders. Have you gone mad?”Listening to them – and a great crowd gathered – the donkey became restless, so restless that he jumped, fell from the bridge down into the river and died. The two men came down – the donkey was dead.They sat by the side and the old man said, “Now listen…”This is not an ordinary story – the old man was a Sufi master, an enlightened person, and the young man was a disciple. And the old master was trying to show him a lesson because Sufis always create situations; they say unless there is a situation, you cannot learn deeply. So this was just a situation for the young man.Now the old man said, “Look: just like this donkey you will be dead if you listen too much to people. Don’t bother what others say because there are millions of others and they have their own minds and everybody will say something; everybody has his opinion and if you listen to opinions this will be your end.”Don’t listen to anybody, remain yourself. Just bypass them, be indifferent. If you go on listening to everybody, everybody will be prodding you this way or that. You will never be able to reach to your innermost center.Everybody has become eccentric. This English word is very beautiful: it means “off the center,” and we use it for the mad people. But everybody is eccentric, “off the center,” and the whole world is helping you to be eccentric because everybody is prodding you. Your mother is prodding you toward the north, your father toward the south, your uncle is doing something else, your brother something else, your wife, of course, something else – and everybody is trying to force you somewhere. By and by, a moment comes…you are nowhere. You remain just on the crossroads being pushed from north to south, from south to east, from east to west, moving nowhere. By and by, this becomes your total situation: you become eccentric. This is the situation. And if you go on listening to others and not listening to your inner center, this situation will continue.All meditation is in order to become centered, not to be eccentric, to come to your own center.Listen to your inner voice, feel it, and move with that feeling. By and by, you can laugh at others’ opinions, or you can be simply indifferent. And once you become centered you become a powerful being; then nobody can prod you, then nobody can push you anywhere, simply nobody dares. You are such a power, centered in yourself, that anybody who comes with an opinion simply forgets his opinion near you; anybody who comes to push you somewhere, simply forgets that he had come to push. Rather, just coming near you, he starts feeling overpowered by you.That’s how even a single man can become so powerful that the whole society, the whole history, cannot push him a single inch. That’s how a Buddha exists and a Jesus exists. You can kill a Jesus but you cannot push him. You can destroy his body, but you cannot push him a single inch. Not that he is adamant or stubborn, no. He is simply centered in his own being. He knows what is good for him, and he knows what is blissful for him. It has already happened; now you cannot allure him toward new goals, no salesmanship can allure him to any other goal. He has found his home. He can listen to you patiently but you cannot move him. He is centered.This centering is the first thing toward being natural and loose; otherwise if you are natural and loose, anybody will take you anywhere. That’s why children are not allowed to be natural and loose, they are not mature enough to be centered. If they are natural and loose and running all around, their lives will be wasted. Hence, I say, society does a needful work: it protects them. The citadel becomes a cell-like character. They need it; they are very vulnerable, they may be destroyed by anybody. The multitude is there, they will not be able to find their way; they need character armor.But if that character armor becomes your total life, then you are lost. You should not become the citadel, you should remain the master and you should remain capable of going out of it; otherwise it is not a protection, it becomes a prison. You should be capable of going out of your character. You should be capable of putting aside your principles. You should be capable, if the situation demands, to respond in an absolutely novel way. If this capacity is lost then you become rigid, then you cannot be loose. If this capacity is lost then you become unnatural, then you are not flexible.Flexibility is youth, rigidness is old age – the more flexible, the more young; more rigid, more old. Death is absolute rigidity. Life is absolute looseness, flexibility.This you have to remember and then try to understand Tilopa. His final words:The supreme understanding transcends all this and that. The supreme action embraces great resourcefulness without attachment. The supreme accomplishment is to realize immanence without hope.Very, very significant words!The supreme understanding transcends all this and that. Knowledge is always either of this or of that. Understanding is neither. Knowledge is always of duality: a man is good, he knows what good is; another man is bad, he knows what bad is, but both are fragmentary, half. The good man is not whole because he does not know what bad is; his goodness is poor, it lacks the insight that badness gives. The bad man is also half, his badness is poor; it is not rich because he does not know what goodness is. And life is both together.A man of real understanding is neither good nor bad, he understands both. And in that very understanding he transcends both. A sage is neither a good man nor a bad man. You cannot confine him to any category; there exists no pigeonhole for him, you cannot categorize him. He is elusive, you cannot catch hold of him. And whatsoever you say about him will be half; it can never be total. A sage may have friends and followers, and they will think he is God because they see only the good part. And the sage may have enemies and foes, and they will think that he is the Devil incarnate because they know only the bad part. But if you know a sage, he is neither, or both together; and both mean the same.If you are both together, good and bad, you are neither because they annihilate each other, negate each other, and a void is left.This concept is very difficult for the Western mind to understand because the Western mind has divided God and the Devil absolutely. Whatsoever is bad belongs to the Devil and whatsoever is good belongs to God; their territories are demarked, hell and heaven are apart, set apart.That’s why Christian saints look a little poor before tantric sages, very poor: just good, simple, they don’t know the other side of life. And that’s why they are always afraid of the other side, always trembling with fear. A Christian saint is always praying for God to protect him from evil. Evil is always around the corner; he has avoided it and when you avoid something, it is continuously in the mind. He is afraid, trembling.A Tilopa knows no trembling, no fear, and he never prays to God, “Protect me.” He is protected. What is his protection? His understanding is his protection. He has lived all, he has moved to the farthest corner into evil, and he has lived the divine, and now he knows both are aspects of the same. And now he is neither worried about good nor worried about bad; now he lives a loose and natural, simple life, he has no predetermined concept and he is unpredictable.You cannot predict a Tilopa. You can predict Saint Augustine, you can predict other saints, but you cannot predict a Tantra sage. You cannot predict – simply unpredictable because in each moment he will respond and nobody knows in what way, nobody knows; even he himself does not know. That’s the beauty of it because if you know your future then you are not a free man, then you are moving according to certain rules, then you have a prefabricated character; then somehow you have to react, not respond.Nobody can say what a Tilopa will do in a certain situation. It will depend; the whole situation will bring the response. And he has no likings, no dislikings: neither this nor that. He will act, he will not react; he will not react out of his past, he will not react according to his future concepts, of his own ideals. No. He will act, he will act here and now, the response will be total; nobody can say what will happen. Understanding transcends duality.It is said that once Tilopa was staying in a cave and a passerby, a certain type of seeker, came to visit him. Tilopa was taking his food and he was using a human skull as a pot. The traveler became afraid. It was weird, he had come to see a sage and this man seemed to be something of the world of black magicians. In a human skull… Tilopa was enjoying, and a dog sitting by his side was also eating from the same skull. And when this man came, Tilopa invited him to participate as well. “Come here,” he said, “So beautiful you reached at the right time because this is all that I have got. Once it is finished, then for twenty-four hours there is nothing. Only the next day somebody may bring something. So come and join and participate.”The man felt very disgusted – a human skull, food in it, and a dog also a participant! He said, “I feel disgusted.”Tilopa said, “Then escape as soon as possible from here and run fast and never look back because then Tilopa is not for you. Why are you disgusted with this human skull? You have been carrying it for so long. And what is wrong if I am taking my food in it? – it is one of the cleanest things. You are not disgusted with your own skull inside, and your whole mind. Your beautiful thoughts and your morality and your goodness and your saintlihood are all in the skull. I am taking only my food in it; and your heaven and your hell and your gods and your Brahma, are all in your skull. They must have become absolutely dirty by now – you should be disgusted about that. And you yourself are there in the skull. Why do you feel disgusted?”The man tried to avoid and rationalize, he said, “Not because of the skull but because of this dog.”And Tilopa laughed and said, “You have been a dog in your past life, and everybody has to pass through all the stages. And what is wrong in being a dog? What is the difference between you and a dog? – the same greed, the same sex, the same anger, the same violence, aggressiveness, the same fear. Why do you pretend that you are superior?”Tilopa is difficult to understand because ugly and beautiful make no sense to him; purity and impurity make no sense to him; good and bad make no sense to him. He has an understanding of the total. Partial is knowledge; understanding is total. And when you look at the total, all distinctions drop: what is ugly and what is beautiful, what is good and what is bad.All distinctions simply drop if you have a birds-eye view of the total, then all boundaries disappear. It is just like looking down from an airplane. Then where is Pakistan and where is India? And where is England and where is Germany? All boundaries lost, the whole earth becomes one.And if you go still higher in a spaceship and look at it from the moon, the whole earth becomes so small. Where is Russia and where is America? And who is a communist and who is a capitalist? And who is a Hindu and who is a Mohammedan? The higher you go, the fewer are the distinctions, and understanding is the highest thing, there is nothing beyond it. From that highest peak everything becomes everything else. Things meet and merge and become one, boundaries are lost – an unbounded ocean with no source to it, infinity.The supreme understanding transcends all this and that. The supreme action embraces great resourcefulness without attachment. Tilopa says be loose and natural, but he doesn’t mean be lazy and go to sleep. On the contrary, when you are loose and natural much resourcefulness happens to you. You become tremendously creative. Activity may not be there; action is there. Obsession with occupation may not be there, will not be there, but you become tremendously resourceful, creative. You do millions of things, not because of any obsession but just because you are so free with energy, you have to create.Creativity comes easy to a man who is loose and natural. Whatsoever he does becomes a creative phenomenon. Wherever he touches becomes a piece of art; whatsoever he says becomes poetry. His very movement is aesthetic. If you can see a buddha walking, even his walking is creativity. Even through his walking he is creating a rhythm, even through his walking he is creating a milieu, an atmosphere around him. If a buddha raises his hand he immediately changes the climate around him. Not that he is doing these things, they are simply happening. He is not the doer. Calm, settled inside, tranquil, collected, together inside, filled with infinite energy, over-pouring, overflowing in all directions, his every moment is a moment of creativity, of cosmic creativity.Remember that. It has to be remembered because many people can misunderstand. They can think that no activity is needed, so they can think, “No action is needed.” Action has a different quality altogether. Activity is pathological.If you go into a madhouse you will see people in activity, every madman doing something because that is the only way they can forget themselves. You may find somebody washing his hands three thousand times a day because he believes in cleanliness. In fact, if you stop him washing his hands three thousand times a day he will be unable to stand himself, it will be too much. This is an escape.Politicians, people who are after wealth, power, are all mad people. You cannot stop them because if you stop them they don’t know what to do then. They are thrown into themselves and that is too much.One of my friends was telling me once that they had to go to a certain party; and they had a very small child, a beautiful child, and of course very active, as children are. So they locked his room and told him, “If you behave well and don’t create any disturbance in the house, we will give you whatsoever you ask for, and within an hour we will be back.”The child was allured – whatsoever he asks will be given. So he acted really well. In fact, he didn’t do anything; he simply stood in the corner because, “Whatsoever I do may turn out… Nobody knows, nobody knows about these adult minds: what is wrong and what is good. And they also go on changing their opinions.” So he stood with closed eyes just like a meditator.And when they came back they opened the door; he was standing stiff, in the corner. He opened the eyes and looked at them, and they asked, “Did you behave well?”He said, “Yes, in fact I behaved so well that I couldn’t stand myself.”It was too much! People who are too occupied with activities are afraid of themselves. Activity is a sort of escape; they can forget themselves in it. It is alcoholic; it is an intoxicant. Activity has to be dropped because it is pathology, you are ill. Action has not to be dropped; action is beautiful.What is action? Action is a response: when it is needed you act, when it is not needed you relax. Right now you go on doing things which are not needed, and right now when you want to relax, you cannot. A man of action, total action, acts, and when the situation is over he relaxes.I am talking to you. Talking can be either activity or action. There are people who cannot stop talking; they go on and on. Even if you stop their mouths it will not make any difference inside; they will go on chattering, they cannot stop it. This is activity, a feverish obsession. You are here and I talk to you; I don’t even know what I am going to talk to you about. Until the sentence is uttered, I am not even aware what it is going to be. You are not the only listeners; I am also a listener here. When I have said something, then I know that I have said it. Neither can you predict nor can I predict what I am going to say. Even the next sentence is not there; it is your situation that brings it.So whatsoever I say, I am not solely responsible; remember you are also half responsible for it. It is half-half: you create the situation; I act. So if my listeners change, my talk changes. It depends, because I have nothing pre-formulated. I don’t know what is going to happen, and that’s why it is beautiful for me also. It is a response, an act. When you are gone I sit inside my abode, not even a single word floats in the inner sky.It is you… So sometimes it happens people come to me and say, “We were going to ask a certain question and you answered it.” Every day it happens. It is happening: you have a certain question, you create a climate around you of that question; you come filled with that question. Then what I am to do? I have to respond. Your question simply creates the situation and I have to respond. That’s why many of your questions are simply solved. If some question is not solved the reason must be somewhere in you; you may have forgotten it. In the morning it was in the mind but when you entered this room you forgot about it. Or there were many questions and you were not certain exactly which question was to be asked; you were in confusion, vague, cloudy. If you are certain about your question the answer will be there.It is nothing on my part, it simply happens. You create the question; I simply float into it. I have to because I have nothing to say to you. If I had something to say to you, you would be irrelevant; whatsoever question you had wouldn’t make any sense. I would have my prepared thing in me and I would have to tell it to you. Even if you were not there, it would not make any difference.The All India Radio used to invite me, but I felt it was very difficult because it was so impersonal: talking to nobody! I simply said, “This is not for me. It is such a strain and I don’t know what to do; there is nobody there.” So they arranged… They said, “This can be done: a few people from our staff can come and they can sit there.”But then I told them, “Then don’t give me a subject because those people will give me the subject. It would be totally irrelevant – somebody sitting there and you had given me a subject to talk on and nobody involved in that subject; they would be just a dead audience.”When you are there you create the question, you create the situation and the answer flows toward you. It is a personal phenomenon. Then I simply stopped going there. I said, “This is not for me, it is not possible. I cannot talk to machines because they don’t create any situation for me to float in. I can talk only to people.”That’s why I have never written a book. I cannot, for whom? Who will read it? Unless I know that man who will read it, and unless he creates a situation, I cannot write – for whom? I have written only letters because then I know that I am writing to somebody. He may be somewhere in the United States, it makes no difference – the moment I write a letter to him it is a personal phenomenon: he is there. While I am writing he helps me to write. Without him it is not possible; it is a dialogue.This is action. The moment you are gone, all language disappears from me; no words float, they are not needed. And this should be so! When you walk you use your legs and when you sit in your chair, what is the point of moving your legs? It is mad! When there is a dialogue, words are needed; when there is a situation, action is needed. But let the whole decide it; you should not be the deciding factor, you should not decide. Then there are no karmas; then you move, from moment to moment, fresh. The past dies by itself every moment, and the future is born and you move into it fresh like a child.The supreme action embraces great resourcefulness without attachment. Actions happen but there is no attachment; you don’t feel, “I have done this.” I don’t feel I have said this. I simply feel it has been spoken, it has happened. The whole has done it, and the whole is neither I, nor you; the whole is both and neither. And the whole hovers around and the whole decides: you are not the doer. Much happens through you, but you are not the doer. Much is created through you, but you are not the creator. The whole remains the creator – you simply become vehicles, mediums for the whole. A hollow bamboo, and the whole puts his fingers and his lips on it, and it becomes a flute and a song is born.From where does this song come – from that hollow bamboo you call a flute, from the lips of the whole? No. From where does it come? Everything is involved. The hollow bamboo is involved, the lips of the whole are also involved, the singer is involved, the listener is involved – everything is involved. Even a small thing can create a difference.Just a roseflower at the side of the room and this room will not be the same because the roseflower has its own aura, its own being. It will influence, it will influence your understanding, it will influence whatsoever I say. The total moves, not parts. Much happens but nobody is the doer.…great resourcefulness without attachment. And when you are not the doer, how can the attachment happen? You do a small thing and you become attached. You say, “I have done this.” You would like everybody to know that you have done this and you have done that. This ego is the barrier for the supreme understanding. Drop the doer and let things happen. That’s what Tilopa means by being loose and natural.The supreme accomplishment is to realize immanence without hope. This is a very deep thing, very subtle and delicate. Tilopa says, “What is the supreme accomplishment?” It is: …to realize immanence without hope: that inside, the inner space is perfect, absolute, without hope. Why does he bring in this word hope? It is because with hope comes future, with hope comes desire, with hope comes the effort to improve, with hope comes greed for more, with hope comes discontentment, and then, of course, frustration follows.He is not saying to be hopeless, because that too comes with hope. He is simply saying no hope, not hopeful, not hopeless – because they both come with hope. And this has become such a great problem for the West because Buddha says the same, and then Western thinkers think that these people are pessimists. They are not. They are not pessimists; they are not optimists. And this is the meaning of no-hope.If somebody hopes, we call him an optimist. We say that he can see the silver lining in the darkest cloud, we say that he can see the morning following the darkest night: he is an optimist. And then there is the pessimist, just the opposite of it. Even in the brightest silver lining he will always see the darkest cloud. You talk about the morning and he will say, “Every morning ends in the evening.” But remember: they may be opposites but they are not really separate; their focus is different but their minds are the same. Whether you see the bright lining, silver lining in the dark cloud, or you see the dark cloud in the silver lining, you always see the part. Your division is there; you choose, you never see the total.Buddha, Tilopa, myself, we are neither optimists nor pessimists; we simply drop hope. With hope, both optimism and pessimism come in. We simply drop the coin of hope, and both aspects are dropped with it. This is a totally new dimension, difficult to understand.Tilopa sees the suchness of things; he has no choice. He sees both the morning and evening together, he sees both the thorns and the flower together, he sees both pain and pleasure together, he sees both birth and death together. He has no choice of his own. He is neither a pessimist nor an optimist; he lives without hope. And that is a really wonderful dimension in which to live, to live without hope. Use the very words …without hope… and inside you it feels that it is something pessimistic, but that is because of the language – and what Tilopa is saying is beyond language. He says: The supreme accomplishment is to realize immanence without hope. You simply realize yourself as you are in your total suchness, and you are simply that. There is no need for any improvement, change, development, growth – no need. Nothing can be done about it. It is simply the case.Once you go deep into it, that this is simply the case, suddenly all flowers and all thorns disappear, days and nights disappear, life and death disappear, summer and winter disappear. Nothing is left because the clinging disappears. And with the acceptance, whatsoever you are, whatsoever is the case, is then no problem, no question, nothing to be solved; you are simply that. A celebration comes; and this celebration is not of hope, this celebration is just an overflowing of energy. You start blooming. You simply bloom, not for something in the future; you cannot do otherwise.When one realizes the suchness of being, the blooming happens: one goes on blooming and blooming and celebrating for no visible cause at all. Why I am happy? What have I got that you have not got? Why am I serene and quiet? Have I achieved something that you have to achieve? Have I attained to something that you have to attain? No. I have simply relaxed into the suchness. Whatsoever I am – good, bad, moral, immoral – whatsoever I am, I have simply relaxed into the suchness of it. And I have dropped all efforts to improve, and I have dropped all future. I have dropped hope, and with the dropping of hope everything has disappeared. I am alone and simply happy for no reason at all, simply silent because now, without hope, I don’t know how to create disturbance. Without hope, how can you create disturbance in your being?Remember this: all effort will lead you to a point where you leave all effort and you will become effortless. And the whole search will lead you to a point where you simply shrug your shoulders, sit down under a tree and settle.Every journey ends in the innermost suchness of being, and that you have every moment. So it is only a question of becoming a little more aware. What is wrong with you? – I have seen millions of people and I have not seen even a single person who has really something wrong, but he creates it. You are creators, great creators of illnesses, wrongs, problems, and then you chase them – how to solve them? First you create and then you go chasing. Why create them in the first place?Just drop hope, desire, and simply look at the case that you are already; just simply close your eyes and see who you are – and finished! Even in the blinking of the eye this is possible, it needs no time. If you are thinking it needs time, gradual growth, then it is because of your mind that you will need time; otherwise time is not needed.The supreme accomplishment is to realize immanence… all that is to be achieved is in. That is the meaning of immanence: all that is to be achieved is already there inside you. You are born perfect; otherwise is not possible because you are born of the perfect. That is the meaning when Jesus says, “I and my father are one.” What is he saying? He is saying that you cannot be otherwise than the whole because you come out of the whole.Take a handful of water from the ocean, taste it: it tastes the same. In a single drop of seawater you can find the whole chemistry of the sea. If you can understand a single drop of seawater you have understood all seas, past, future, present, because a small drop is a miniature ocean. And you are the whole in a miniature form.When you go deeper inside yourself and realize this, suddenly laughter happens, you start laughing. What were you seeking? The seeker himself was the sought; the traveler was himself the goal. This is the supreme-most accomplishment: to realize oneself, one’s absolute perfection, without hope. Because if a hope is there it will stir; it will continually stir your disturbance, you will again start thinking, “Something more is possible.” Hope always creates dreams: “Something more is possible.”Of course it is good… People come to me and they say, “Meditation is going very well; of course it is good, but give us some other technique so that we can grow more.” Even sometimes people have come to me saying, “Everything is beautiful…” And then they say, “Now what?” Now hope stirs. Everything is beautiful, then why ask, “Now what?” Everything was wrong, then again you were asking, “Now what?” And now everything is beautiful, again you ask, “Now what?” Now leave it, this hope.Just the other day somebody came, and said, “Everything is going very beautifully now but who knows, tomorrow…?” Why bring tomorrow in when everything is going absolutely right? Can’t you remain without problems? Now everything is good, but there is a worry whether it may be good tomorrow or not. If it is good today, from where is tomorrow going to come? It will be born out of today, so why be worried? If today is silence, tomorrow is going to be more silent; it will be born out of today. But because of this worry you can destroy today; then tomorrow will be there and you will be fulfilled in your frustration and you will say, “This is what I was thinking and worried about. It has happened.” And it has happened because of you. It was not going to happen! Had you remained without future, it would not have happened.This is the self-destructive tendency of the mind, suicidal; and in a way it is very self-fulfilling, so the mind can always say, “I was warning you before. I had warned you beforehand, you didn’t listen to me.” Now you will think, “Yes, that’s right; the mind warned and I was not listening to it.” But it has come only because of the warning of the mind.Many things happen… If you go to the astrologers, jyotishis, palmists, and they say something to you, then when it happens you will think they predicted your future. Just the opposite is the case: because they predicted, your mind got into it and it happened. If somebody says that you are going to die next month, on the thirteenth March, the possibility is there – not because he had known your future, but because he had predicted the future. Now the thirteenth March will move in your mind continuously: you will not be able to sleep without it, you will not be able to dream without it, you will not be able to love without it. Twenty-four hours a day: “The thirteenth March and I am going to die.” It will become a self hypnosis, a chanting. It will go round and round; the nearer the thirteenth March will come, the faster it will move. And it will self-fulfill. The thirteenth March…It happened once that a German palmist predicted his own death. He had been predicting many people’s deaths and they happened, so he became certain that his prediction was something. “Otherwise, how is it happening?”And he was getting old so a few friends suggested: “Why not predict your own death?” So he studied his hands and charts and everything – all foolish – and then he decided on his own death: that it was going to happen on such and such a date, at six o’clock, early in the morning.And then he waited for it. Six was approaching; from five o’clock he was ready, sitting by the clock. Each moment…and death was coming nearer and nearer and nearer. And then came just the last moment. One moment more and the clock will say it is six, and he is still alive, how is it possible? Seconds started passing, and exactly when the clock struck six he jumped out of the window, because how it is possible… And of course, died exactly as predicted.Mind has a self-fulfilling mechanism. Be alert to it. You are happy; the mind says, “Of course, you are happy, it is okay, but what about tomorrow?” Now already the mind has distorted, destroyed this moment, it has brought tomorrow in. Now tomorrow will come out of this mind, not out of that blissful moment that was there.Don’t hope this way or that, for or against; drop all hope. Remain to the moment, in the moment, with the moment, for the moment. There is no other moment than this. And whatsoever is going to happen will happen out of this moment, so why worry? If this moment is beautiful, how can the next moment be ugly? From where will it come? It grows, it will be more beautiful, has to be. There is no need to think about it.And once you accomplish this, remaining with your innate perfection… Remember, I have to use words and there is a danger that you may misunderstand. When I say remain with your inner perfection you may be worried because sometimes you may feel that you are not perfect – then remain with your imperfection. Imperfection is also perfect! Nothing is wrong in it, remain with it. Don’t move away from this moment; here and now is the whole existence. Everything that has to be accomplished is to be accomplished here and now, so whatsoever is the case, even if you feel imperfect – beautiful, be imperfect! That’s how you are, that is your suchness. You feel sexual – perfect, feel sexual; that’s how you are, that’s how existence meant you to be. Sad – beautiful, be sad, but don’t move from the moment. Remain with the moment and, by and by, you will feel that the imperfection has dissolved into perfection, the sex has dissolved into the inner ecstasy; the anger has dissolved into compassion.In this moment, if you can be your total being this moment, then there is no problem. This is the supreme accomplishment. It has no hope, it need not have. It is so perfect there is no need for hope. Hope is not a good situation; hoping always means something is wrong with you – that’s why you hope for the “against,” for the opposite. You are sad and you hope for happiness; your hope says that you are sad. You feel ugly and you hope for a beautiful personality; your hope says you are ugly. Show me your hope and I can tell you who you are because your hope immediately shows who you are: just the opposite. Drop hope and just be. At first, if you try this, just being, this will happen:At first a yogi feels his mind is tumbling like a waterfall; in mid-course, like the Ganges it flows on slow and gentle. In the end, it is a great vast ocean where the lights of son and mother merge in one.If you are being here and now, the first satori will happen, the first glimpse of enlightenment. And this will be the situation inside: At first a yogi feels his mind is tumbling like a waterfall… because your mind starts melting. Right now it is like a frozen glacier. If you remain loose, natural, true to the moment, authentically here and now, the mind starts melting. You have brought sun energy to it, this very being in the here and now conserves such a vast energy. Not moving into the future, not moving into the past, you have such tremendous energy in you, that the very energy starts melting the mind.Energy is fire; energy is of the sun. When you are not moving anywhere, completely still, here and now, no going, converging upon yourself, all leakage stops – because leakage is through desire and hope. You leak because of the future. Leakage is because of motivation: “Do something, be something, have something. Why are you wasting your time sitting? Go! Move! Do!” Then there is leakage. If you are simply here, how you can leak? Energy converges, falls back upon you, it becomes a circle of fire, and then the glacier of the mind starts melting.At first a yogi feels his mind is tumbling like a waterfall… Everything falls. The whole mind is falling, falling, falling – you may be scared. Near the first satori, the master is needed very, very deeply and intimately, because who will tell you, “Don’t be afraid; it is beautiful – fall.”Just the word fall and fear comes in because falling means falling into an abyss, losing your ground, moving into the unknown. And falling carries a sense of death – one becomes afraid.Have you gone to some mountain, a high peak, and from there looked into the abyss, down into the valley? Nausea, trembling, fear, come in as if the abyss is death and you can fall into it. When the mind melts everything starts falling, everything I say. Your love, your ego, your greed, your anger, your hate, all that you have been up to now suddenly starts becoming loose and falling, as if the house is falling apart. You become chaotic: no more order, all discipline falling. You have been maintaining yourself somehow; somehow you were together: forcing a control upon yourself, a discipline. Now, being loose and natural everything is falling. Many things that you have suppressed will bubble up; they will surface. You will find chaos all around; you will be just like a madman.The first step is really difficult to pass through because whatsoever society has forced on you will fall, whatsoever you have learned will fall; whatsoever you have conditioned yourself to will fall. All your habits, all your directions, all your paths will simply disappear. Your identity will evaporate; you will not be able to know who you are. Up to now you knew well who you were: your name, your family, your status in the world, your prestige, your honor, this and that; you were aware of them. Now suddenly everything is melting, the identity is lost. You knew many things, now you will not know anything. You were wise in the ways of the world; they will fall and you will feel completely ignorant.This is what happened to Socrates. That was his first satori moment, when he said, “Now I know only one thing: that I don’t know anything. I have only one knowledge: that I am ignorant.” This is the first satori.Sufis have a particular term for this man, this type of man, who comes to this state; they call him mast, they call him the madman. He looks at you without looking at you. He roams around not knowing where he is going. He talks nonsense. He cannot keep a relevant coherence to his talk. One word and then a gap; then another word absolutely unrelated; one sentence, then another sentence not connected at all: no coherence, all consistency is lost. He becomes a contradiction; you cannot rely on him.For these moments a school is needed, where people can take care of you. Ashrams came into existence because of this, because this man cannot be allowed in society, otherwise they will think he is mad and they will force him into a prison or a madhouse, and they will try to treat him. They will try to bring him down, back to his normal state – and he is growing! He has broken all the chains of the society; he has become a chaos – hence my insistence on chaotic meditations. They will help you come to this first satori. From the very beginning you cannot sit silently; you can befool, but you cannot sit, that is not possible. That can happen only in the second satori.In the first satori you have to be chaotic, dynamic; you have to allow your energies to move so that all straitjackets around you are broken and all chains are thrown away. You become for the first time an outsider, no longer part of the society. A school is needed where you can be taken care of. A master is needed who can say to you, “Don’t be afraid,” who can tell you to fall easily, to allow it to happen, not to cling to something because that will only delay the moment – fall! The sooner you fall, the sooner madness will disappear; if you delay, then the madness can continue for long.There are millions of mad people in madhouses around the world who are not in fact mad, who needed a master, who don’t need a psychotherapist. They have attained their first satori, and all the psychotherapies are forcing them back to be normal. They are in a better situation than you; they have reached a growth, but the growth is so outlandish. It has to be so in the beginning – they are passing through the first satori, and you have made them guilty. You say, “You are mad,” and they try to hide it and they try to cling, and the longer they cling the longer the madness will continue.Only just recently a few psychoanalysts, particularly R. D. Laing and others, have become aware of the phenomenon that a few mad people have not fallen lower than the normal, really they have gone beyond the normal. Just a few people in the West, very perceptive people, have become aware of it – but the East has always been aware, and the East has never suppressed mad people. The first thing the East will do: the mad people have to be brought to a school where many people are working and where a living master is. The first thing is to help them to attain a satori.Mad people have been highly respected in the East; in the West they are simply condemned, forced to have electric shocks, insulin shocks, forced somehow, even if their brains are destroyed –now there are surgical things going on. Their brains are operated on and a few parts of the brain are removed. Of course then they become normal, but dull, idiotic, their intelligence is lost. They are no longer mad, they will not harm anybody; they will become a silent part of the society – but you have killed them without knowing that they were reaching a point from where a man becomes superhuman. But of course, the chaos has to be passed through.With a loving master and a loving group of people in a school, in an ashram, it passes easily. Everybody takes it easily, helps it; one moves to the second stage easily. This has to happen because all order is imposed on you, it is not real order. All discipline is forced on you; it is not your inner discipline. Before you attain to the inner, the outer has to be dropped; before a new order is born, the old has to cease. There will be a gap. That gap is madness. One feels like tumbling, falling like a waterfall into the abyss, and there seems to be no bottom to it.…in mid-course… If this point is passed, if the first satori is lived well, then a new order arises that is from within, that comes from your own being. Now it is no longer of the society. It is not given to you by others; it is not an imprisonment. Now a new order arises which has a quality of freedom. A discipline comes to you naturally; it is of your own. Nobody asks about you, nobody says, “Do this!” You simply do the right thing.…in mid-course, like the Ganges it flows on slow and gentle… The tumbling, the roaring waterfall has disappeared, the chaos is no more. This is the second satori. You become like the Ganges, flowing gently, slowly; not even a sound is created. You walk like a bridegroom, silently, gracefully. An absolutely new charm happens to your being: grace, elegance. This is the stage, the second stage, in which we have caught all the buddhas in the statues; because the third cannot be caught, only the second or the first.All the buddhas and Jaina tirthankaras… Go and look at their statues: the elegance, the grace, the subtle feminine roundness of their bodies. They don’t look masculine, they look feminine; a roundness, their curvature is feminine. That shows their inner being has become very slow, very gentle: nothing of aggression in them.Zen masters: Bodhidharma, Rinzai, Bokuju have been pictured in the first state. That’s why they are so ferocious. They look like roaring lions; they look like they will kill you. If you look at their eyes, their eyes are volcanoes, fire jumps at you; they are like shocks. They have been pictured in the first satori state for certain reasons. Zen people know that the first is the problem; and if you know Bodhidharma in this state, when the same state happens to you, you will understand – don’t be afraid, even to Bodhidharma… But if you have been always watching buddhas and tirthankaras in their silent and slow flowing rivers and their feminine grace, you will become very much afraid when ferociousness comes to you, when you become like a lion – exactly, one starts roaring. You become a waterfall – tremendous!That’s why in Zen the ferocious state has been pictured more and more. Of course there were buddhas in the shrine, but that is the next state. And that is not a problem at all; when you become silent there is no problem. In India the second stage has been too much emphasized and that became a barrier because one should know from the very beginning how things are. A buddha is already an accomplished being. It can happen to you, but in the gap from you to a buddha, something else is going to happen, and that is complete madness.What happens when you accept all madness, you allow it? – it subsides by itself. The old order goes; society forced, simply evaporates. Old knowledge is no longer there; all that you knew about the scriptures is no longer there. There is a Zen monk burning all scriptures – his picture is one of the most famous pictures. That comes in the first state. One burns all the scriptures, one throws away all knowledge; everything that has been given to you looks rubbish, rot. Now your own wisdom is arising; there is no need to borrow it from anybody. But it will take a little time, just like a seed takes time to sprout.If you can manage to pass through the chaotic state, then the second follows very, very easily, automatically, on its own accord. You become silent, everything has calmed down, just like the Ganges when it comes to the plains. In the hills it is roaring like a lion, falling from great heights into depths, much turmoil; and then it comes to the plains, leaves the hills. Now the terrain changes, now everything flows silently. You cannot even see whether it is flowing or not; everything moves as if it is not moving, at ease.Attain to inner accomplishment, innate, with no hope: not going to any goal, not in any hurry, no haste, just enjoying each moment …like the Ganges it flows on slow and gentle…This second stage has the quality of absolute silence, calm quietude, tranquility, collectedness, at-home-ness, rest, relaxation.And then: …in the end, it is a great vast ocean where the lights of son and mother merge in one. Then suddenly, flowing silently, it reaches to the ocean and becomes one with the ocean – vast expanse, no boundaries. Now it is no longer a river, now it is no longer an individual unit, now there is no ego.Even in the second stage there is a very, very subtle ego. Hindus have two names: one they call ahankar, ego – that’s what you have. The second they call asmita, am-ness – not ego. When you say, “I am,” not the “I” but simply “am,” am-ness, they call it asmita. It is a very, very silent ego. Nobody will feel it, it is very passive, not aggressive. It will not leave any trace anywhere, but it is still there. One feels one is. That’s why it is called the second satori: the Ganges is flowing silently of course, at home, at peace, but still it is; it is asmita, it is am-ness. The “I” has dropped and all the madness of the I has gone; the aggressive, the ferocious I is no longer there, but a very silent am-ness follows because the river has banks and the river has boundaries. It is still separate; it has its own individuality.With the ego, personality drops, but individuality remains. Personality is the outer individuality. Individuality is the inner personality. Personality is for others; it is a showroom thing, a display. That has dropped; that is the ego. But this inner feeling of, “I am” or rather “am,” is not for display; nobody will be able to see it. It will not interfere with anybody’s life; it will not poke its nose into anybody’s affairs. It simply moves, but it is still there because the Ganges exists as an individual.Then the individuality is also lost. That is the third word: atma. Ahankar is ego, the I-ness; the “am” is just a shadow to it, the “I” is focused. Then the second state, asmita: the “I” has dropped; now the am-ness has become the total, not a shadow. And then atma: now the am-ness has also dropped.This is what Tilopa calls no-self. You are, but without any self; you are, but without any boundaries. The river has become the ocean; the river is in the ocean, it has become one with it. The individuality is no longer there, no boundaries, but the being exists as a nonbeing. It has become a vast emptiness. It has become just like the sky.The ego was like black clouds all over the sky. The am-ness, asmita, was like white clouds in the sky. And atma is like without clouds, only the sky has remained.…in the end, it is a great vast ocean where the lights of son and mother merge in one. Where you come back to the original source, the mother, the circle is complete. You have come back home, dissolved within the original source. The Ganges has come to the Gangotri, the river has come to its original source: the complete circle. Now you are, but in such a totally different sense that it is better to say that you are not.This is the most paradoxical state because it is most difficult to bring it into language and expression. One has to taste it. This is what Tilopa calls Mahamudra: the great orgasm, the ultimate orgasm, the supreme orgasm. You have come back from where you had gone. The journey is over, and not only is the journey over, but the journeyman is also no more. Not only is the journey over as a path, the goal is also over.Now nothing exists and everything is.Remember this distinction. A table exists, a house exists, but God is; because a table can go into nonexistence, a house can go into nonexistence, but the God cannot. So it is not good to say that God exists; God simply is. It cannot go into nonexistence. It is pure isness. This is Mahamudra.All that exists has disappeared, only isness remains.The body has disappeared; it existed. The mind has disappeared; it existed. The path has disappeared; it existed. The goal has disappeared. All that existed has disappeared; only purity of isness is there: an empty mirror, an empty sky, an empty being. This is what Tilopa calls Mahamudra. This is the supreme, the last; there is no thing beyond it. It is the very beyond-ness.Remember these three stages; you will have to pass through them. Chaos, everything gone topsy-turvy: you are no longer identified with anything, everything has become loose and fallen apart – you are completely mad. Watch it, allow it, pass through it, don’t be scared; and when I am here you need not be scared. I know it will pass, I know it always passes, I can assure you. And unless it passes, the grace, the elegance, the silence of a buddha will not happen to you.Let it pass. It will be a nightmare, of course, but let it pass. With that nightmare all your past will be cleansed. It will be a tremendous catharsis. All your past will pass through a fire, but you will become pure gold.Then comes the second state. The first has to be passed through because you may get scared and run away from it. The second also has a different kind of danger, an absolutely different kind. The first has to be passed; you have to be aware that it will pass. It will pass; just time and trust are needed. The second has a different kind of danger: you would like to cling to it because it is so beautiful; one would like to be in it forever and ever. When the inner river flows calm and quiet, one wants to cling to the banks; one wants not to go anywhere else, it is so good. In a way it is a greater danger.A master has to assure you that the first will pass, and a master has to force you so that you don’t cling to the second. If you do cling, Mahamudra will never happen to you. There are many people clinging to the second, they are hanging on. There are many people who are hanging onto the second; they have become so much attached to it. It is so beautiful one would like to fall in love with it; one falls automatically. Be aware! Remain aware that it too has to be passed. Watch, so that you don’t start clinging.If you can watch your fear with the first and your greed with the second… Remember, fear and greed are two aspects of the same coin. In fear you want to escape from something, in greed you want to cling to it, but they are both the same. Watch fear, watch greed and allow the movement to continue; don’t try to stop it. You can become stagnant; then the Ganges becomes not a flowing thing, but a stagnant pool. Howsoever beautiful, it will soon be dead. It will become dirty, it will dry up and soon all that was gained will be lost.Go on moving. The movement has to be eternal – keep it in mind. It is an endless journey, more is always possible; allow it to happen. Don’t hope for it, don’t ask for it, don’t go ahead of yourself, but allow it to happen because then the third danger comes when the Ganges falls into the ocean – and that is the last because you will be losing yourself.That is the ultimate death. It appears like the ultimate death. Even the Ganges shudders, trembles before it falls; even the Ganges looks backward, thinks of past days and memories, and the beautiful time on the plains and the tremendous energy phenomenon in the hills and the glaciers. At the last moment, when the Ganges is going to fall into the ocean, it lingers a little while longer. It wants to look back, think memories, beautiful experiences. That has to be also watched. Don’t linger!When the ocean comes, allow: merge, melt and disappear.Only on the last point can you say goodbye to the master, never before it. Say goodbye to the master and become the ocean. But up to that moment you need the hand of somebody who knows.There is a tendency in the mind to avoid an intimate relationship with the master; that’s what becomes a barrier to taking sannyas. You would like to remain uncommitted; you would like to learn, but you would like to remain uncommitted. But you cannot learn, that is not the way; you cannot learn from the outside. You have to enter the inner shrine of a master’s being. You have to commit. Without it you cannot grow.Without it you can learn a little bit from here and there, and you can accumulate certain knowledge. That will not be of any help; rather it may become an encumbrance. A deep commitment is needed, a total commitment in fact, because many things are going to happen. If you are outside on the periphery, just learning as a casual visitor, then much is not possible because what will happen to you when the first satori comes? What will happen to you when you go mad? And you are not losing anything when you commit to a master because you don’t have anything to lose. By your commitment you are simply gaining; you are not losing anything because you don’t have anything to lose. You have nothing to be afraid of. But still, still one wants to be very clever, and one wants to learn without commitment. That has never happened because it is not possible.So if you are really authentically sincerely a seeker, then find someone with whom you can move in a deep commitment, with whom you can take the plunge into the unknown. Without it you have wandered for many lives and you will wander again. Without it the supreme accomplishment is not possible. Take courage and take the jump.Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The Venerable Master said:The Supreme Tao is formless, yet it produces and nurtures heaven and earth.The Supreme Tao has no desires, yet by its power the sun and moon revolve in their orbits.The Supreme Tao is nameless, yet it ever supports all things.I do not know its name but for title call it Tao.The Classic of Purity is one of the most profound insights into nature. I call it an insight, not a doctrine, not a philosophy, not a religion because it is not intellectual at all; it is existential. The man who is speaking in it is not speaking as a mind, he is not speaking as himself either. He is just an empty passage for existence itself to say something through him.That’s how the great mystics have always lived and spoken; these are not their own words. These mystics are no more, they have disappeared long before. These words are the whole pouring through them. Their expressions may be different, but the source is the same. The words of Jesus, Zarathustra, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Krishna, Mohammed are not ordinary words; they are not coming from their memory, they are coming from their experience. They have touched the divine and the moment you touch the divine you evaporate, you cannot exist anymore. You have to die for God to be.This is a Taoist insight. Tao is another name for God, far more beautiful than God because God, the word God, was exploited too much by the priests. They have exploited in the name of God for so long that even the word has become contaminated – it has become disgusting. Any man of intelligence is bound to avoid it because it reminds him of all the nonsense that has happened on the earth down the ages in the name of God, in the name of religion. More mischief has happened in the name of God than in any other name.Tao in that sense is tremendously beautiful. You cannot worship Tao because Tao does not give you the idea of a person. It is simply a principle, not a person. You cannot worship a principle – you cannot pray to Tao. It will look ridiculous, it will be utterly absurd, praying to a principle. You don’t pray to gravitation, you cannot pray to the theory of relativity.Tao simply means the ultimate principle that binds the whole existence together. Existence is not a chaos – that much is certain. It is a cosmos. There is immense order in it, intrinsic order in it and the name of that order is Tao. Tao simply means the harmony of the whole. No temples have been built for Tao; no statues, no prayers, no priests, no rituals – that’s the beauty of it. Hence I don’t call it a doctrine, nor do I call it a religion, it is a pure insight. You can call it dharma; that is Buddha’s word for Tao. The word in English that comes closer or closest to Tao is Nature with a capital N.This profound insight is also one of the smallest treatises ever written. It is so condensed – it is as if millions of roses have been condensed to a drop of perfume. That’s the ancient way of expressing truth: because books were not in existence, people had to remember it.It is said that this is the first mystic treatise ever written down as a book. It is not much of a book, not more than one and a half pages, but it existed for thousands of years before it was written. It existed through private and personal communion. That was always the most significant way to transmit truth. To write it down makes it more difficult because then one never knows who will be reading it; it loses all personal contact and touch.In Egypt, in India, in China, in all the ancient civilizations, for thousands of years the mystic message was carried from one person to another, from the master to the disciple. And the master would say these things only when the disciple was ready, or he would say only as much as the disciple could digest. Otherwise words can also produce diarrhea, they certainly do produce it – our century suffers very much from it. All the mystics for centuries resisted writing down their insights.This was the first treatise ever written; that is its significance. It marks a certain change in human consciousness, a change which was going to prove of great importance later on because even though it is beautiful to commune directly, person to person, the message cannot reach many people; many are bound to miss. Yes, it will not fall into the wrong hands, but many right hands will also remain empty. And one should think more of the right hands than of the wrong hands. The wrong people are going to be wrong whether some profound insight falls into their hands or not, but the right people will be missing something which can transform their being.Ko Hsuan, who wrote this small treatise, marks a milestone in the consciousness of humanity. He understood the significance of the written word, knowing all its dangers. In the preface he writes: “Before writing down these words I contemplated ten thousand times whether to write or not because I was taking a dangerous step.” Nobody had gathered that much courage before.Ko Hsuan was preceded by Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu. Even they had not written anything; their message was remembered by their disciples. It was only written after Ko Hsuan took the dangerous step. But he also says, “Ten thousand times I contemplated,” because it is no ordinary matter. Up to that moment in history no master had ever dared to write anything down, just to avoid the wrong people.Even a man like Buddha contemplated for seven days before uttering a single word. When he attained enlightenment, for seven days he remained absolutely silent, wavering about whether to say anything or not. The question was: Those who cannot understand, what is the point of saying to them such profound insights? They will misunderstand, they will misinterpret, they will do harm to the message. Rather than allowing the message to heal them, they will wound the message itself – they will manipulate the message according to their minds and their prejudices. Is it right to allow the message to be polluted by foolish, mediocre and stupid people?Buddha was hesitant, very hesitant. Yes, he also thought of the few people who would be able to understand. But he could also see that: “Those people who will be able to understand my words will be able to find truth on their own because they cannot be ordinary people, they will be super-intelligent people, only then will they be able to understand what I am saying to them. If they can understand my words they will be able to find their own way, they will be able to reach the truth on their own, so why bother about them? Maybe it will take a little longer for them. So what? – because there is eternity, time is not short. But the message, once it gets into the wrong hands, will be corrupted forever.” He was hesitant even to utter the message.I can understand Ko Hsuan’s contemplating over the matter ten thousand times – whether to write it down or not – because when you say something to people, if they are stupid people, they are bound to forget it very soon. If they are mediocre people they will not bother even to listen; they won’t care. But once it is written down then they will read it, study it; then it will become part of their schools, colleges and universities and stupid scholars will ponder over it and they will write great scholarly treatises on it. People who know nothing will be talking about it for centuries and the truth will be lost in all that noise that scholars make – they will argue for and against.It is said that once a disciple of the Devil came running to him and he said, “What are you doing sitting here under this tree? Have you not heard? – one man has found truth! We have to do something and urgently because if this man has found truth, our very existence is in danger, our very profession is in danger. He can cut our very roots!”The old devil laughed. He said, “Calm down, please. You are new, that’s why you are so disturbed by it. Don’t be worried. I have got my people, they have already started working.”The disciple asked, “But I have not seen any of our people there.”The Devil said, “I work in many ways. Scholars are there, pundits are there, philosophers are there, theologians are there. Don’t be worried. They will make such noise for and against, they will create so much argumentation that the still small voice of truth will be silenced by them. We need not worry. These scholars and pundits and these professors are my people: I work through them – they are in my service, they are my secret agents. Don’t be worried. You may not have seen my well-known disciples there because I cannot go directly, I have to go in disguise. And I have arrived there and my people have started working – they have surrounded the person. He cannot do any harm. And soon he will be dead – he is old – and then my people will be his apostles, his priests and they will manage the whole affair.”Priests are in the service of the Devil, not in the service of God. The so-called great scholars who go on and on with logic-chopping, hair-splitting arguments are in the service of the Devil, not in the service of God.Once you write down something you are giving a chance to these people; they will jump upon the opportunity, they won’t miss the opportunity. They will mess the whole thing up, they will create great confusion around it. That is their expertise.Hence I can understand Ko Hsuan contemplating ten thousand times whether to write it or not. But finally he decided to write and I think he did the right thing. One should never be afraid of darkness. Light, howsoever small, is far more powerful than darkness howsoever big, howsoever old. In fact, darkness has no power, light has power.These words are powerful words. And the way mystics speak the truth, it is almost beyond the scholars; they really cannot destroy its beauty. In fact, they cannot even touch its truth. It is impossible for them for the simple reason that the mystics speak in a paradoxical language, they don’t speak logically. Hence they are beyond the grasp of the scholars. The scholars can only see contradictions in words because the scholar functions through logic and all the mystic expressions are paradoxical – illogical or supra-logical. And particularly Taoist sayings are superb in that way – nobody has been able to transcend their paradoxes. Even in this small treatise you will come across paradoxes almost in every sentence, in every utterance – that too has to be understood.Why do mystics speak in paradoxes? To remain unavailable to the scholars. The paradox can be understood only by a meditator; it can never be understood by a person who lives in the head, in the mind. Unless you have tasted something of the no-mind, you cannot understand a paradox. That is a safeguard, that is an inbuilt safeguard: speak paradoxically, speak as if you are almost mad.Once a journalist came to see George Gurdjieff. He was drinking his morning tea. He always avoided journalists because they are the most stupid people around and his way of avoiding them was unique. He asked the woman disciple who was pouring tea for him, as the journalist sat by his side, “What day is it today?”And the woman said, “Today is Saturday.”And Gurdjieff became so angry that he went into a rage and threw the cup on the floor. The cup was shattered into thousands of pieces. The journalist became very afraid – because it was Saturday.And Gurdjieff said, “You always go on talking nonsense to me! Just the other day you were telling me that it was Friday and now today it is Saturday? How can it be? How can Saturday come after Friday?”The journalist thought this man was mad. He simply escaped without even saying goodbye and Gurdjieff had a good laugh. The woman disciple was very shocked. She was new; she did not know that this was his way of avoiding the wrong people. She said, “But why did you become so angry?”He said, “You will understand if you remain here a little longer. Now this man will never come back; for his whole life I have put him off. And he will go and spread rumors about me to his professional colleagues, so not only has he been thrown out, many more who may have bothered me will never come here.”He was thought to be a madman, utterly mad.The paradoxical statements of the mystics have a purpose. The purpose is so that the scholars avoid them. The moment scholars come across a mystic, deep down they know that the man is mad – they won’t bother about such a man. Secondly: the paradox is the only way to indicate something that is really true. Logic is always half, it never takes in the whole, it cannot take in the whole. Life consists of polarities: just as electricity consists of positive and negative poles, the whole of life consists of polarities. And polarities are only apparently opposite to each other; deep down they are not opposite to each other. Deep down, for those who understand, for those who have the intelligence to see so deeply, they are not opposites, they are complementaries.But for that you will need a deep experience of meditation; using only the mind won’t help. The mind will say, “These are contradictory statements. This man is saying one thing at the beginning of the sentence and by the time he ends the sentence he has uttered just the opposite.” But the mystic knows what he is doing: he is trying to put the whole truth in it. But the whole truth can be understood only by a person who has tasted something of the whole.The mind always splits things: it divides, it separates, it functions like a prism. When a white sunray passes through the prism it becomes divided into seven colors. That’s how a rainbow is created: it is created by very small drops of water hanging in the air; those drops of water function like prisms and the sun rays passing through them become divided into seven colors. The mind is a prism: it divides everything into many. The truth is one, but if you look through the mind everything appears to be many. And the mystic’s way of saying things is such that he wants to put all the colors of the rainbow back together again as they were in the very beginning before passing through the prism.Because of this paradoxical way of expression, scholars avoid the mystics. People who live in the mind cannot comprehend them; it is a safeguard. That’s how such beautiful treatises have survived for centuries.Ko Hsuan is simply writing it, remember; he is not the creator of the treatise. He has also experienced the same truth because the truth is always the same whoever experiences it. Whenever one experiences it, it is always the same, it does not change; time makes no difference. But what he is saying has been transferred by word of mouth for centuries, maybe for thousands of years. That’s why we don’t exactly know whose words they are.He simply says:The Venerable Master said…Who is this master? Nothing is said about him. Perhaps the master simply represents all the masters of the past and all the masters of the present and all the masters of the future. Maybe it simply represents the essential wisdom – not any particular person, but simply the principle.Nothing is known about Ko Hsuan, nothing at all. Hence for at least a few centuries it had been thought that these words belonged to Lao Tzu. But Lao Tzu has a different way of speaking, a totally different way; these words can’t be coming from Lao Tzu. We have gone into the words of Lao Tzu; he is even more mad than Ko Hsuan, he is even more mystical. And it is a well-known fact that he never wrote anything other than Tao Te Ching and that too he wrote under pressure, at the last moment, when he was leaving China to die in the Himalayas.He had decided to die in the mountains and one cannot find a more beautiful place to die than the Himalayas – the silence of the Himalayas, the virgin silence, the beauty, nature in its most profound splendor. So when he became very old he said to his disciples, “I am going to the Himalayas to find a place where I can disappear into nature, where nobody will know about me, where no monument will be made in honor of me, no temple, not even a grave. I simply want to disappear as if I had never existed.”When he was passing through the country he was stopped at the border because the king had alerted all the borders and ordered that “If Lao Tzu passes out of the country through any gate, he should be prevented unless he writes down whatsoever he has experienced.” His whole life he had avoided it. In the end, it is said because he was caught on the border and they wouldn’t allow him to go to the Himalayas, he stayed in a guard’s hut for three days and just wrote down the small treatise Tao Te Ching.So it cannot be that The Classic of Purity belongs to Lao Tzu. But because nothing much is known about Ko Hsuan, people used to think that they must be words of Lao Tzu, and that Ko Hsuan must have been a disciple of Lao Tzu who has simply written them down – the notes of a disciple. That’s not so. Ko Hsuan himself was a master in his own right.In his preface to this small treatise he says a few things which have to be remembered. First he says: “When I attained union with Tao I meditated upon this insight ten thousand times before writing it down.” He says, “When I attained union with Tao…” He is not just a disciple, he is an enlightened man. He has attained union with Tao. He is not writing notes heard from somebody else, he has experienced it himself. He has attained the ultimate union with Tao: he has become one with nature.He says in the preface, “It is only for the seekers of the beyond; the worldly cannot understand it.” He makes it clear in the preface that if you are a worldly man it is better not to bother about it. Don’t waste your time, it is not meant for you, it will not be of any use to you. It may even confuse you, it may even distract you from your worldly affairs. It is better not to get involved with things in which you are not really interested. It is better not to be accidental.There are many people who are accidental, just by the way. They will meet somebody and they will become interested.Just the other day I received a letter from Amritsar. From the International Hotel in Amritsar a man writes… You will be surprised to know that when I was talking about The Dhammapada, the last series, I mentioned a man, Michael Tomato, who had written to me from a hotel in Bangalore because he came across a sannyasin who told him that in my ashram, in Sufi dancing, his president, Reverend Canon Banana, was being laughed at. He became angry. He wrote a very angry letter to me saying: “This is not good that you should allow such things in your ashram because it is insulting to our great nation of Zimbabwe.”The nation was born just seven days before that and this man, Reverend Banana, had become president just two days before Michael Tomato met this sannyasin – just two days before that – and we have been using the word banana in Sufi dancing for years! In fact, it may be because of our prayers that one of the bananas has become the president – because prayers have their own ways of working miracles.That time I told you that this man was angry and that his name was Michael Tomato and just jokingly I mentioned that soon another letter would be coming to me from a certain Michael Potato. It has come! This letter comes from the Amritsar International Hotel. Two sannyasins are staying there and this man saw them. This man comes from the West, but he has become a converted Sikh. Seeing two orange people he became interested; he introduced himself. And those sannyasins must have wondered when they heard his name, Michael Potato Singh, because now he has become a Sikh. They said, “Wait, we’ve got the tape – listen to it!”He listened to the tape and he thought, “This is a miracle! How did Osho know about me?” So he has dropped his new religion. He is coming here! Soon he will be here.Now these are accidental people. I was just joking, in a way knowing perfectly well that in this big earth there must be someone who is known as Michael Potato, but I was not hoping that so soon, just after one month, we would find him! Now he had become a Sikh, so he dropped Sikhism. He writes: “I have cut my hair and I am coming and I want to be a sannyasin because you are the right man I have been searching for my whole life.”These are accidental people. This is not the way to grow. These people are like driftwood: they simply go on moving with any wave, they are just at the mercy of the winds, having no sense of direction.Ko Hsuan says: “It is only for the seekers of the beyond.” He makes it clear that if you are a seeker of the beyond, if you are ready to risk…because the search for the beyond is risky. It is the greatest adventure, tremendously ecstatic, but not easy at all; it is arduous too. It has its ecstasy, it has its agonies – it has its own cross. Of course, resurrection comes through it, but it cannot happen unless you are crucified. So he makes it clear that it is only for the seekers.One has to be very certain about oneself whether one is a seeker or not. Are you really interested in truth? – because every child is distracted from the very beginning. No child seems to be interested in God, but parents go on forcing the idea of God on every child. If by chance you happen to be born in a family of atheists, then they impose the idea of atheism on you. If you are born in a communist country, then of course communism will be imposed upon you. If not the Bible, then Das Kapital. If not the holy trinity, then the unholy trinity of Marx, Engels and Lenin, but something is bound to be imposed upon you.No parent is loving enough to leave you alone to yourself to grow, to help you, to nourish you and to give you total freedom to be yourself, authentically yourself. Hence there are many people who think they are seekers of God – they are not. Their whole seeking is an imposed phenomenon, a conditioning. And if you are only searching for God because you have been told, you have been continuously told again and again, then the word has become a reality in you but it is not part of you. It is not intrinsic; it has come from the outside. You are just like a parrot – or maybe even parrots are more intelligent than you are.An overly enthusiastic Italian communist finds a parrot who can sing the popular communist song “Bandiera Rosa.” He buys it and takes it home, but after a few days the wife can no longer stand it. The parrot keeps singing the song the whole day long.In a moment of rage she knocks the parrot over and then covers it with a cloth. When the husband comes back she tells him everything.In despair the man lifts the cloth to see how the parrot is.Opening one eye the parrot whispers, “Hey, comrade, are those dirty fascists gone-a?”Even parrots are far more intelligent than so-called human beings. They go on simply repeating clichés that have been handed over to them by their parents and the priests, teachers, schools, colleges and universities. This whole society goes on conditioning you in a certain way and it is natural after twenty-five years of conditioning to forget what you really want to do.The first thing to be decisive about is whether there is a deep longing to know the truth. Are you ready to risk everything for it, even your life if the need arises? If it is so, “Then,” Ko Hsuan says, “these words are for you.” If you are only a worldly person – by “worldly” he means one who is interested in money, power, prestige – then it would be better if you don’t bother about such great things. They are not for you – at least not yet.You have to become fed up with all your so-called worldly desires. First go into those desires. Unless you become tremendously frustrated, unless you see that they are all futile: that whether you succeed or fail you always fail; that whether you have money or you are poor you are always poor; that whether you are a beggar or an emperor you are always a beggar… When that insight dawns on you, only then can you really become a seeker of the beyond. Otherwise, if you pretend to be a seeker of the beyond, you will bring your whole world with you, you will bring all your desires with you.That’s why people think of God, of heaven. It is not that they are interested in God and heaven, they are only interested in power, prestige. Maybe they are afraid of death and out of fear and out of greed they start praying to God. But a prayer that arises out of fear and greed is not prayer at all.A real prayer arises out of gratitude, never out of fear and greed. A real prayer arises out of love for truth, whatsoever it is. Otherwise your worldly desires will be imposed again, be projected onto God, onto heaven.If you look into the descriptions of paradise of different religions and different countries you will be surprised: what they desire is projected. For example, the Tibetan paradise is described as warm – obviously because Tibetans suffer from cold so much that they would like heaven to be full of sun and warmth so that they can at least take a bath every day. In Tibet the scriptures say that it is your duty to take one bath at least every year!The Indian paradise is cool, in fact, air-conditioned. They did not know the word at that time so it is air-cooled. It is bound to be so – India has suffered so much from heat. And you know through your own experience now that all that the Indian mind wants is a little shade and coolness. So the Indian paradise is always full of cool breezes and there are big trees, so big that a thousand bullock carts can rest under a single tree – the Indian idea of shade and coolness.The Tibetan hell is absolutely icy and the Indian hell is full of fire.Now there cannot be so many hells and so many paradises; these are our projections. Whatsoever we desire we project onto heaven and whatsoever we are afraid of we project onto hell. Hell is for others, for those who don’t believe in our ideology and paradise is a reward for those who believe in our ideology – the same worldly things. These are not religious people.In the Mohammedan heaven there are streams of wine. This is very strange: here you condemn wine – it is a sin – and there you reward your saints with wine!All the paradises of all countries are full of beautiful women because they are all created by men, so I have never come across a description of beautiful men. If women…and, of course, sooner or later the Lib women are going to write about their own paradise. They won’t talk about beautiful women, they will talk about beautiful men – henpecked husbands, always following the women like shadows, obedient, etcetera, etcetera, just like servants. That’s how women have been painted by men in their heaven. And they are always young, they never grow old. This is strange!If you look at the idea of God, all the religions think of God as a very, very old man. Have you ever thought of God as a young man? No country has ever thought of God as a young man because you cannot trust young people: they are dangerous and they are a little foolish, too. A wise man has to be very old, so God is very old. But the women he is surrounded with are all very young, in fact, stuck at the age of eighteen; they don’t grow beyond that. Very stagnant! They must be getting tired of remaining eighteen for millions of years!But this is man’s idea. Here the saints renounce women, they renounce sex; they condemn sex, they praise celibacy – and, of course, they are hoping they will be rewarded and paid well. These are our worldly desires coming from the unconscious; you cannot push them away unless you have encountered them, unless you have watched them. You cannot just repress them.Ko Hsuan is right: he says, “The worldly cannot understand it.” They are bound to misunderstand.The new patient comes into the analyst’s office. He is a theologian, a great scholar and a philosopher. He says, “Doctor, I came here because everybody says I think too much of myself.”“Let’s get into this,” says the doctor. “To analyze your problem it is necessary that you tell me your story; it is necessary that you tell me your problem from the very beginning.”“Okay,” says the professor and sitting down continues. “In the beginning all was darkness.”You see? And he has come to tell the analyst, “People think I think too much of myself.” And he really begins from the very beginning! His understanding is bound to remain with him wherever he goes, whatsoever he does. Whatsoever he chooses is going to be from his mind and his mentality.A jealous Italian husband comes home early one night. He finds his wife in bed, smoke hanging in the bedroom. Suspicious, he starts beating his wife.“I swear-a I’m alone!” cries the wife. “Don’t-a beat-a me! You might-a be punished. Remember, up-a there, there is-a someone who knows-a everything!”From the top of the closet a male voice says, “Yes, but the one under the bed knows even more!”How long can you repress? How long can you hide? It is going to come up, if not from the front door then from the back door.Two madmen looked at the clock: it is twelve o’clock.One says, “It is midday.”The other says, “It’s midnight.”The discussion becomes so heated that they decide to ask the director. “Is it midday or midnight, sir?” they ask him.The director looks at his watch and says, “Well, I don’t know – it’s stopped.”In a madhouse you can’t expect the director to be less mad than the other madmen. In fact, he may be the director because he is more mad! He may be the oldest inmate, hence he was chosen to be the director.The father calls his son and asks him, “Is it true that you are planning to leave home as Mother tells me?”“Well, yes,” the boy firmly replies.“Well,” says the father in a serious voice, “when you decide to go, tell me – I’ll come with you!”Ko Hsuan says in his preface: “I received it from the divine ruler of the Golden Gate.”Truth is always a gift, it is not an achievement because all achievements belong to the ego and truth cannot be part of your ego trip. Truth happens only when the ego is dropped, so you cannot say, “I have achieved it,” you can only say, “It was given.” It is a gift. Ko Hsuan is right: he says, “I received it…” Hence, remember, you have to be at the receiving end. You are not to be aggressive about truth. The real seeker is not an achiever, he is not aggressive, he is not masculine. He becomes feminine. He is just like a womb – he receives. He empties himself totally so that space is created to receive.And that’s the whole art of meditation. That’s what we are doing here and for centuries that’s what mystics have been doing and masters have been telling their disciples to do: empty yourself totally, become a nothingness. And the moment you are totally nothing, at that very moment, truth descends in you; you become full of it. First you have to be empty of yourself and then you become full of God, Tao, dharma, or whatsoever name you would like to choose for it.He says: “I received it from the divine ruler of the Golden Gate.” This is a mysterious saying, “the Golden Gate.” That is Taoist way of saying that God is not really a person but a gate, an opening into existence and if you are empty, the door opens within you. It is your ego that is blocking the door, it is you who are blocking the door; except you there is no hindrance. Remove yourself, don’t come in between and suddenly the Golden Gate opens. And it is called golden because the moment you pass through it you are pure gold. The dust disappears, is transmuted, is transformed; it becomes divine.This is the definition of alchemy: transforming dust into the divine, transforming base metal into gold. And it happens simply by becoming a receiver. You have to be utterly a non-entity.Ko Hsuan says: “It was previously only transmitted by word of mouth. Those who will be able to comprehend the meaning will become ambassadors of the divine and enter the Golden Gate.”This small preface says: “Those who will be able to comprehend it, understand it, will become ambassadors of the divine…” Not that they have to become, they will become so naturally, without any effort, effortlessly. They will start radiating godliness, they will start radiating light, they will become luminous. Miracles will start happening through them without any effort.It is said that many miracles happened in Ko Hsuan’s life. They are the same miracles which have been happening to many mystics. For example, it is said he was able to walk on water. The same is said about Jesus. It is not a fact, remember – Jesus is not so foolish, neither is Ko Hsuan so foolish as to walk on water. There is no need to walk on water. Then what does it mean? It is a poetic expression, it is a metaphor. It simply means they were able to do the impossible.And what is the most impossible thing in the world? The most impossible thing in the world is to transcend the world. The most impossible thing in the world is to know oneself. The most impossible thing in the world is to become utterly empty.These are just metaphors, “walking on water”; don’t take them as facts. They are poetic ways of saying certain things.The second thing said about Ko Hsuan is that he knew the secret of the elixir of life: the secret of alchemy. One who knows his consciousness, that consciousness which is just a witness to his thoughts, one who comes to know his state of no-mind, knows absolutely that there is no death for him – no birth, no death – that he has never been born and will never die, he has gone beyond both. This is the secret of life, this is the secret science of alchemy.And the third thing said about him is that he ascended to the beyond in the full light of the day. That is said about Mohammed also and about many others. These are all beautiful ways of expressing the inexpressible. These people have ascended to the ultimate, not by any back door; they have ascended to the ultimate in the full light of the day. Those who had eyes have seen them ascending. Those who had ears have heard the music when they were ascending. Those who had hearts to feel have felt it, their transformation. These people lived on the earth and yet they belonged not to the earth. They were not earthly people, they were utterly unearthly.Don’t be misguided by religious fanatics who go on emphasizing that these metaphors are not metaphors but facts, that these poetic expressions are not poetic expressions but part of history. Be a little more poetic if you really want to understand the mystic way of life.The perfection of the paradise was such that St. Peter got bored. One day, when everyone was sitting together, he said to God, “I am so bored. I’d love to visit earth now and then, wouldn’t you?”“Not at my age,” replies God.Says Jesus, “Once was enough for me.”Says the Holy Ghost, “Not until they stop shooting at doves!”Jesus is called by his father who tells him that he has to sacrifice himself once more for the redemption of mankind.Though rather unwillingly, Jesus says okay.He goes around heaven saying good-bye to all his friends and promising to come back in thirty-three years. Then, followed by all the angels, he comes down to earth.Thirty-three years go by, but there is no sign of Jesus. Finally, after eighty years, an old lean man comes to heaven saying that he is Jesus. He is taken to God who recognizes him immediately and exclaims in astonishment, “What happened? Why did you take so long?”“Well, you see, Father,” replies Jesus, “there is no more capital punishment on earth. I was condemned to a life sentence!”Jesus is walking amongst the people and performing miracles. Suddenly a man falls at his feet and says, “Lord, Lord, cure me, cure me!”“Calm down, son. Have faith and you will be cured.”Jesus moves closer to the man and looks into his eyes, then backs away and signals to Peter to come over. As Peter draws near, Jesus whispers to him, “It’s not going to work, Peter. Pretend we have to go – he’s got cancer!”Reality is reality!Either these miracles are metaphors or coincidences. For example, Lazarus coming back to life may just have been that he was in a coma. It is just a beautiful metaphor because every master calls his disciple to come back to life from his grave – ordinarily you are dead; you have not tasted of life at all. Each of you is Lazarus! And he was dead for only four days; you have been dead for millions of lives. It would certainly be a miracle to call you forth! And if you listen and come back to life it would be just as much a miracle done by you as it would be a miracle done by the master. In fact, you will be doing a greater miracle than the master!The same miracles are described in all the lives of the saints; there are not many differences for the simple reason that every mystic lives such a life that he is in the world and yet not in the world. How to express it? How to say something significant about him? It can be said only through miracles. The language of miracles is the only possible way to express something, at least to hint at something, that is indescribable.But there are foolish people who cling to these things and then they start creating a history. They are not helpful in spreading the divine message; they create obstacles, hindrances. In fact, many more intelligent people would be with Jesus if all these miracles and the nonsense attached to them were dropped. Yes, fools would desert him because they are only with him because of the miracles, but intelligent people would be with him.And that’s my effort here. I want you to be aware, intelligent, conscious. And if you choose to be with me it should not be for any foolish reason.Just three or four days ago I received a letter from Australia from a new sannyasin, a young woman who had read only one of my books, it must have been because of the title, Be Realistic: Plan for a Miracle. So she read that book and she started planning for a miracle: she became a sannyasin and then she started planning to come to India. Her friends laughed, her family laughed. They said, “You are mad!” But she was so convinced that she didn’t listen to anybody. She had been unemployed for many months, had no money and had been borrowing from almost everybody she knew. She could not borrow more money from anybody else. So there was no possibility of her coming to India, but she started planning.And one day at a friend’s house she saw a magazine with an advertisement for a ninety-day trip to India. She looked into it and she said, “It must be Osho who is doing the miracle!” You had to read a book…you had to purchase the book and read the book and then answer a few questions in only twenty lines. She had only six dollars left but she purchased the book – that was the price of the book. She read the book because the final date was coming close; so that day and night she had to read the book. It was one thousand pages long! And then she answered.She writes to me: “I don’t know who was answering. You must have been answering!” Now I have no idea what she is talking about. I have not answered at all – I must say it before it is too late! But she says, “You must have answered because,” she says, “I don’t have any idea what I wrote – I don’t even remember what I wrote.” Naturally because if for three days she was reading day and night, how could she know what she was writing? And how could she remember some stupid book, one thousand pages long? And the book must be stupid because this is not the way to sell a book of any value; this is the way to sell stupid books.And she was determined that it was going to happen. But this is a series of coincidences! She went, handed over the answer because it was the closing date. She was not in her senses about what was happening and who was doing it. The next day while she was going to some friend’s house, on the way suddenly she had the idea that she had to run back home – the telegram had come! She rushed back. Yes, there was a telegram. Now even if I tell her that I had nothing to do with all these things she won’t listen to me. She won’t believe me, she will believe in her own experience, obviously. And the telegram said, “Come immediately and contact us.” She rushed there – she had won the first prize! Now she is coming for ninety days. She says, “Osho, you have done it. You promised and you have done it!” Now I am not guilty at all!Sometimes a coincidence or a series of coincidences are possible which can make a person believe. And when these things happen – and these things can happen, it is such a vast world – people are bound to believe. People are gullible.But my effort here is to make you intelligent, not believers. There are no miracles. There is only one miracle – the miracle I call it – and that is your being utterly empty. The death of the ego is the only miracle; if that happens you have attained the Golden Gate, you have passed through the Golden Gate. You have known what eternity is; you have gone beyond time.Now these small sutras:The Venerable Master said:The Supreme Tao is formless…From the very beginning Ko Hsuan wants you to know that Tao has no form. So you cannot make a statue of Tao, you cannot create a temple around Tao, you cannot create rituals. No priesthood is possible: The Supreme Tao is formless…It is the universal law of existence. You cannot worship, you cannot pray. All your worship is foolish and all your prayers are unheard and will remain unheard. There is nobody to hear your prayers or to fulfill your prayers. Your prayers are your desires in a new form. Watch your prayers – what they are. The garb is religious, the jargon is religious, but nothing has changed; the desires are the same. People are asking for money, power, prestige. Whatsoever you are asking for you are asking for something wrong because there is nobody to give you anything. The very idea of getting by asking is absurd. Be utterly silent.Tao is not the path of prayer, it is the path of meditation.…Tao is formless, yet it produces and nurtures heaven and earth.It does not mean that Tao is indifferent to you; it simply means you cannot worship it, you cannot pray to it. But it goes on nursing you, you are nourished by it; it nurtures you. The whole breathes it. It is the heartbeat of the cosmos, but not a person.The Supreme Tao has no desires…So if you want to have a communion with Tao you will have to drop all desires. People simply go on changing their desires, but they basically remain the same. People go on changing their outer structures of life; they call it character. Somebody smokes, you may not smoke; then you start chewing gum. It is the same stupidity. Or you may stop chewing gum, then you start doing something else. But because you are the same, nothing is going to change. If you go to the moon you will do the same stupid things that you are doing here. Everything will be different and nothing will be different.A couple was captured by a flying saucer from Mars and are taken to the living room of the spacecraft. There they are received by a Martian couple, are offered green drinks and begin chatting. After several drinks, everyone relaxes. The man from earth asks the Martians, “How do you procreate?”“My wife and I will demonstrate for you,” answers the Martian.They go over to a refrigerator-like closet and the female picks up a bottle containing brown liquid and the husband picks up a bottle containing white liquid. They go over to a table where there is an empty jar. Each pours the liquid into the empty jar.“Now we put the jar in this closet,” explains the Martian, “and in nine months we will have another baby. How do you do it on Earth?”So the earth couple demonstrates for the Martians. They take off their clothes and lie down on the floor with the man on top of the woman. As they are coming and going, they notice the Martians are laughing at them.“What are you laughing at?” they ask.“Excuse us,” they answer, “but we find it very funny because that is the same way we make coffee!”You can be here, you can be on the moon, you can be on Mars, you can change outer things – it makes no difference. Either you will make love in a stupid way or you will make coffee in a stupid way, but you will do something stupid!Unless intelligence arises in you, unless your unconsciousness is transformed into consciousness, unless your darkness disappears and becomes light…The Supreme Tao has no desires, yet by its power the sun and moon revolve in their orbits.The Supreme Tao is nameless, yet it ever supports all things.I do not know its name…These are immensely valuable words: I do not know… That’s how the people who know speak. The people who claim that they know are utterly ignorant. The real knower functions out of a state of not knowing.Ko Hsuan says:I do not know even its name but for title call it Tao.But we have to call it something. See the non-fanatic attitude. You can call it anything – XYZ. Tao simply means XYZ. Just because we have to call it something, we call it Tao. If you choose some other name there is no problem.So when Buddhists reached China they were surprised because Taoist mystics simply agreed with them. They said, “Perfectly right! We call it Tao, you call it dharma. It is the same thing because we define Tao as nameless, you define dharma as nameless. We say Tao is formless, you say dharma is formless, so there is no problem. We are only speaking different languages, but we are indicating toward the same truth.”That is one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened in history. When Buddhism reached China there was no conflict, no argumentation, no conversion and yet Buddhists and Taoists met and mingled and become one, absolutely one. It has not happened in the history of Christianity or in the history of Judaism or in the history of Mohammedanism, their history is full of ugliness. It has happened only in the traditions of Buddha and of Lao Tzu: a very rare phenomenon – no argumentation. They simply tried to understand each other and they laughed and they hugged and they said, “Perfectly true!”A Christian missionary went to see a Zen master and he started reading the beatitudes from the Bible. And he said, “Blessed are the meek for theirs is the Kingdom of God.”The master said, “Stop! That’s enough. Whoever has said it is a buddha!”The missionary was utterly dumb. He had come to argue, he had come to convert. He had come to convince the Zen master that Buddha is wrong and Jesus is right. And this man said, “Whosoever has said it – I don’t know who has said it – but whosoever has said it is a buddha. There is no need to read more; that one sentence is enough. You can taste the ocean from anywhere, it tastes the same – it is salty. This one sentence will do!”The same happened in China. Buddhists went there and the whole of China became Buddhist without anybody converting anybody else. Because Taoism was so generous and Buddhism was so understanding, there was no question of converting. The whole idea of converting anybody is ugly, is violent. They never argued – yes, they communed, they nodded at each other’s understanding and they said, “Yes, that’s true. That’s what Lao Tzu also says. That’s what Buddha has said in his own words.”And out of this meeting – which is the rarest in the whole of humanity – Zen was born. Out of the meeting of Buddha and Lao Tzu, out of the meeting of Buddha’s insight and Taoist insight, out of the meeting of dharma and Tao, Zen was born. Hence Zen is a rare flowering. Nowhere else has it happened that way – so silently, without bloodshed, without a single argument. There was no question of argument; the difference was only of language.This is how a truly religious person is. He is not a fanatic – he cannot be.Ko Hsuan says: I do not know its name but for title call it Tao. It is a nameless experience, but we have to call it something so we will call it Tao. That is arbitrary. If you have some other name – God, logos, dharma, truth, nirvana – you can choose from those names; they are all beautiful because it has no name of its own so any name will do.My sannyasins should also have this attitude; this approach should be our approach. You should not be part of any dogma – Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu. You should not belong to any church; that is all childish, political. A religious person is absolutely free from all dogma. Only in freedom understanding grows.My sannyasins have to understand this approach toward life; this is very fundamental. Once you are rooted in it you will start growing. Great foliage will happen to you and great flowering and fulfillment.Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Could you say something about discipline and repression?They are as distinct as the earth and the sky. The distance is so great between the two that it is unbridgeable. Repression is just the opposite of discipline but for thousands of years, repression has been misunderstood and thought to be the same as discipline. It gives a pseudo appearance of discipline.And remember one very fundamental thing: the real is never in danger from the unreal; the real is always in danger from the pseudo. The unreal cannot harm it, but the pseudo can harm it because the pseudo looks like it. It is not it and yet it has the mask of it, the appearance of it.Repression is cheap. Any stupid person can do it – it needs no intelligence to repress. Discipline needs great intelligence. Discipline means awareness. Discipline comes from your innermost core; it is not an imposition from the outside. Nobody can discipline you.The very word discipline is beautiful: it means the art of learning. Hence the word disciple: one who is ready to learn, one who is capable of learning. Learning is an inner process. One has to be always alert, only then can one learn. One has to be awake, only then can one learn. One has to watch all that goes on happening around you and one has to deepen this watchfulness so that you can see even the inner processes of your body, mind, and heart. You have to become a mirror. You have to witness everything within yourself, only then do you learn from them. And that learning brings discipline. Then a deep harmony arises in you because whatsoever is wrong starts falling away from you of its own accord. You are not to drop it. If you have to drop it through effort, then it is repression; if it falls like dry leaves falling from the tree, then it is discipline.Discipline has to be effortless; it has to be out of sheer understanding. Repression has nothing to do with understanding, with learning. Others tell you what to do and what not to do; others give you the Ten Commandments. You have simply to follow, you have to be obedient. And who are these others? They are the powerful people – politically powerful, religiously powerful. They may be the rich people, the people who own the state or the church, the dominant people. They have their vested interests; to safeguard their vested interests they create a certain kind of slavery, a mental slavery. They want people to be obedient, they don’t want people to be rebellious; hence they cannot allow intelligence.Intelligence is basically rebellious. It is radical, it is revolutionary. To be intelligent is the most dangerous thing for those who are in power. Hence every child has to be crippled and paralyzed; no child can be allowed to live his life according to his light. Every child is born intelligent, but twenty-five years of conditioning from the primary school to the university creates a stupid person out of an intelligent child – so much conditioning that the intelligence disappears. He becomes so afraid to say no to anything, he becomes so afraid, so frightened of the crowd that he simply follows like a sheep. He is no longer a man. The only way to do it is to teach him how to repress himself. First he has to repress his intelligence, then he has to repress all that can be a danger to the status quo.For example, every society talks about peace but lives for war. Hence sex has to be repressed because sexually repressed people can be changed into soldiers very easily; there is no problem with it. The sexually repressed person is always ready to fight, he is always on the verge of violence. His sex becomes violence, he loses all tenderness, all loving qualities and the instinct of love becomes perverted; it becomes the instinct for hatred. Up until now all societies have been basically warring societies, always preparing for war; they cannot allow sexual freedom. If a society is sexually free and a person is allowed to live his sexuality totally, then his violence will disappear. Then he will not be ready to do such utterly stupid things as killing people for no reason at all; it will be impossible for him even to conceive. He will ask, “Why? Why should I kill? There seems to be no reason. Just because a few power maniacs want to dominate the whole world we have to be victims and we have to turn the whole world into a chaos?”The sexually free person will be loving and tender – war will become impossible. Unless sex is free, war cannot disappear from the earth.All psychological research shows one thing very conclusively: that weapons are nothing but phallic symbols. Hence societies which are preparing for war are bound to be repressive. Intelligence has to be crippled, sex has to be repressed. All that can make you capable of being an individual has to be discarded. You have to be forced to be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Jaina or a Buddhist for the simple reason that if you are part of a crowd you lose your individuality. You start functioning according to the collective mind – and the collective mind means the lowest mind. The collective mind functions through the lowest common denominator.It is said that the best teacher in the schools, in the colleges, in the universities, is one who can make himself understood, who can help the students understand him in such a way that the most mediocre student is also capable of understanding him. If only the first grade students understand him he is not a good teacher. The third-rate should be capable of understanding him, then he is a good teacher. But to make himself understood by the third-rate he has to fall that low. He has to speak the language of the mob, of the crowd. And the crowd consists of mediocre people.It is because of centuries of conditioning, otherwise it would not have been so; it is a man-made calamity. So many people need not be so mediocre and stupid. They are not born that way, they are manufactured. Individuality has to be effaced, completely effaced because individuals seem to be dangerous to the power holders – individuals will think and they will say “yes” only if they agree with it, otherwise they will say “no.”I have heard…In the Second World War it happened that many people were needed in the army, so all kinds of people were being recruited. Everybody was asked to sacrifice for the country, for the motherland, for the fatherland and all that nonsense. A professor of philosophy was also recruited.The first day the corporal calls the newly enlisted men for their first training and starts shouting, “Platoon, attention! Platoon, halt! Platoon, attention! Platoon, about face! Platoon, halt! Platoon, right face!”The professor steps out of formation and starts to walk away.“Hey! you!” shouts the corporal. “Where are you going?”“To the pub,” says the professor, “I’ll come back when you’ve made up your mind.”Naturally, a man who thinks will see the whole nonsense of it. What is the point of it? Why should one do all these things? But they have a certain reasoning behind it: this is how your intelligence is killed, this is how you are slowly transformed into a robot, into a machine. The man is slowly killed; then you start functioning like a machine. “Right turn!” and you need not think, you simply turn right. Not that you think why – there is no question of why – no question arises in you. In fact, your body functions almost mechanically. Just as you push a button and the light goes on or off or the machine starts functioning. So when the soldier hears “Right turn!” he simply turns right without paying any attention to what is being done by him; it simply happens.I have heard about William James – one of the most significant psychologists that America has contributed to the world. He was sitting with a friend in a restaurant talking about conditioning. It was the talk all over the world because just recently the Russian psychologist Pavlov had discovered the conditioned reflex: that a man can be conditioned so deeply that he starts functioning like a machine.And Pavlov has become the father of Russian psychology and communists have been following his ideas for all these sixty years.William James was talking to his friend, but the friend was not willing to accept the idea so easily – it was so new.At that very moment a retired soldier was passing along the street with a bucket full of eggs. To demonstrate, William James shouted, “Attention!” and the poor old soldier simply went into the posture of attention. The bucket fell and all the eggs were destroyed.The soldier was very angry. He asked, “Who has done this?”William James said, “But we didn’t say that you had to follow the order!”The old soldier replied, “It is no longer a question of following, it has become my nature. Attention means attention! I was in the army for twenty-five years: attention means attention; it does not mean anything else. And it is not a question of my deciding whether to follow or not. It has become automatic.”This is what all the societies have been doing and all the so-called religions have been doing: they have been automatizing you. And this is done through the process of repression – repress everything that can be dangerous to the establishment.That’s why Jesus is crucified and Socrates is poisoned and al-Hillaj Mansoor is killed, for the simple reason that these people were bringing rebellion, these people were releasing others from their bondage, from their mental slavery. They were telling people to be intelligent, to be individuals, to be a light unto themselves. That’s the message of Gautam the Buddha: Be a light unto yourself. Follow your own light, follow your own intelligence. Don’t listen to those with vested interests because they are working for their own purposes. They have no interest in doing anything for your welfare, they are not concerned about it.And once you repress anything, the energy that is being repressed starts turning sour in you. The same energy that would have become a flower becomes a thorn. The same energy that would have helped you to grow becomes stagnant, starts stinking. Energy needs to remain in a flowing state; repression makes your life stagnant.People’s mental age is not more than twelve years. That means at the age of twelve they stopped growing psychologically. They may be eighty years old, but their minds are childish – remember, not childlike but just childish. It is beautiful to be childlike but it is ugly to be childish.And why have they stopped at the age of twelve? For what reason? How does it happen? And this is the average all over the world. It is the same in the East, in the West; it is the same for the Hindu and for the Christian. All the societies in their own ways have been able to repress everybody before the age of twelve – why? Because the age of thirteen is the dangerous age. At that time a person becomes sexually mature; before then all his growth has to be stopped. Once he becomes sexually mature then it will be very difficult to repress him. He will have so much energy that all your measures for repression are bound to fail. So repression has to happen before thirteen.All kinds of nonsense has to be put in people’s minds before they are thirteen; by the time they reach twelve the work should be finished. Then they will only be growing old but not growing up.In an oral exam in biology the teacher asks a student, “Which organ of man’s body once stimulated can grow up to three hundred times its size?”The girl replies, “I am not going to answer such questions!” and she walks out.So the teacher asks the same question of another student who answers, “The pupil of the eye.”“Very good!” replies the teacher. “Now go and tell your friend that she’s going to be disillusioned!”This is the work of repression: if you repress something your mind slowly, slowly becomes colored by it; everything becomes colored by it. A sexually repressed person is constantly concerned with sex. He may talk of celibacy, he may try to be a celibate, but his whole mind is full of sexuality. He dreams of sex and nothing else. And it is not so only when you are young…Mahatma Gandhi writes in his autobiography that even at the age of seventy he was suffering from sexual dreams. That is bound to happen after seventy years of repression. Otherwise, by the time one is seventy, one should be mature enough to drop all these toys. Repression keeps things hanging in the air. The repressed person, even when he is dying, will be thinking of the thing that he has repressed his whole life.I am against repression, I am all for expression.Express yourself. Existence is God’s expression – that’s what creativity is all about. Express yourself and don’t condemn anything. Nothing is wrong with you; all that is, is beautiful. It may need transformation, but it is not wrong. It has not to be dropped, it has to be transformed. And transformation happens through discipline; discipline comes through meditation. Become more aware, watchful. But don’t carry conclusions, a priori conclusions.If you are already convinced that sex is wrong then you cannot watch your mind. How can you watch if you have already concluded? Whenever a sexual thought arises you will shrink back; you will want to throw that idea out of your being. You will immediately jump upon it, you will start struggling and fighting. You cannot be simply watching; you will start evaluating.A meditator has to be absolutely unprejudiced, with no conclusions. He has to be an utterly scientific observer, he simply observes.Take note of whatsoever happens in your mind. Notice – don’t let anything go unnoticed, that’s all. And the beauty of watchfulness is that whatsoever is meaningless starts disappearing of its own accord and whatsoever is meaningful starts growing. Your energies start gathering around the meaningful and they start deserting the meaningless. Then a certain discipline is born, not imposed by anybody from the outside.Many people, particularly Indians, write to me asking why I am not giving a certain discipline to my sannyasins. I cannot – I am not their enemy. I am not in any way here to dominate anybody, I am not here to dictate. I can help you to understand, then it is up to you. Out of your understanding if something happens in your life, good, but if it happens because I have said it then it is ugly. Then sooner or later you will repent, then sooner or later you will take revenge on me.I am your friend. I can help you to be more alert; that’s my whole function. And then whatsoever is good follows so silently, just like your shadow. It makes no noise and it does not give you any ego. As you become more aware, all ego disappears. You become more and more humble, more and more simple, more and more ordinary. And that ordinariness is divine, that simplicity is sacred. But discipline has to arise in you. I can commune with you my understanding, I can share with you my experience, that’s all. Then it is for you to decide what to do and what not to do.My sannyasins have to learn how to live in freedom. I know it is very difficult for you, too – even my sannyasins ask, “If you give us definite rules it will be easier for us to follow them.” I know it will be easier because that’s what you have been doing your whole life. Somebody has been giving you orders and you have been following; that has become your habit. You would like me also to be a father figure, just to tell you that this has to be done and that has not to be done. That makes things cheap and simple. You need not bother deciding yourself, you can simply depend upon me. But that creates dependence and you lose something immensely valuable: you lose your freedom, you lose your independence, you lose your individuality, you lose yourself. And that is not my purpose here.My purpose here is to make you more and more unique individuals, more and more authentic individuals. I would like you to take the responsibility of your life upon your own shoulders totally, so that you become completely free from all kinds of father figures. That brings great blessing and great benediction.The second question:Osho,Please say something to us about Swami Prem Chinmaya's death yesterday.The first thing about Prem Chinmaya’s death is that it was not a death at all. He died very consciously. He died so beautifully! It was rare. Ten years ago when he came to me, I was afraid that he might die before he could taste something of deathlessness because he was suffering from such a disease… It was incurable.But he was a rare individual, unique in many ways. He lived for these ten years by the simple strength of his individuality. His body was not capable of living. The doctors were puzzled, the physicians were unbelieving, but I knew the secret. He was not afraid of death, but he wanted to grow to a certain point before death happened. And he managed it!And the moment he was ready I allowed him to go. I had to tell him, “Now you can drop your body.”A deep communion had started between me and him. Because of illness he was not able to come and see me – and that’s how sometimes blessings come in disguise. Because he was not able to physically see me, slowly, slowly an inner communion was established.The day before yesterday I called Sheela to my room just to tell her, “Now it is time. Chinmaya can go – he is ready. Now there is no need for him to suffer any more in the body. He has done whatsoever was needed, he has attained to a certain integrity. Yes, he will be born once more, but that is a great achievement.”He died from his sixth center. To attain the seventh would have been almost impossible in such a condition; even this was almost a miracle to achieve – to die from such a height.The moment Sheela reached Chinmaya’s room he immediately said, “Did Osho call you to his room?” She was surprised because it is very rare that I call anybody into my room. In these six years I may have called Sheela only thrice, so it was not an everyday thing. And Sheela may be the only one besides Vivek and Laxmi who has ever been called to my room. But immediately he asked, “Did Osho call you to his room? What did he say? What is his message?”A deep communion had started happening lately. And when Sheela told him, “Now Osho has said that you must rest, relax, go deep into yourself and forget about the body”… It was very difficult to forget the body because his body was in immense pain; it was not an ordinary pain. No painkiller was of any help. Great doses of painkillers were being given to him, but nothing was helping him. It was even impossible to help him to go to sleep. The pain was so great that it was keeping him awake.He laughed and he said, “Yes, I will do it!”Thrice in the night, again and again he asked Sheela, “Please tell me again what is the message of my master? I don’t want to forget his message at the last moment.”And whenever she said, “He has said only three words: ‘Rest, relax, go deep into yourself,’” he would say, “Yes now I remember,” and fall asleep again.He told Sheela that he wanted to listen to this series – that he hoped at least he would be able to listen to the first lecture. And he managed! Yesterday he listened to the whole lecture – and fully conscious. With all that pain he listened to the lecture. Then he asked for the last time about the message and then he closed his eyes and disappeared.This is not death, this is something far more beautiful. This is let-go. This is surrender. This is love. He trusted me so totally. He died beautifully, silently, in utter relaxation. I am happy about him.I was afraid that he may not be able to survive even these years, but it was through his sheer determination, his sheer willpower that he survived. The body would have died at least six years ago; for six years he lived a kind of posthumous existence. He could have lived some more – he could have still managed at least for another three months – but I saw no point in it because it was not possible to attain more in this body than whatsoever he had already attained. The body was getting rotten, absolutely rotten, and he was in such a good space that I did not want him to get disturbed as far as his inner space was concerned. I wanted him to leave. There are moments when one should depart. He was in such a positive mood in such a negative body, he was in such a healthy mood in such an unhealthy body.Just the other day when I was telling you a joke about Jesus and the man who was suffering from cancer I was remembering Chinmaya and he was listening! And he must have laughed because he loved jokes.The angels who must have carried him must be puzzled because he is at least six years late.Three Italians arrive in paradise. St. Peter asked the first one, “Who are you?”“I am-a Carletto from Milano.”“Very well, you are on time – come in,” says St. Peter. Then he asks the second one, “And you, who are you?”“I am-a Genaro from Roma.”“You are six hours late. How come?” asked St. Peter.“Well-a, San Pietro, from Roma to here it is-a a long-a journey. I stop-a to rest-a a little on the way.”“And you, who are you?” asked St. Peter to the third man.“l am-a Pasquale from Napoli.”“Pasquale,” says St. Peter, “this is too much! You are two months late!”“Don’t-a get-a angry, San Pietro. I have-a been-a in bed-a sick.”I don’t know what Chinmaya is going to say because six years is really too much! They may have completely forgotten about him. They will have to look in the files – it will take days for them to find out who this man is! But I think by now they must be becoming acquainted with orange people – that they are not reliable people. They come at all kinds of odd hours, they don’t bother about time, they don’t follow any rules, they don’t know anything of discipline!He used to love jokes. He used to write me beautiful jokes. In his memory I will tell you a few jokes.A man enters a police station and says that his wife has disappeared.“When did she disappear?” asked the policeman.“Five or six years ago,” he answers.“Five or six years ago!” exclaims the policeman. “Why didn’t you come earlier?”“Well, you see,” says the man, “I just couldn’t believe it!”In Moscow a Communist chief sees an old man kneeling in front of an icon. He stops and asks him, “Are you praying, old man?”“Yes, I am praying,” answers the old man.“You are praying for us, aren’t you?”“Of course.”“And you pray now for us just as in the old times you were praying for the Czar?”“That’s true,” replies the old man.“Now tell me, were your old prayers of any use?”“Well, yes, they killed the Czar, didn’t they?”And this one he would like the most:It is a bank meeting. The president, heated by the discussion, gets up and starts pacing up and down. His secretary notices that his fly is open so she whispers to him, “Mr. President, the garage is open. One can see everything.”“Ah yes and what can you see? – my new Mercedes?”“No,” replies the secretary, “a Fiat with flat tires!”Yesterday you celebrated his departure. Always remember him. He should be a light to you all. He loved deeply, he laughed deeply. He was a man who knew how to celebrate. Of course the body was not willing at all, but he never bothered about the body.Yesterday he wanted to come to the discourse. I had to stop him, but still he heard the whole discourse. And he said to Sheela, “I wanted to hear the whole series, but when Osho says that I have to go then I have to go. Then this is the time, this is the right time and I don’t want to miss it.” He never wanted to let me down. He loved me tremendously.His name, Prem Chinmaya, means love and consciousness. He was both. He was love and he became consciousness. He died with great love and with great consciousness.It is not death at all, it is samadhi – it is transcendence of death.Soon he will be back and whenever he comes you will know because whenever I see that he is back in the womb of some sannyasin of mine, I will call him Ko Hsuan – in memory of this series which he wanted to hear the whole of, but could only manage to hear the first lecture. So whenever I call any child Ko Hsuan you will know that Prem Chinmaya is back to fool around!The third question:Osho,My husband loves me so totally that he has never thought of another woman in his life and we have lived together almost twenty-five years. I cannot believe it although it is true. What do you say about it?I cannot believe it either!Once there was a man whose name was Unbelievable. He was married to a very nice woman and the two of them were a very contented couple.One day Unbelievable was so sick that he knew he was dying, so he called his wife and said to her, “Darling. I have spent my whole life being called by this idiotic name. Now that I am dying please promise me one thing – not to put this name Unbelievable on my gravestone. You can put a saying or a picture, anything, but not my name. I do not want to carry it into eternity.”So the wife agreed. When he died she put a saying on his gravestone which read “Here lies a faithful husband who never betrayed his wife.”From that day people would pass by and read the gravestone and say, “It’s unbelievable!”Either your husband is dead or insane – or maybe you have stumbled upon a buddha! But what is a guy like Buddha doing with you?At a beach resort two friends are talking. “Of course, all these young, almost-naked girls are a constant temptation for our husbands,” says one.“Maybe,” replies the other, “but I trust mine absolutely. He is madly in love with me.”“Oh,” replies the first one, “and doesn’t he ever have some sane moments?”If a man loves a woman he is bound to love many other people too, or if a woman loves a man she is bound to love many people too because love cannot be confined to one person. If it exists at all, it cannot be confined; if it does not exist at all, then there is no question.Love is like breathing. If a person says, “I breathe only when I am with you and the remaining time I never breathe,” you will not trust him. How can you trust him? He will be dead if he does not breathe when he is not with you. Love is the breath of your soul.But that’s what we have done: for centuries we have conditioned people with such stupid ideas and created so much misery in the world and so much jealousy and so much possessiveness and so much hatred for no reason at all. We have conditioned people with this stupid idea that love can only be between one person and another, one to one. If love is true then it is one to one, otherwise it is untrue. Just the opposite is the truth: if it is one to one it cannot be true. Then it is false, pseudo; then it is only a make-believe. Then the persons are pretending and they are being untrue to themselves – not only to the other person but to themselves, too.If a man is interested in beauty how can he avoid seeing beautiful women and how can he avoid being interested in them? The only way is to kill his interest in beauty totally – but then he will no longer even be interested in his own wife. That’s what has happened: because of this idiotic idea that love has to be one to one, love has disappeared from the earth. The only possible way to manage it is that the husband should not love the wife. He should kill the very instinct of love, he should repress the very idea of beauty, he should forget that beauty exists in the world. But then, remember, he cannot love his wife either. Then he will pretend, then he will go on acting – empty gestures with no content. If a woman is told, “You have to be only in love with your husband and you cannot even feel interested in other people,” she is bound to lose interest in the husband.That’s why husbands and wives lose interest in each other. They are constantly quarreling; they go on finding excuses to quarrel. The real phenomenon is that they are quarreling because their love energies are not being allowed to flower, but they have forgotten about it because the conditioning is so ancient. Their parents were conditioned the same way and their parents’ parents; it comes from Adam and Eve’s time. It has become such a part of us, almost part of our blood, bones and marrow, that we are not even aware of it. It has gone deep into the unconscious.So husbands and wives are constantly angry at each other – sometimes more, sometimes less – and always finding excuses to be angry. And they look sad. They are bound to be sad, they are bound to be angry, for this simple reason. All other excuses are false. I am not saying that they are falsifying knowingly – they are unaware of the whole phenomenon.The simple truth is that a man who is interested in beauty will remain interested in many women; a woman who is interested in beauty will remain interested in many men. Maybe she is more interested in one person – that is possible – maybe she is so interested in one person that she would like to live with that person, but that does not mean that her interest in other people simply disappears. It remains. But if you are going with your husband or with your wife for a morning walk and your husband says to you, “Look at that woman. How beautiful she is!” immediately there is trouble – he cannot say it! There is nothing wrong in it. In fact you should be happy that your husband is still alive and sane, that his tires are not flat yet! You should be happy that he is lively, young, that his eyes can still see beauty, that he can still be sensitive to all that is beautiful. There is no need to feel jealous.But the husband cannot say it; in fact he will pretend that he has not looked at the other woman at all. He has looked, he is looking – he may be using sunglasses only for that purpose! He will find excuses to look at the woman: he may start talking about the beautiful tree. He is not concerned with the tree but with the woman sitting under the tree! And the wife knows perfectly well why he is suddenly interested in the tree; otherwise he is never interested in a tree.The wife cannot say to the husband, “This man looks so beautiful!” The husband will feel offended – his ego is hurt. Everybody carries this idea that “Nobody is more beautiful than me.” Now everybody knows that this is sheer nonsense. Everybody is unique, that is true, but everybody has a few things that nobody else has. Maybe this man has more beautiful eyes than you have; you may have a beautiful nose and his nose is ugly, but what about the eyes? You may have a beautiful face, but what about his whole proportionate body?People should be more intelligent and they should appreciate. They should help each other to appreciate. They should say to each other, “You are right. That woman looks beautiful, that man looks beautiful.” And there is nothing wrong in it. And it is not going to destroy your love; it is, really, enhancing it, strengthening it. To communicate with each other so authentically is always a nourishment for love. Whenever you start pretending, whenever you are forced to pretend, whenever you are forced to say something which you don’t want to say and you are not allowed to say something which you wanted to say – then love starts disappearing, then distance is created.Please help your husband to be alive again, help him to be sane again, help him to be sensitive again. You must have contributed much toward his dullness. This is not good, this is not healthy. This is a state of pathology. If he says that he has never thought of another woman in his life, then remember perfectly well that you are also a woman – nothing more, nothing less. Just by becoming a wife you are not more than a woman. And if he has no more interest in any woman – and this earth is full of beautiful women – then he has nothing to do with you either. Then he is finished with you – or maybe you have forced him to be finished with you.That’s why you say: “I cannot believe it although it is true.” You cannot believe it because you must be thinking of other men – how can you believe it? If you are still thinking of other men, how can you believe that your husband is not thinking of other women?In fact whenever a man and a woman, particularly husband and wife, are making love, then in the bed there are never only two people, there are always four. He is thinking of some other woman and the woman is thinking of some other man. The woman is thinking of Mohammed Ali, he is thinking of Sophia Loren, and then things go well!It is always good for wives and husbands not to make love in the daytime and even in the night to always put the light out so you can have free imagination; you can think of whomsoever you want to think. In fact, there is not much difference – basically there is not much difference. Different models, little differences in the bonnets, etcetera, but basically there is not much difference. When you come to the fundamentals it is the same – and when you are making love to a woman or a man you have come to the fundamentals, you have come to the very rock bottom; now there is no further to go. And this is good about nature: that about fundamentals it is very communist, there are not many differences. All differences are superficial.But nothing is wrong in being interested. Help him – he needs your help because my own experience of thousands of couples is that it is always the woman who destroys the man. The man pretends to be the master, but he is not. And women are so utterly confident of their mastery that they allow him to talk about his mastery, but they don’t bother about it.They say, “You can say it. That’s a good division: you talk about it – that freedom is given to you – but we are the real masters.”One day I went to see Mulla Nasruddin. He was sitting under his bed. I asked Nasruddin, “What is the matter? Why are you sitting under your bed?”He said, “Why not? I am the master of the house, I can sit anywhere!”And then his wife came and she said, “You coward! You come out and I will show you who the master is.”He said, “Nobody can force me to come out! I am the master so I can sit anywhere I like.”Now the wife is very fat and she cannot go under the bed, so I asked the wife, “What are you going to do now?”She said, “You wait! Lunchtime is coming closer – he will have to come out. And under the bed he can go on talking about his mastery; above the bed I know who is the master!”Help your poor husband. You must have destroyed him – not knowingly, unknowingly. Feminine strategies are very subtle. Revive him, bring him back from his grave. And only then will he be interested in you. And he will be grateful to you.All couples should remember that by becoming a couple you are not becoming masters of each other – just companions, friends. And don’t take your relationship for granted; it has nothing to do with possessiveness. Men or women are not things to possess, they are people. They have to be respected. They are not means to be used. Husbands are using wives as means, wives are using husbands as means and that’s why the whole world seems to be so ugly and so insane and everybody seems to be so miserable.There is no need for so much misery – ninety-nine percent of it is our creation. One percent will of course remain because there are the limitations of the body. The body has to become old, sometimes it will be ill, some day it has to die, but that is only one percent. And if ninety-nine percent of misery can disappear, that one percent can be accepted, joyously accepted; there is no problem about it.The last question:Osho,I have heard from many sannyasins that we need to do nothing at all: “Let Osho do it.” Gurdjieff has taught that only through one's own efforts, stemming from a deep wish, does an awareness of being grow.Please speak on this for a sannyasin suffering growing pains.Anubhuti, I know you are not suffering growing pains, not at all, because you are not growing!Anubhuti was in Gurdjieff’s work for many years – not with Gurdjieff himself but with somebody who had been with Gurdjieff. Now to be with a master is a totally different matter. If you had been with Gurdjieff your understanding about Gurdjieff would have been totally different. But you have never been with a living Gurdjieff, you have been with somebody who was with Gurdjieff – and that somebody is not yet enlightened, that somebody is in the same boat as you are. But she – the person Anubhuti was with – has conditioned your mind in a certain way: her own understanding of Gurdjieff.Gurdjieff used to say that even the people who understood him the most had not understood him – even a man like P. D. Ouspensky was rejected by Gurdjieff. In fact, the whole credit goes to P. D. Ouspensky for making Gurdjieff world-famous; nobody would have known about him without Ouspensky. It is through Ouspensky’s books that Gurdjieff became well-known – otherwise he might have died an obscure mystic. It was Ouspensky and his great capacity to philosophize, to argue, to write, that made Gurdjieff one of the greatest known masters of the world.But Gurdjieff was not happy even with Ouspensky’s understanding of him: he used to say that Ouspensky had misunderstood him totally. Ouspensky was of course very angry and finally he departed from Gurdjieff and became antagonistic. Even to mention Gurdjieff’s name in Ouspensky’s presence was an offense. No disciple of Ouspensky was allowed to mention Gurdjieff’s name, although what Ouspensky was teaching was Gurdjieff’s teaching according to him. And if you read Ouspensky and read Gurdjieff you will be more convinced by Ouspensky than by Gurdjieff because Gurdjieff is not a philosopher. He is not a good writer either – his writing is so tedious, so boring that if you can finish his whole book that will show great willpower. I have come across many people who have been deeply interested in Gurdjieff, but they have not read his books; they all have read Ouspensky, Nicoll, and others.Whatsoever you know about Gurdjieff is not about Gurdjieff; you don’t know anything about him. Even the people who lived with him for many years were not capable of understanding him – he was a very mysterious man. And to each disciple he was saying different things because each disciple’s need was different. He said one thing to Ouspensky and another opposite thing to Nicoll because their needs were so different that the same thing could not be said to each of them.To a few people he said, “Surrender everything to me…”It happened once…A very rich Russian woman came to him and the first thing he asked was, “Surrender all your valuable ornaments to me immediately. If you want to be my disciple give all your diamonds and jewels.” And she had really beautiful things with her; she was one of the richest women of those days. She became very afraid – naturally.She went in her room to think over it, “What to do? Is it right to surrender everything?”She was sharing the room with another woman, one of her old acquaintances; she was also rich. She asked about the matter – what to do.The other woman said, “There is no problem – the same thing happened with me. When I came he asked me, ‘Give all your valuables to me first. If you cannot sacrifice that much then forget all about me and my work; then your search is not authentic. You have to pay for it.’ And I immediately surrendered then and there all my ornaments. And do you know what happened?” the woman said. “The next morning he came to my room and gave everything back to me!”So the new woman was very happy. She went and surrendered everything – and Gurdjieff never came back! She waited and waited and she asked the other woman, “What is the matter? He has not come back!”The woman said, “I don’t know what the matter is, but that was what happened with me. I don’t know why he is not coming.”The woman became very distrustful, left Gurdjieff and started spreading rumors about him: “That man is a charlatan. He is exploiting people.”The other woman asked Gurdjieff, “Why did you return everything to me and not to her?”Gurdjieff said, “You surrendered so immediately, without a thought, that there was no need to keep it. She thought over it, she asked you about it. Only when she was certain that her things would be returned to her did she give them to me. That was not surrender at all, that was calculation. And I don’t want calculative people around me. If I had returned those things to her she would have stayed here. So I have killed two birds with one stone: we have that money – we needed it for the work – and we got rid of that stupid woman. And now she is spreading rumors about me, so other stupid people won’t come to me.”You are not going through growing pains, you are simply in a confusion because my work is totally different to Gurdjieff’s work. It is bound to be so. Your problem now is what to do?Anubhuti has entered many groups and left every group because they do not fit with her understanding of work; they are below her. She knows far better – she has worked for years. But my work is totally different.Gurdjieff depended on crystallization and my work is of dissolution; you have to dissolve, not to crystallize. Both are valid means. Through both doors you can enter the ultimate. Either you have to enter through willpower – and that was Gurdjieff’s work – or you have to enter through surrender. That is my work.You ask: “Please speak on this for a sannyasin suffering growing pains.” You are just trying to understand me with your Gurdjieffian jargon. That won’t work. If you want to understand me you will have to put Gurdjieff aside. I love the man, I love him immensely, I respect the man, but my ways are totally different.But old habits die hard…An American teacher is tired of seeing her white students fight with the black ones who are forbidden to use the school bus. So one day she calls them together and says, “Boys, what are all these discriminations? I won’t have any more of this! Remember, we are all equal. Everybody is equal, black or white! So from now on we can think of ourselves as blue! Have you understood? We are all blue!”“And now, the light blues will go on the bus and the dark blues will go on foot!”Old habits…Heaven is in a havoc. God asks St. Peter the reason for it and St. Peter replies, “Well, it’s that man, Adolf Hitler. He is impossible. He keeps shouting at everyone, ‘Jew! Jew!’ But don’t worry, I’ll tackle him myself!”After a while peace and harmony reign in Heaven again. Curious, God asks St. Peter, “How did you do it?”“Well, it was easy,” says St. Peter. “I just gave him a brush and now, instead of shouting, ‘Jew! Jew!’ he is busy writing ‘Jew’ on all the clouds!”Old habits…You have come here, you have waited to come here for months, you have longed to be here, you have disappointed your so-called teacher, you have disappointed your whole group, but you are not here either. You are neither there nor here; you are in a limbo.If you want to work according to Gurdjieff, escape from here as quickly as possible. If you want to work according to me then you will have to learn different ways.You ask: “I have heard from many sannyasins that we need to do nothing at all…” That is the most difficult thing in the world – to do nothing at all. Don’t think it is the easier way; it is the most difficult thing, to do nothing. You can do anything; the problem arises when you are told not to do anything.Sitting silently,Doing nothing,The spring comes,And the grass grows by itself.Gurdjieff’s work is work; my work is not work, it is play. And there is a great difference between the two. Gurdjieff wanted you to force yourself to the extreme; he was a hard taskmaster. I don’t want you to be extremist, I want you to be exactly in the middle. I want you to be exactly in the middle, remember, because only through that is balance possible, is equilibrium possible. You are not asked to do anything at all.You say: and your sannyasins say, “Let Osho do it.” I don’t do anything at all – that is just a way of speaking. I don’t do anything and I want my sannyasins not to do anything either. But their old habits are there so I tell them, “Leave it to me. I will do it!” I don’t do anything at all – I have never done anything in my life. I am the laziest man you can find in the world! Can’t you see? – I don’t even walk a hundred yards! And I have told Laxmi, “In the new place the car has to come on top of the stage!” I am the laziest person in the world – why bother with these steps? I don’t do anything.But my sannyasins are accustomed to doing, so just to help them I say, “Don’t be worried, I will do it. Leave it to me.” That is just an excuse for them to leave doing – and then things start happening on their own. I want you to be natural.Gurdjieff’s work is extremist: it creates tension in you. It depends on friction: it creates friction in you. My work is not work. It is relaxation, it is rest, it is becoming more and more silent, utterly silent. Even if you are doing something you are not to be the doer of it; you have not to take it seriously. Gurdjieff’s work is serious. My work is not serious at all; it is playfulness, it is fun, it is dance, it is song. I don’t call it work. Work is a dirty word, a four-letter dirty word here!But you are misunderstanding me for the simple reason that you have your own understanding. Either you will have to drop this understanding that you are carrying or you will have to drop me. You will have to choose. You cannot ride on both these horses.A beautiful looking tomcat is strolling down the road. On the way to the park, he meets a little white tomcat.“Hey, Tommy, where are you going?” asks the little cat.“I’m going to the park to fuck around!” answers big Tommy.“What’s that? Something like fish?” asks the little one.“Come with me and you’ll find out!” says Tommy.Soon the two tomcats come to the big fountain in the park and there sits Jolly, the most beautiful cat in town, her golden fur shining in the sun. She sees the big tomcat coming closer with a mischievous smile on his cat face. “I’m in trouble!” she exclaims, jumps up and starts running around the fountain.“Come on, boy!” cries Tommy and he starts running after her. One round, two rounds, three rounds. “Come on, faster!” Tommy screams. Round and round the fountain they run.The little white cat, hardly keeping up with Tommy, exhausted, gasping for air, trembling on his little legs, cries: “Hey, Tommy, listen – I’ll fuck one more round and that’s enough for me!”You say, “Gurdjieff has taught that only through one’s own efforts, stemming from a deep wish, does an awareness of being grow.” That is true, but then you have to follow the whole Gurdjieffian method and for that you will need a Gurdjieff. Without a Gurdjieff it is impossible to do it. Without a living master no method, howsoever beautiful it is, works. In fact it is the master, his presence, that is the real thing, not the methods. With an alive master everything works; with a dead master nothing works. Let this be settled forever in your consciousness.That’s why beautiful methods later on are found to be bogus. It is not the methods, it is the master. It is the man behind them, it is the golden touch, the magical touch of the master, it is his charisma that works.When I am gone, then Sufi Dancing will continue and there will be Kundalini and there will be Chaotic Meditation and all the things will continue in the same routine way, but something will be missing – something which was the very soul of them. Then they will be just rituals.That is how the Christian Church goes on, Hindus go on, Mohammedans go on, Buddhists go on. And these methods did work once. They worked when Jesus was alive, they worked when Krishna was alive, they worked when Buddha was alive. Being with a living master is what works; it is not the method.That’s the difference between science and religion: religion is magic. Science depends on method; religion depends on masters, on the presence of those who have become awakened.Here, only if you can get attuned with me, is something possible – even the impossible is possible. But you will have to get attuned with me. Gurdjieff will be a hindrance.If you choose Gurdjieff, choose Gurdjieff, but remember you are choosing a dead master. You can go on repeating his methods your whole life – nothing is going to happen through them.Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is the secret of remaining happy and married?It is impossible! It has never happened – it cannot happen in the very nature of things. Marriage is something against nature. Marriage is an imposition, an invention of man – certainly out of necessity, but now even that necessity is out of date. In the past it was a necessary evil, but now it can be dropped. And it should be dropped: man has suffered enough for it, more than enough. It is an ugly institution for the simple reason that love cannot be legalized. Love and law are contradictory phenomena.Marriage is an effort to legalize love. It is out of fear. It is thinking about the future, about the tomorrows. Man always thinks of the past and the future and because of this constant thinking about past and future, he destroys the present. And the present is the only reality there is. One has to live in the present. The past has to die and has to be allowed to die.The really intelligent person never looks back; he never bothers about the past – that which is finished is finished forever. And he never thinks of the future either because that which has not come yet has not come yet. And he knows that whenever it comes, he will be capable of responding to it, so why ponder over it? Why make ready-made answers to questions which have not even arisen? And all your ready-made answers are going to be irrelevant because life goes on changing. Life remains always a surprise; it is unpredictable.But man thinks that he is being very clever by preparing for the future. You love a woman, you love a man, but what about the future? Tomorrow the woman may fall in love with somebody else. If she can fall in love even with you, why can she not fall in love with somebody else? You know it, you are aware of it: “She has fallen in love even with me so there is every possibility she can fall in love with somebody else.” So something has to be done to prevent her from falling in love with somebody else so that your tomorrow is safe and secure, so that you can use her tomorrow, too. Whether love remains or not, at least you will have the physiology of the woman. You are not much concerned with her soul – because law cannot restrain the soul, but law can create barriers for the body. The body is not beyond its reach. Law can control her; law can condemn her, can punish her in many ways.And another thing: not only are you afraid of the woman, you are afraid of yourself too. If you can fall in love with this woman, you can fall in love with somebody else. You know that your mind is constantly thinking of other women. You know there is every possibility that tomorrow you may lose interest in this woman; in fact it is almost a certainty, not just a possibility, not just a probability. And then you are afraid of yourself. You may escape, you may run.You want to cling because this woman is taking care of you. She has been a comfort to you, she has been a consolation in your life, she has been in many ways a mother to you, a nourishment. You are afraid to betray her. You are afraid of your own mind, of your own unconscious; it can take you anywhere.And you have promised her that you will never leave her, that you will always love her, that you will love her forever, life after life. You are afraid of breaking your promises. Your ego feels that to break those promises will mean only one thing: that you will never be able to forgive yourself. It will remain a heavy weight on you, it will create guilt for you.And the same is the situation from the side of the woman. Hence it has been a necessary evil, and men and women have agreed to plan for the future. Afraid of themselves they have taken support from the law, from the society, from conventions, from respectability. They have created a thousand and one barriers around themselves so that they remain together.But if – and that “if” is not a small “if,” it is a big “if” – something happens tomorrow, then your life will become miserable. And something is going to happen tomorrow; tomorrow is not going to remain the same. Life never remains the same, not even for two consecutive moments. Nothing can be said about the future. It remains unknown, unknowable, unpredictable. No astrology can help, no palmistry can help, no tarot card reading can help, no I-Ching can help – nothing can help. Man has tried every possible way to make something certain out of the uncertain future, but nothing can be done. The nature of the future is unknown and it remains unknown and open.So you close yourself to all possibilities. You close all the doors, all the windows. But then you will feel suffocated and you will feel angry and you will feel constantly in conflict. You will feel angry with the woman you once loved for the simple reason that now it is difficult to get out of this prison. You have imprisoned yourself; now the only way to go on living in it is to make yourself as insensitive as possible, to become as unloving as possible, to become as false as possible, to be as dead as possible.Hence people die very soon. They may be buried after forty years, fifty years, but they die nearabout thirty. By the time their love starts dying they die because life is love. But love is not law, life is not law. Life is not logic, love is not logic. Life is basically insecure and that is the beauty of it.Hence I don’t see that with the coming age, with the new maturity that man is attaining, marriage can exist anymore in the same old way. It has to become more fluid; that means it can no longer be an institution. People will live together – they need each other. Men and women are each a half of one whole; their need is intrinsic. Together they become one whole, together they are complementary to each other. But they will live together only because of love, not because of any law. And they will live together out of freedom, not out of bondage.And with the disappearance of the institution of marriage the whole structure of society will change – it cannot change otherwise – because once marriage disappears many things will disappear automatically. The family will not be the same anymore; the family will be replaced by communes – that is inevitable. And children will not belong to persons but to the commune. Hence they will not be much of a problem – because children have been a big problem: what to do with the children when people separate? The children are left in a limbo; something has to be done with the children. And marriage has persisted for the simple reason that children have to be protected, they have to be helped; they are helpless. And it is your responsibility.Love becomes duty, responsibility. And the moment it is duty and responsibility it loses all poetry, it becomes pure calculation. Then it is a compromise, then you have somehow to pull it along, then you start dragging your life.A great revolution is on the way and with the disappearance of marriage that revolution will become possible. Once children no longer belong to persons they will have more generosity, they will be more human. They will not be Hindus and Mohammedans and Christians because they will not belong to certain parents and they will not be conditioned by the parents; they will belong to the commune. And once children belong to the commune they will have a greater experience of people. One child may come in contact with many women as mothers, aunts, with many men as fathers, as uncles, with many children as brothers, sisters.Right now the experience of the child is very limited. Each child is brought up by a certain woman. The impact of that woman remains hanging on the child’s consciousness for his whole life; it becomes an imprint. And he is always searching for the same woman: in every woman he falls in love with he is really looking for his mother, whom he cannot find. Where can he find his mother? There are no two persons alike. He will never find his mother anywhere, but he is looking for his mother in every wife, in every beloved. And the same is the case with the woman: she is looking for the father in every husband, in every lover. And they cannot find them, but that is their idea.The woman’s idea of a man is nothing but her idea of the father and the man’s idea of a woman is nothing but his idea of the mother. They will never find them, hence there will be frustration, hence there will always be despair, misery, failure, anguish.If a child is brought up by many women in the commune and comes in contact with many men and many women, he will not have a certain idea, he will have a more vague vision. He will not have a certainty about how a man should be or a woman should be, his idea of a man or a woman will contain many pictures. And then there will be more possibility of finding a woman who can fulfill him or a man with whom life can be a contentment – because one of the greatest miseries is that you are looking for someone you cannot find. Hence everybody will seem to be falling short; nothing will ever satisfy you.And because you will not be confined to one family you will not carry the rotten heritage of the family. Otherwise the Hindu parents will make the child Hindu and a Hindu child is bound to be against the Mohammedans, against the Christians, against everybody else. And so is the case with the Jews and with the Christians and the Mohammedans. If the child moves with many people in a commune and feels attuned with the whole commune…For example, in this commune, you can see Siddhartha. He lives absolutely freely. Such a little child, with such freedom! He has no attachment to the mother or to the father. He makes friendships with grown-up people, then he starts living with them. He has so many friends – men and women and all kinds of friends, children, grown-ups. He is really getting the idea of so many people that his vision of humanity is bound to be vast.He had asked me – he was living in a kids’ house where only kids live – he asked me, “Osho, I want to live with real men, not with kids. Enough is enough! I have lived with kids long enough.” So I sent him to live with Govindas and other sannyasins. And they complained: “Sometimes he comes at twelve o’clock in the night and sometimes at one o’clock, sometimes at two o’clock. This is too much! He goes to parties and to dramas and to the disco and he is disturbing us continuously. And he has possessed the whole room – as if the room belongs to him and we are just living in his room. He has put all his things around the room – all his toys are everywhere. So please,” they asked me, “remove him!”I told him to go to his mother, Neerja, to live with her. He said, “That is the last place I want to go! But if you say so I will go.” He was forced to go and live with the mother at least for a few days. And he was living with many families, with many couples. Wherever he goes he makes friendships and there are so many friends that he is never out of money – he asks everybody!Sattva was once Neerja’s lover. Now that love relationship is broken, but the love that has grown between Sattva and Siddhartha has continued. They are still friends – Sattva still has to give him money! He comes every day: “Today I need five rupees, ten rupees.”One day Sattva said, “I don’t have any money.” Then he said, “You can ask me!” And he brought five rupees from somewhere and gave it to Sattva. “Why don’t you ask me? I have so many friends, I can bring as much money as you want!”Now this child will be a totally different child. He has lived with Jews and with Christians and with Hindus. He will not be conditioned by anything, he will not have any conditioning. He will have a vast territory of being available to him.That’s my idea of how all children should grow. Then there will be no ugly religious conflicts, wars, bloodshed, no ugly fanaticism, no fascist ideologies in the world. These are all by-products of the family and the family depends on marriage. In fact, if the family disappears, nations will have to disappear, religions will disappear, states will disappear, churches will disappear. That’s why nations, churches, everybody is in favor of marriage and they all go on praising marriage as if it is something holy, something divine. It is the ugliest thing on the earth! And they go on telling people, “Without marriage, where will children get love?” They will get more love; nobody is going to prevent their parents from loving them, but they will be available to others, too. They will not be dependent, they will start learning independence. From the very beginning they will have a certain new feel of freedom. And that’s what is needed.The whole of human history has been full of religious wars for the simple reason that everybody becomes conditioned and once you are conditioned it is very difficult to decondition you. I know the difficulty because that’s my whole work here – to decondition you. It takes months, years; and you struggle hard, you resist in every possible way because your conditioning means your ego.You ask me, “What is the secret of remaining happy and married?” I don’t know! Nobody has ever known. Why would Jesus have remained unmarried if he had known the secret? He knew the secret of the Kingdom of God, but he did not know the secret of remaining happy in marriage. He remained unmarried. Mahavira, Lao Tzu Chuang Tzu, they all remained unmarried for the simple reason that there is no secret; otherwise these people would have discovered it. They could discover the ultimate – marriage is not such a big thing, it is very shallow – they even fathomed truth, but they could not fathom marriage.Socrates got married and he suffered his whole life. He did not discover through marriage the secret of remaining happy; he simply discovered that it would have been better if he had never married. But in Greece there had never been such people like Jesus or Lao Tzu – Jesus was still to come, five hundred years after Socrates. Socrates was a contemporary of Lao Tzu, Mahavira, but he knew nothing about them because the world in those days had no communication. So whatever happened in his life was conventional.Mohammed married not only one woman, he married nine women. Many times I have been asked, “What about Mohammed?” I know the secret of Mohammed but I don’t know the secret of remaining happy in marriage. If you have nine women they will fight amongst themselves and you will be free! Mohammed managed it and he has said to his followers, “Marry at least four women.” So Mohammedans are allowed to marry four women. Four women are enough to fight amongst themselves and the husband will be spared.Krishna did the best: he married sixteen thousand women! Now it is very easy to get lost. Sixteen thousand women… Who will notice Krishna, where he has gone, where he is? There will be so much noise and fight and in that cloudy, smoky atmosphere Krishna can escape anywhere. He can even sit in the middle of it and meditate and nobody will bother about him! They will all be concerned about each other’s saris and each other’s ornaments.Buddha got married, but then he escaped. He had a beautiful wife, Yashodhara, but he escaped. He came back home only when he became enlightened, after twelve years. Yes, if you are enlightened then you can be happy anywhere, even in marriage, but no enlightened person has been known to get married after enlightenment.Two friends meet.“Hello, Luisa, how is your great love?”“It’s over,” she replied sadly.“Over? How come?”“We got married!”Two friends were talking.“I’ve placed an advertisement in the newspaper, looking for a wife,” says one.“Did lots of women write back?” asks the other.“Just a few women, but lots of husbands!”The wife left home for the fifth time and the husband rushed to place an advertisement in the newspaper.It read: “Don’t come back and all will be forgiven.”It was a wise old woman who, when people asked her why she never married, would answer, “Why marry? I have a dog who snores, a parrot who speaks only dirty words and a cat who stays out all night. What do I need a husband for?”The jealous husband hires a detective to find out if his wife betrays him. After a few days the detective comes back with a movie showing his wife and his best friend swimming, dancing, making love, having fun.While watching the movie the husband keeps saying, “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!”“But,” says the detective, annoyed, “I’m giving you proof of it!”“No, it’s not that,” replies the husband, “I just can’t believe someone can have so much fun with my wife!”In heaven everybody is quiet and silent except for Paolo who keeps saying, “What peace here! What peace here!”Even St. Peter gets tired of him and so one day he sends him to purgatory. Even there though Paolo keeps muttering, “What peace here! What peace here!”Everybody gets so tired that they decide to send him down to hell. But even in hell, among the flames and the devils, he keeps uttering, “What peace here! What peace here!”So Beelzebub calls him and asks him the reason for his behavior.“Well, Beelzebub,” replies Paolo, “you would say the same if you had lived for fifty years with my wife!”Love is enough. Live only out of love. It may last long, it may not last, but don’t be worried whether it lasts long or does not last long. Even if it is there for a single moment it will give you the taste of eternity.And there is every possibility that if you are not afraid it may last longer because fear is poison; it poisons everything. If you are not worried about tomorrow you may live today so totally that out of that totality a beautiful tomorrow will arise. But if you are afraid of tomorrow you may destroy today. And once today is destroyed, from where is tomorrow going to come?Live fearlessly – that is one of my fundamental messages to my sannyasins – and live dangerously. Don’t compromise for conveniences, for comforts. It is better to live in discomfort but to live rather than to be in comfort and dead. For that you can wait – in your grave you will be perfectly comfortable and out of danger. Nothing can happen there; there is no danger. You cannot die again, no illness can happen, nobody can leave you, you can’t go bankrupt, nothing can be stolen from you. You will be perfectly at peace.You must have come across gravestones – and it is written on almost all graves: “Rest in peace.” What else is there?One man died. He had made his own gravestone himself, a beautiful, artistic thing – he did not rely on his wife because she was such a miser that she might put up some ordinary stone. So he had purchased the most expensive marble, asked the best artist to make roseflowers on it and he had written on it: “Live in peace.”When he died his wife discovered that he had not left any money for her. When the will was opened there was only one sentence: “I was a wise man, hence I have spent all that I had. I have not left anything to anybody.”The wife was furious. She went to the grave with the artist and told the artist to add a few more words: “Live in peace till I come!”But don’t be worried: even wives can’t come in the same grave; they will have their own graves. And even if they come they won’t recognize you and you won’t recognize them either.You can live in peace in the grave, in absolute security, but while you are alive be alive. Accept all insecurity. In that very acceptance, insecurity disappears and without any compromise on your part. Love totally, but don’t ask for permanence. Only fools ask for permanence. And remember one thing: if you ask for permanence you will get only false things; only false things are permanent.Real roses are bound to wither sooner or later, but plastic roses are permanent; they don’t wither away. But they don’t have any fragrance either, they don’t have any life; they have only the appearance of roses.Marriage is a plastic rose; love is a real rose. Grow real roses in your life. Of course they will wither – so what? You can grow them again, you can go on growing them. You can go on creating more and more love, sharing more and more with more and more people.And this is my experience – and whatsoever I am saying I am saying out of my own experience – that if you love totally without desiring any permanence, even the impossible is possible. Your love may remain for a long period, maybe your whole life. But don’t ask for permanence; in that very asking you have disturbed the whole thing: you have moved from the real to the unreal. Live totally!Totality is my keyword – and up to now permanence was the keyword. You have been told that your love should be permanent, only then it is real: if it is not permanent, it is not real. That is sheer bullshit! A real love has nothing to do with permanence; there is no necessary relationship. It may happen only for a moment, it may be just like lightning, but that does not mean that lightning is unreal because it happens only for a moment. The roseflower opens in the morning; by the evening the petals have dropped, withered away, gone back to rest in the earth. That does not mean that the roseflower was unreal.But you have been told again and again by the priests that if you are really looking for reality then the touchstone is permanence. They have moved your mind from reality to permanence and once you become attached to permanence, you are bound to purchase something false and lose track of the real. The real is changing, constantly changing; the unreal remains the same. And you have to be available to the constantly changing.Even if for a single moment love happens, be total in it. If you are total in it, the next moment will come out of this totality. It is possible – I cannot tell you it is certain, I can only tell you it is possible – that the next moment will deepen your love. But it will not be the same: either it will deepen or it will disappear, but it will never be the same again. No two moments are the same and they cannot be the same.And that is the beauty of life, that is the incredible adventure of life: that it is always a surprise, it is always unexpected. If you live totally things may deepen, but remember, when things are deepening they are not the same. If you think of permanence you have missed the target.So don’t ask me: “What is the secret of remaining, happy and married?” I can only tell you the secret of being happy – marriage is irrelevant. If you live together with somebody out of love, out of gratitude, good; if it goes on happening your whole life, good. If it disappears one day, depart from each other in deep gratitude, in the remembrance of the love that was once there – it has enriched you. Rather than clinging to each other in anger, in frustration, in rage and being violent to each other and destructive, it is better to depart with grace. One should know how to fall in love and one should also know how to fall out of it gracefully.The second question:Osho,My Jewish parents are not happy that I have become a sannyasin. What should I do?Jesus has said, “Unless you hate your parents you cannot follow me.” Now the words are very strange – and they come from a man like Jesus. They are shocking. One does not expect them, at least from Jesus because he says, “Love your enemies as you love yourself.” Not only that, he even says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself” – which is far more difficult than loving your enemies! But when it comes to parents he is very clear. He says, “Unless you hate your parents you cannot follow me.” Why is he so hard on parents?But it is nothing compared to Gautam the Buddha. He used to ask his bhikkus – his sannyasins, his disciples, “Have you killed your parents yet or not?” A man like Buddha, who is absolutely nonviolent! Jesus is not so nonviolent, at least he eats meat, he is not averse to eating fish. Buddha is a vegetarian, absolutely vegetarian; he is the greatest propounder of nonviolence on the earth. And he asks his disciples again and again, “Have you killed your parents yet or not?”Of course they don’t mean it literally, neither Jesus nor Buddha, but their words are significant. What they really mean is a great message; it is metaphoric. You will have to understand the metaphor. They are not concerned with the outer parents, your father and mother, they are concerned with the inner imprints that your mother and father have created in you.It is not the outer parents who are dominating you. What can they do? You are here and they may be thousands of miles away somewhere in Germany. What can they do? They cannot dominate you. But you have something inner: you have inner ideas, inner reflections, imprints, impressions of your parents and those ideas go on dominating you. If they don’t like your being a sannyasin, then your conscience will feel guilt. You will feel that you are hurting your parents, that it is not good, that this should not be so, that something has to be done. But parents are always against anything that is new.Buddha’s father was not happy with him; he was very unhappy, he was angry at him. Buddha had to escape out of his kingdom – he was afraid that he would be caught because detectives were sent to catch hold of him. He was the only son of his father and the father was getting old; the father was seventy when Buddha escaped from his home. The father was afraid – who was going to possess his kingdom? And stories were coming to him, rumors, gossip of all kinds: that Buddha had become a monk, that he was begging, that he had become a beggar. And, of course, the old king was getting very angry: “What is this nonsense? The son of a king begging – for what? He has everything – why should he beg? And he is begging from house to house, walking barefoot and surrounded by other beggars like himself. What is he doing? He has betrayed me in my old age!”Naturally he was angry, but the real anger is somewhere else. The anger is because Buddha has gone against his religion, his ideology. He has gone against all that the father represents – he has gone against the ego of the father.Jesus’ parents were not happy with Jesus either. They were orthodox Jews, how could they be happy with a son who was preaching strange things and who was talking in such a way as if he knew more than Moses? Because Jesus was saying again and again, “It was said to you in the past, but I say unto you that it is wrong: It was told to you that if somebody throws a brick at you, answer him by throwing a rock at him. But I say to you, if somebody hits one of your cheeks, give him the other cheek too.”Now this was absolutely against the Jewish idea of justice; this seemed almost anti-Jewish – because even the Jewish God declares in the Talmud, “I am a very jealous God. If you go against me I will destroy you.”And he destroyed two cities completely. What happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Jewish God had done three thousand years before! He destroyed two cities for the simple reason that people were not behaving according to his idea of morality, they were becoming immoral. He destroyed two whole cities.Now, all the people could not have been immoral and even if all the people had been immoral, they could not have been immoral to the same degree. There were small children also; they could not have been immoral. They didn’t know anything of morality or immorality. There were very old people also; they could not have been immoral. There were ill people who could not even get out of their beds. What immoral acts could they have been doing? But he was so angry that he destroyed two whole cities just to teach a lesson to humanity.And this young man Jesus is saying, “Forgive…” He was going against all the ideas of the Judaic religion completely. He was teaching people new concepts, new visions, new ways of approaching God. The parents were angry.Once it happened Jesus was teaching, surrounded by his disciples and a crowd also. His mother came and somebody informed him from the crowd, “Your mother is waiting outside and she wants to see you urgently.” Jesus is reported to have said, “Tell that woman” – not “my mother” – he says, “Tell that woman that nobody is my father and nobody is my mother and nobody is my relative. All my relatives are those who are with me. I have nothing to do with those who are not with me. Tell her to go away.”It seems hard, it seems cruel, but there is a reason in it. These are all symbolic stories, I don’t think it really happened. I don’t think Jesus would say, “Tell that woman…” But it says something. You have to drop the idea of your father, of your mother, from your innermost core; only then do you become mature. If you carry that idea you remain childish, you never become mature. And no father, no mother ever wants you to become really mature because maturity will mean that you will become free.All the so-called religions have taught you to respect your parents for the simple reason that if you respect your parents you will respect the past, you will respect traditions, you will respect conventions. If you respect your father you will respect God the Father. If you don’t respect your parents then naturally you are cut off from tradition and no church can afford it.I will not say to you don’t respect your father and mother. I will say to you that you can respect your father and mother only when you are completely free of your inner impressions of father and mother; otherwise your respect is false, pseudo. You can love your father and mother only when you are completely free of them, otherwise you cannot love them. You will remain angry with them. Nobody can love anybody unless one becomes free of that person. If there is dependence of any kind, love remains only a facade; deep down there is hatred. And every child hates his father and mother – every child, without any exception. But respect is imposed from the outside.Just look within your unconscious, look deep down within yourself and you will find a great revengeful fire. You want to take revenge on your parents. You are angry because they are responsible for the way you are. It is the way they have brought you up that is making you miserable. It is the way they have conditioned you that is making you crippled and paralyzed. Hence, naturally, there is hatred.I would like you to become aware of it so that you can drop it because whatsoever they have done they have done unconsciously. They need to be forgiven. Forgive them.Jesus says, “Hate your father and mother.” Buddha says, “Kill them.” I say to you to forgive them – which is far more difficult. Forgive them because whatsoever they have done they have done unknowingly; they were conditioned by their parents and so on and so forth. Even Adam and Eve were conditioned by their father, God. Conditioning begins there. God is responsible for conditioning Adam: “Don’t eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.” That “don’t” became an attraction; that is a negative way of conditioning. And if it is said emphatically that you shouldn’t do a certain thing, a great urge arises in you to experiment, to experience it. Why? Why is God so interested? – because the Tree of Knowledge cannot be a bad thing, knowing cannot be bad. If you become wise, what is wrong? Wisdom is good, knowledge is good.Certainly Adam must have thought to himself, “God is trying to keep me from becoming as wise as he is so that I always remain dependent on him, so that I always have go to him for his advice, so that I can never live on my own, so that I always have to be just a shadow to him. He does not want me to be free and independent.” That is a simple logical conclusion.And that’s also what the Devil did – he argued the same thing. He told Eve… Why had he chosen Eve, not Adam? – because if you persuade the wife, if the wife is convinced, then you need not worry about the husband. Every advertising expert knows this, hence all advertisements are meant for women. Once they are convinced then nobody can unconvince them, at least not their husbands; they have to follow suit, they have to do it because the woman will become a continuous torture if you don’t do it.The Devil was the first advertising expert. He was the pioneer, he was the founder of the whole art. He did not bother about Adam – he must have known that all husbands are henpecked, so why bother about them? Persuade the wife. He persuaded her and of course she was convinced because the logic was so clear. He said, “God has prohibited it only because he does not want you to become like gods. Once you eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge you will be like gods. And he is jealous, he is afraid. And it will be foolish on your part if you don’t eat. Be like gods!”And who would not like to be like a god? Once the temptation was there it was impossible to resist. But all of the conditioning came from God himself; it was a negative kind of conditioning.Your parents are not responsible really. An unconscious person cannot be held responsible: he functions unconsciously, he does not know what he is doing.You have to go within yourself and cleanse yourself of all the impressions that your parents have put upon you, both negative and positive. Then there will arise great compassion in you for your parents, great compassion and great gratitude also because whatsoever they have done, they have done – according to them at least – thinking that it is good. They have not deliberately done anything wrong to you. Even now, if they are against your sannyas, if they are not happy with your sannyas, it is because they think you have fallen into wrong hands, that you have fallen from their traditional heritage. They are afraid you may go astray, you may suffer later on, you may repent one day. They feel for you.Their love is unconscious, hence you need not listen to them, but you are not to become angry with them; you have to understand them.You say: “My Jewish parents are not happy that I have become a sannyasin.” First, they are Jewish. That is one of the oldest religions in the world. There are only two old religions in the world, the Judaic religion and the Hindu religion. The older a tradition, the greater is its weight; it crushes people more. Anything new is light.My sannyasins can walk light-footedly, almost dancingly. But a five thousand year old tradition creates a great weight; it is a long past. They could not forgive Jesus, how can they forgive you? And Jesus has not become my sannyasin! In, fact, he never went outside the tradition; he remained a Jew. He was not a Christian, remember because there was no Christianity at that time. Christianity was born out of his death, out of his crucifixion. Hence I always call Christianity “Crossianity”; it has nothing to do with Christ, it has something to do with the cross. That’s why the cross has become the symbol of Christianity – far more important than Christ.They could not forgive Jesus and he never went outside the tradition. Of course he was saying things which looked a little strange, a little new. He was bringing new light; he was clearing the mirror of the Jewish consciousness from the old dust. But they have not been able to forgive him, not even now. I have not come across a single book written by a Jew in favor of Jesus. They still think he was wrong, they still think that it was right to crucify him, they still think that he was a criminal.And to become one of my sannyasins is certainly far more dangerous because it is going totally out of all traditions. It is not just changing one tradition for another, it is dropping the very traditional mind itself. It is dropping being traditional as such; it is becoming nontraditional, unconventional. It is pure revolution! And they are afraid, naturally. For many reasons, Jews are afraid.And there is some attraction between me and the Jews. I have attracted so many Jews here that sometimes I myself wonder – am I a Jew or what is the matter? – because Jews are not so easily attracted to anybody. They were not attracted to Jesus. They are not attracted to anybody else. Why have they come to me? I have touched something deep in them. In fact, they have suffered from tradition more than anybody else; that’s the reason why they have become so interested in my vision – because I am anti-traditional. They would like to get rid of it.A Jew and a black man are sitting next to each other on the train. Suddenly the Jew realizes that the black man is reading a Hebrew magazine. He keeps silent for a while, then whispers to him: “Listen, friend, is it not enough to be a black?”Your parents may be afraid: “Is it not enough to be a Jew? Now you want to suffer more?” Because to be with me is going to be dangerous. Freedom is far more dangerous than anything else in the world. Freedom is fire: it burns your ego and because it makes you egoless it hurts many other people’s egos and they all become enemies to you.And then Jews are very worldly people. It is the only religion which is very worldly. There are two kinds of religions: the worldly religions – Jews represent the worldly religion – and there are the other-worldly religions, for example, Buddhism. Buddhists will be against me because to them I will look a little worldly and to Jews I will look a little too other-worldly.I am both: I am a bridge. My sannyas is a synthesis because I don’t divide “this world” and “that world.” To me they are both beautiful. And one has to live in both worlds together because they are not separate, they are inseparable. The very idea of dividing them was a great calamity.Jews are more interested in money than in meditation. Now, thinking that you have become a meditator, they will be afraid. “What are you doing? This is the time to earn money. This is the time to get rooted in the world. Don’t waste this precious time!” According to them, when you are young you can do something; as you become old you will be less and less able to make money, to have power, prestige, to make a name in the world. You are wasting your time here.Even with those who are here, if they are Jewish, the hangover continues. One of the sannyasins went to the office a few days ago, in a state of euphoria – she must have touched something intangible in meditation, may have been silent here in the discourse, may have had a glimpse of something unknown. In those moments even if you are a Jew your Jewishness disappears. She went to the office and said that she wanted to donate one hundred thousand dollars to the new commune. After five minutes she went back and said that she wanted to cancel it! She was asked, “What happened? Yes, we will cancel it. It was your doing, nobody had asked you for anything. You came on your own; now, just after five minutes… What has happened?”She said, “I went to see Amitabh, one of my friends and he said, ‘Are you a fool or something? Go immediately and cancel it!’ He scolded me!” Now, Amitabh is a Polack Jew! That is the most dangerous combination you can find – Polack and Jew! Of course, he loves me and loves me tremendously – he is here, he is one of my topmost therapists, he lives in my house, in Lao Tzu – but hangovers are hangovers!Very excited, Isaac calls David, “Come immediately, David, I have an incredible bargain. Three hundred trousers for only fifty dollars!”David runs to Isaac, where he finds the pile of three hundred trousers. He looks them over and then says to Isaac, “But Isaac, these trousers have only one leg! No one can wear them.”“Listen, David,” replies Isaac, “Besides the fact that there are people with only one leg, I already told you – we have to sell them, not wear them!”A Jew arrives in Chicago from Israel; he is coming to America for the first time. It’s raining, so he stops at a shop to buy a pair of shoes. Mindful of his father’s advice, when the clerk asks twenty dollars for the shoes he starts bargaining: “Ten dollars!”“That’s impossible!” replies the clerk.“Ten or nothing!” is the Jew’s reply.So the clerk consults the manager, then says, “Okay, ten.”“No,” replies the Jew, “five!”Again the clerk consults the manager. “Okay, five.”“No, two!” replies the Jew.“Listen,” says the clerk, tired of him, “just take these shoes and get out!”“No!” exclaims the Jew.“No? You don’t want them?” asks the clerk incredulously.Says the Jew: “I want two pairs!”Your parents must be worried about what you are doing here. Such an intelligent guy like you wasting his time meditating? Have you gone crazy or something, sitting silently doing nothing? Is this a way a Jew is supposed to behave? Time is money – don’t waste it!And, moreover, whether your parents are Jewish or not, parents are parents. They feel offended – they feel offended by the very idea that you think you know more than they know, that you are trying new ways, that you are trying to be wiser than your parents.A Jew arrives in heaven and God, in a very compassionate voice, asks, “What happened to you?”He says, “I was brokenhearted. When my only son, my pride and my joy, announced that he had become Catholic, I felt this terrible pain in my chest…”“You should not have despaired so much. Even my only son did the same!”“And what did you do, my Lord?”“I made a new will and testament!”So, what can they do? They will make a new will and a new testament – let them make it! Learn to forgive them. I will not tell you to hate them because hate is not freedom – if you hate somebody you remain attached. Hate is a relationship. Love is freedom. Love is not a relationship; hate is a relationship. That’s why those who live in relationship live in hate, not in love. Love is freedom. Love them, then you are free. But to love them you will have to cleanse yourself totally.I will not tell you, like Gautam the Buddha, to kill them because killing is not going to help. Understand them. Be compassionate. Killing will be doing something in a hurry; there is no need to be in a hurry. And parents have gone so deep in you. They are not only in your blood and bones, they have entered your very marrow. You cannot kill them easily – it is impossible. You will have to commit suicide if you want to kill them because only then will they be killed. They have entered your being: you are part of them, they are part of you. But through deep understanding you can be free of them.A lawyer has succeeded in acquitting a Jew who has killed his mother, his wife and his sister. Before separating he says to the man, “As you still have a father I’ll just say ‘See you soon!’”I will not suggest killing your mother; my methods are far more subtle. What Jesus said and what Buddha said are very primitive methods. What I am saying is far more sophisticated – it has to be, it is the twentieth century! Forgive your parents, understand them. The whole question is within you; it has nothing to do with the outer parents. If you can relax within yourself and if you can feel compassion for them – because they have suffered in their own way… They have wasted their whole life, now they want to waste your life because that is the only way they know how to live. Great compassion is bound to arise in you and out of that compassion maybe you can be of some help to them because compassion functions in a very subtle way. Love is the greatest magic in the world.I will not tell you to go and listen to them and follow them to satisfy them; that will be wrong. That will be destroying your life and it will not help them either. You have to remain yourself and yet be compassionate and forgiving. And if you happen to go there, remain compassionate and forgiving. Let them feel your compassion, your love, your joy. Let them feel your celebration. Let them feel what has happened to you through sannyas. Let them see the difference.Buddha’s father remained angry until Buddha came to see him. He was so full of anger when he saw him that for a few moments he could even not see. Buddha remained silent. The father went on insulting him, saying, “You have been a deep wound to me – you have almost killed me. Why have you come now after twelve years? I have waited so long. You have not been a son to me, you have been an enemy!”Buddha listened and did not utter a single word. Then the father suddenly became aware that the son had not even spoken a single word. He asked, “Why are you not speaking?”Buddha said, “First say everything that you have carried for all these twelve years. Cathart, unburden yourself! Only when you are unburdened will you be able to see me. There is one thing that I would like to say to you: that you are now talking to somebody else, not to your son. The man who had left your palace has not come back – he has died. I am a totally new man. I have come with new consciousness, with new love, with new compassion. But first unburden yourself, otherwise your eyes are so full of rage you cannot see me. Let your eyes be cleared.”The father was trembling with anger. Slowly he cooled down; this very answer cooled him. Tears of anger were coming to his eyes. He wiped his tears, looked again. “Yes, this is not the same man who left my palace; this is a totally different person. Of course, the face is the same, the figure is the same, but it is a totally new being – the vibe is new.”He fell at the feet of Buddha and he said, “Initiate me too because now I am very old; death is coming closer. I would also like to taste something that you have tasted. And forgive me and forgive all my anger. I have not known what is happening to you and what has happened to you. It is good that you have come. It is good that you remembered me, that you have not forgotten me.”So whenever you go back, let them first cathart. And remember, they are German parents so they will cathart longer than Buddha’s parent! Listen silently. Don’t get angry. If you really want to help them remain meditative, calm, and quiet, and your coolness will transform them.And each sannyasin should want to help his parents because they have given birth to you. They have brought you up in the only way they could; it was not possible for them to do otherwise. Whatsoever they could do they have done and they have done it for your good. Whether it proved good or not is another matter, but their intentions were good. So whenever you go back, remember to help them.The last question:Osho,Don't you ever get tired of us and our stupidity?I rather enjoy it! Moreover, I have to do something and this is the only thing that one can go on doing forever and forever.Jesus was bored so he went to God his father and asked him, “Dad, give me something to do – I am bored!”“Take a file and smooth the top of the Himalayas,” said God.After seven thousand years Jesus came back again. “And now what can I do?” he asked God again.God gave him a spoon and told him to empty the Indian Ocean.After seven thousand years, he was back again. “It’s done. And now?” he asked God.Tired, God looked at him and said, “Listen, Jesus go down to earth and convince the men down there to love each other – that will keep you busy for eternity!”I am not a priest; it is not my duty. Otherwise one is bound to get bored and tired. It is my joy, it is my love!The Pope is redecorating his summer residence of Castel Gandolfo. When the work is finished he comes with the chief decorator to see the results. Everything is perfect.However, when the Pope arrives at his bedroom, he sees that the decorator, to give the final touch, has hung a beautiful antique twelfth-century cross just over the bed.“Oh, no, no, no, my son!” exclaims the Pope. “I have already told you not to put anything here that reminds me of my office!”This is not my work, this is my joy, this is my play. I am really enjoying it!A Russian cosmonaut comes back from his space travel. Brezhnev receives him: “Tell me the truth, comrade. Did you meet God up there?”“If you want the truth – yes, I found him!” replies the cosmonaut.“I thought so,” replies Brezhnev. “Now promise me never to reveal this to anyone.”After a few months the same cosmonaut is received by the Pope. When they are alone, the Pope whispers to him, “Now, my dear son, please tell me – did you meet God up there?”Faithful to his promise, the cosmonaut replies, “No, unfortunately not, Your Sanctity.”And the Pope sadly replies, “I thought so. Now listen, promise me never to tell this to anyone!”Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Please talk about people like Bertolt Brecht who reject religion and spirituality and yet whose powerful creative love shines like an angry light in the twentieth century.Tim Green, religion for centuries has become associated with a life-negative attitude and obviously any life-negative attitude cannot be creative; it becomes intrinsically impossible for it to be creative. Creativity needs a life-affirmative philosophy, creativity needs a tremendous love for existence and the so-called religions have been teaching people to renounce life, to escape from life; they have been against life.Because of this, a creative person cannot be interested in such religions. If he becomes interested he will lose his creativity; if he wants to remain creative he will have to sacrifice his religiousness. Religions have not left any other choice. Because of this, only uncreative people became interested in religion.I am not talking about Gautam the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra, Jesus, Mohammed, Mahavira, Krishna, Kabir, Nanak. Leave aside these few names. They are immensely creative, they are poets of existence. They are far greater poets than your so-called poets – their whole life is poetry. They are great musicians. They may never have played on any musical instrument, but their heart is full of harmony, music, melody. Their very heartbeat is that of rhythm, of music. Their life is a dance, it is a song, it is a celebration. Hence, please leave aside these few people.But the religions have nothing to do with them. Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, these organized religions have nothing to do with their own founders. If you look deep, if you meditate over the matter, you will be surprised. This is my observation: the people who call themselves Christians are not at all concerned with Christ and his message. In fact, they are against everything for which Christ stood for and sacrificed his life. The people who call themselves Hindus have nothing to do with Krishna. Although they worship him, worshipping makes no difference in their lives. They have not learned the art that Krishna represents; in fact, they have interpreted Krishna according to their own ideas. And the same is the case with Buddhists, Jainas, and the followers of other religions: they have all gone against the original founders. They have fallen victims of the priests – and the priests have nothing to do with religion at all.Priests and politicians are in a conspiracy to exploit people and the best way to exploit people is to destroy their intelligence. Of course, people like Bertolt Brecht cannot support such religions. These religions have enslaved humanity. They have not helped people to be free, to be independent, to be their own selves; on the contrary, they have reduced them to slaves. In the name of religion they have created great prisons. And the strategy is subtle – very subtle, very cunning. The basic strategy is the same one used all over the world by all the religions.The first and the most fundamental principle of that strategy is to destroy people’s love for life, love for joy, love for celebration. Once people’s roots are cut away from existence they start shrinking into themselves, they start losing their sources of nourishment. Their whole being becomes poisoned.They cannot really escape from life – nobody can really escape from life. Even the people who escape to the mountains have to depend on people who work in the marketplace. Nobody can really escape from life. The people who have gone into the monasteries are dependent on people who live outside; they depend on their support.If all the world, if the whole of humanity renounces life, it will be committing a global suicide. The Buddhist monk has to beg from those who are not yet monks. The Christian monk has to live on the donations of people who are still in the world. Nobody can really escape from life while he is alive; it is impossible. But your sources can be poisoned. You cannot escape from life and you cannot live your life totally. You start feeling guilty about being alive: you start feeling as if to be alive is a sin. You start cutting your life as much as you can; you start living at the minimum. That too you accept only as a necessary evil.That is why laughter has disappeared, wholeness has disappeared. People look sad; their existence has become meaningless. They are uncreative. They are in a kind of limbo, neither here nor there. This is what your religions have done.I am in agreement with people like Bertolt Brecht. I am also not in support of the so-called religion and spirituality. But I cannot agree totally with Bertolt Brecht for the simple reason that whatsoever religions have done is not the work of true religion. The true religion has yet to arrive, the true religion has yet to be born. Be against Christianity, be against Hinduism, be against Mohammedanism, be against Buddhism – I agree – but don’t be against religiousness as such because that means you have made organized religion synonymous with religiousness. It is not so. Condemn the priests, condemn the Pope, condemn the shankaracharyas, but don’t condemn Buddha and Lao Tzu and Jesus and Mohammed. They have contributed immensely to man’s inner growth; they are absolutely creative. Of course, they have been interpreted by wrong people, but what can they do about it? They need people like Bertolt Brecht to interpret them.So I can agree with Bertolt Brecht up to a certain point and then we part. The so-called religion has to be eradicated from the earth because that is the only way for the real religion to arrive, for the authentic to arrive. But the authentic religiousness cannot be condemned. If you condemn it, then the result will be this – Tim Green himself says in his question: “…yet whose powerful creative love shines like an angry light in the twentieth century.”Now, love cannot be angry. Anger is destructive, love is creative. Anger is part of hatred; it is never part of love. That’s where Bertolt Brecht has missed the point. If you are against religiousness then you will be creative, but your creativity will be pathological. It will be ill at ease, it will not be beautiful.And you can see it. The whole of modern art is ugly for the simple reason that it has no spiritual origins, it has no meditative quality in it. You can look at Picasso’s paintings: they show something insane in the man. Picasso is a genius – with just a little spirituality he would have surpassed Michelangelo. He has the capacity, he has the talent, he has the intelligence, but something is missing. He is in a chaos, he has no inner discipline.That’s why while Michelangelo creates beautiful art, Picasso creates ugly art. Looking at Picasso’s paintings one is bound to be struck by the fact that there is some insane note in it.There are so many stories about Picasso…An American millionaire came to Picasso. He wanted two paintings and he wanted them immediately. And he was ready to pay any price – money was not the question. Picasso was a little puzzled because he had only one painting left. He asked such a price that he thought the millionaire would say, “I will purchase only one.”But he said, “Okay, I will pay the price. Where are the paintings? Bring the paintings and here is the check!”He went in, cut his painting in two and he gave the millionaire two paintings.In fact, you can even cut his paintings in four; it will not make much difference.I have heard another story:A rich woman wanted him to paint her portrait; he did it. When she came, she looked at it and she said, “Everything is okay, only I don’t like the nose. You will have to repaint the nose.”Picasso said, “That is impossible.”She said, “Why is it impossible? I am ready to pay for it. If you need more money for it I am ready to pay for it.”He said, “Money is not the question. I don’t know where the nose is!”A man was looking for a wife and he asked an agent. The agent said, “I have a beautiful woman just for you, a very rich widow. Of course, she is a little older than you, but with so much money that I don’t think you would like to miss the opportunity. And she is beautiful! Come along with me. I will show you the woman.”The man went to see the woman. Looking at her he could not believe his eyes – he had never seen such an ugly woman. One eye was looking in one direction, the other eye was looking in another direction. Her nose was crooked, her teeth were coming out, her hair was false, one leg was longer than the other. It was just disgusting to see her!He whispered in the agent’s ear, “You call this woman beautiful?”The agent said, “There is no need to whisper – she is deaf also! You can say out loud whatsoever you want to say. And I can’t help it if you don’t like Picasso. That’s not my fault!”Modern art is ugly for the simple reason that it has no spirituality in it. Modern poetry is ugly. Modern music is just noise – very sexual because when spirituality is not present, all that is left is sexuality. Spirituality is the same energy as sex but at the highest peak, at the most refined peak. Sex is also the same energy but very rough, at the lowest point. Sex is animal energy; the same energy passing through the art of spirituality becomes spirituality, becomes samadhi, becomes superconsciousness. It becomes divine energy.Hence Bertolt Brecht is angry. That anger can be understood. But anger cannot be creative; even if it creates, that creativity will carry something destructive in it.You will be surprised to know that when Adolf Hitler was young, he wanted to become a painter. He was refused admission to an art academy. Then he wanted to become an architect, but again he was refused. And the same man became the most destructive man this century has known – not only this century has known, but the whole of history. If he had been admitted to the art academy he would have become another Picasso; his paintings would have been destructive.He painted a few things – those paintings still survive. They say much about him. He uses the blood-red color out of all proportion. His most loved colors are blood red and black; with these two colors he worked, he painted. He has left a few drawings, his architectural ideas; they don’t look like the Taj Mahal, they look like madhouses! But the man became powerful, he became a politician and he really did his painting and his architecture and his artwork on living people, on the vast canvas of humanity. But those two colors remained his colors: dark black, the color of death, and blood red, the color of murder, anger and rage.Bertolt Brecht would have been a buddha, just as Friedrich Nietzsche would have been a buddha. But they became too obsessed with so-called religion. And going against so-called religion, they went against religion as such. That’s where they missed, they went wrong.I am against so-called religion, but I am all for religion as such. In fact, I am against so-called religion because I am in favor of – and I am for – true religion.The real religion is in danger not because of irreligion, remember. The real is never in danger from the unreal; it is always in danger from the pseudo-real because the pseudo gives the appearance of being the real. We have to change this whole pattern that has dominated humanity for centuries.My approach is that of life-affirmation. I teach my sannyasins to be loving, to be joyous, to be creative, to be aesthetic. The old so-called religions have all been sad and serious. I teach my sannyasins to love and to laugh and to celebrate. Celebration is the only true prayer; it is the only way we can show our gratitude to existence. Renouncing life is complaining against existence. Existence gives you life as a gift and you renounce it! Life is a great gift; you have to be thankful for it. And that thankfulness brings spirituality.People like Bertolt Brecht are beautiful people. They would have become of tremendous value if they had been able to see what is pseudo in religion and what is real, if they had been able to discriminate. They condemned without any discrimination.That’s where the whole Western mind is wrong. For one hundred years after Friedrich Nietzsche, all Western intellectuals have been condemning religion. Nietzsche declared, “God is dead and man is free,” and since that moment this has been the constant slogan of all the intellectuals. And I can understand why. But Nietzsche should have said, “The God of the priests…” Even if he had put it in brackets “[of the priests]” things would have been absolutely clear – because the God of the priests is not the God of the mystics. And the God of the priests need not be dead – he has always been dead! The God of the priests has never been alive. The alive God is that of the mystics.I teach you the God of the mystics.The God of the mystics can be found not by belief but by going deeply inward. It has nothing to do with theology; it has something to do with an inner search, an insight into your own being. The moment you know who you are, you have found God and in that very finding you find freedom. It is good that the God of the priests should be dead, should be thrown away so that you can discover your own God. Your own God is your freedom, your truth.Without your truth you are bound to remain angry and your life is bound to remain empty and meaningless. And whatsoever you create will not be a beautiful creation; it will not be like the roses and the song of the birds and the sunset and the stars, it will be something out of a mad mind. It may help you in a certain way because your own madness will be thrown onto the canvas or on the stone and you will be relieved of it – it will be something like a catharsis – but it will not be good for others. Those who see your work of art will get infected; it will be contagious.Look at the statue of a buddha. Just sit in front of the statue of a buddha, silently watching it and you will be surprised: something in you also starts settling. Something in you also becomes quiet, still, silent.Gurdjieff used to call this “objective art” because the person who has created the statue has created it out of his own meditation. It is a work of meditation. It may not represent exactly the physiology of Gautam the Buddha – it does not really represent it; it is symbolic. It represents his meditation, not his body; not his mind but his very being. It represents his stillness.“Sitting silently, doing nothing, spring comes and the grass grows by itself.” It represents that silence. He is not doing anything. Sitting in front of a buddha statue you will fall into a deep silence. Sitting in front of a Picasso painting you will be in a turmoil. You will start getting angry, you will start getting restless. You cannot move into meditation; it is impossible. If you keep Picasso paintings in your bedroom you will have nightmares!The second question:Osho,Why is it that I cannot understand your philosophy?What philosophy are you talking about? It is not philosophy at all, it is living truth! I am not teaching you any doctrine; I am simply sharing my joy, my insight, my love, my light with you. Philosophy is something of the mind and I’ve dropped the mind long ago. It is a communion that is happening here; it is a communion of hearts. I am using words because you won’t understand silence, but all my words are to help you to understand my silence one day. The words are just fingers pointing to the moon. Look at the moon; don’t start biting my finger!It is not a philosophy at all. Philosophy is a very ordinary thing; it is thinking about truth. It is like a blind man thinking about light: he can go on thinking, but do you think he will ever come to any conclusion about light? Will he have any experience of light through thinking for a long, long time about light? He may come to know everything about light, but to know about light is not to know light. To know light is a totally different phenomenon. It needs eyes, not thinking.I am not a philosopher, I am a physician. I would like to help you to open your eyes. You have kept them closed for many, many lives and you have become addicted to closed eyes; you have forgotten that you can open them. I am here just to remind you that nothing is wrong with your eyes – just open them! And whatsoever you will come to know, that is God. God is not a belief but an experience.Philosophers have spent their lives defining their philosophies.Jean-Paul Sartre says, “To be is to do.”Albert Camus says, “To do is to be.”And then comes Frank Sinatra who says, “Do-be-do-be-do.”And this is my no-philosophy: “To be is just to be.”There is nothing to be done about it. There is no question of doing, it is a question of being. You need not try to understand it.That’s where you are going wrong. If you try to understand it, you are bound to misunderstand it because understanding means an effort of the mind.And your mind is a confusion, your mind is a chaos. Your mind is full of a thousand and one ideologies. Your mind is utterly fucked up!Two hippies, having shared a joint, are walking down the street. Suddenly a police car goes by at sixty miles per hour with its red light flashing and siren screaming.One hippie slowly turns to the other and says, “Man, I thought that fuzz would never leave!”The mind is a kind of drug; it keeps you drugged. You have to get rid of the mind, you have to put it aside. Then there is no question of understanding; you simply see the truth of it. It is a question of seeing, not of understanding.I am leading you toward the state of no mind and you are trying to understand it through the mind; that is impossible. The mind has no capacity to understand no-mind – no-mind is incomprehensible, obviously, the mind cannot grasp it, it can only deny it.Put the mind aside. While listening to me, don’t try to understand, just listen silently. Don’t figure out whether what I am saying is true or not true. Don’t be bothered with its truth or untruth. I am not asking you to believe in it, so there is no need to think about its truth or untruth. Listen to me just as you listen to the birds singing or the wind passing through the pine trees or the sound of running water.But you remain hung up in the head. The head keeps you almost drunk with thoughts, ideas, interpretations.Every time he got drunk, Mario could not find his house, so his friend told him to put a lantern outside his door. Mario did so and that night, when he came back drunk, he saw the lantern and said, “This must be my house!”Then taking the lantern with him, he climbed the stairs, entered the bedroom and said, “Right – this is my bed, that is my wife and there I am sleeping next to her! But who the hell is this guy with the lantern in his hand?”Beware of your mind! You have never thought about it as a drug – it is a very subtle drug. And the society goes on drugging you from your very childhood. It becomes part and parcel of your life and it colors everything. Whatsoever you see, you see through it; whatsoever you listen to, you listen to through it – and it is quick at interpreting for or against.Listening to me, if you are thinking about for or against, you will go on missing me.A drunkard accidentally found his way into a luxurious swimming club and was standing by the pool when he was approached by the manager.“Excuse me, sir, but we are forced to ask you to leave,” the manager told him.“Why should I leave?” asked the drunkard.“Because you are pissing in the pool!” exclaimed the manager.“Are you telling me that I am the only person in this club who has been pissing in the pool?” asked the drunkard.“From the diving board, yes!” answered the manager.You don’t know where you are standing, what you are doing, who you are. My whole effort here is to bring you to your senses – from your mind to your senses.The mind keeps you in a kind of madness. The mind is madness; the difference is only of degree. The mad people have gone a little ahead of you, that’s all.Maybe you are in the mind to ninety degrees, somebody else to ninety-nine degrees and somebody else has crossed the borderline of a hundred degrees; then he is mad.But the only sane man is one who has come out of the mind because then your vision is clear, unclouded. Your consciousness is pure, like a mirror without any dust on it.Two madmen are crouching on the branch of a tree when suddenly one falls down.“But what are you doing?” exclaims the one sitting on the tree branch.“Well, I had to fall – I was ripe!”A man is strolling in a park. Suddenly a man comes up to him and without saying one word slaps him on the face.“Why!” exclaims the man. “You are mad!”Says the other very quietly, “Yes – do you mind?”Your mind keeps dreaming – day in, day out, it goes on dreaming. In the day, the dreams are known as thoughts; they are verbal dreams. In the night, thoughts are known as dreams; they are pictorial thoughts. But there is no difference. And even while you are awake, if you close your eyes and look inside, you will find a subtle stream of pictorial dreams continuously going on like an undercurrent.Meditation means dropping out of this stream: neither thinking nor dreaming, just being. And then, suddenly you will see what I am saying. It will not be a question of being convinced of its truth; it will be a realization. And truth is never a conclusion; it is always a realization, a revelation.“Every night I have the same awful nightmare,” says one man to his friend. “I dream that Sophia Loren enters my room stark naked!”“What! You call this a nightmare?”“Of course I do! Every time she comes in, she slams the door so violently that I wake up!”An American Indian and a hippie are sitting next to each other in a bar. After a few moments the hippie turns to the Indian and says, “Listen, man – you’ve been staring at me for more than an hour! Mind your own business!”And the Indian replies, “Many moons ago I lay with a skunk – I keep thinking you may be my son!”When you are with me, stop all this kind of nonsense! I am not here to help you to think more clearly, to think more logically, to think in a more sophisticated and philosophic way. My whole effort is to make you aware of the stupidity of all thinking as such. Then silence comes and with silence comes seeing. When all is still within you, when nothing stirs within you, you will be able to know what I am saying, what Buddha said twenty-five centuries ago, what Ko Hsuan said two thousand years ago. You will not only understand me, you will understand all the awakened ones of all the ages – past, present, and future too – because you will have been able to realize yourself, you will have been able to taste it yourself. It is a question of tasting it.The third question:Osho,Don't you have enough disciples? What is the need for videotapes of you and your commune?Devesh, I have got only one hundred and fifty thousand sannyasins in the world – that is just a drop in the ocean of humanity. And if you want to transform the consciousness of man it is nothing; it is just the beginning, it is just a seed. We have to go on spreading this new message – new in a sense because of the so-called religions and yet the ancientmost because whenever anybody has known, he has known the same truth.Truth never changes; it is always the same. Who knows it makes no difference, when one knows it makes no difference. Time and space don’t matter.And this is a very special moment in the history of humanity: either man will destroy himself totally or a new man will be born. It has never been so important to transform the consciousness of man, to bring a radical change in the very vision of man as it is today. And we have to do it quickly because time is short. The politicians are piling up atom bombs, hydrogen bombs and whatnot. Just within ten years the power to destroy man has increased seven hundred times. Ten years ago it was enough to destroy humanity; now it is enough to destroy seven hundred earths of the same size. It seems to be simply mad. What is the point? We don’t know any other earths yet. Yes, scientists say there are fifty thousand planets with life, but that is only a hypothesis. We may never reach them – we have only reached the moon.And those planets are far, far away. The nearest is four light years away; that means if a spaceship goes at the speed of light – which is impossible or next to impossible because the speed of light is immense… Light moves at the speed of one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. If we can create a spaceship which can move at this speed, then it will take four years to get there and four years to come back. But it seems not possible to create such a spaceship because when anything moves at such a speed it becomes light; it melts and becomes light. The spaceship will melt and become light and the people traveling in it will become light. They will disappear. At such speed such heat is created that everything becomes light. We don’t yet know of any metal which can resist the heat at such a speed.And those planets which the scientists think have life are thousands of light years away so there seems to be no possibility to destroy them. Then why go on piling up more and more atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, super bombs, death rays? For what? Do you want to kill each human being seven hundred times? Human beings die only once. They are not Jesus Christs who will resurrect, so you have to kill them again and they will resurrect and you have to kill them again – seven hundred times. But politicians make arrangements just in case!In such a mad world where mad politicians are so powerful, meditation can be the only way to defend life on earth.The inner revolution has to be spread as quickly and as fast as possible. Moreover, I am a twentieth-century man – I don’t believe in bullock carts. You can see my Rolls Royce!But even Buddha tried every possible way in order to reach as many people as he could. Of course, there was no other way so he traveled from one village to another; that was the only possible way to reach people. But how many people could he reach? He could never go beyond one single province, Bihar. In fact the name “Bihar” comes from the fact that he traveled there. The name “Bihar” means the place where a buddha travels, where the awakened one has traveled. The boundaries of the province are the boundaries of his travels. But he could not reach all parts of Bihar either. He could reach only the important places and villages on the way.For forty-two years he traveled; old, ill, but he traveled. He was so old – he died when he was eighty-two – and continuously traveling in the hot climate of Bihar, a physician had to continuously follow him to keep him healthy, to look after him. Why did he travel? For what? – to reach as many people as possible.Mahavira did the same. They each tried in their own ways.Two monks were talking to each other.“Do you know why Jesus, after his resurrection, appeared to women?”“No, I don’t,” replied the other.“So that the news of his resurrection could spread more quickly!”I don’t go anywhere. There is no need now – that is out of date. I cannot reach many people by traveling, but now we have the media available. My word can go to the farthest corner of the earth – it is reaching already. Books are also an older way of reaching people; their days are also over. New methods have been evolved.A videotape is a far better way to reach people because they can hear me the same way as you are hearing me. And just hearing the word without seeing the person is one thing; seeing the person also makes a lot of difference. It is totally different because when you are listening to me on a tape recording or on records you will not be able to see my hand, which says more than I can say with my words. You will not be looking at my eyes, which have much more to say than words can convey. Something will be missing, something of immense value – the person will be missing. You will be hearing only a ghostly voice.I will use films, television, videotapes, tapes, every modern technique to spread the message. I belong to the twentieth century totally, wholeheartedly. And I love this century; I am not against it. I love science and its technology. It is in the wrong hands, but that always happens. Whenever something significant is discovered it always falls into the wrong hands first, for the simple reason that they are very quick people, cunning people.Even the discovery of atomic energy can be a blessing to the world. But it has fallen into the hands of the politicians. It should be in the hands of mystics. Then there would be no need to be afraid of a Third World War. Then we could fill the whole earth with affluence; then poverty could disappear for the first time from the whole earth. Poverty could become a thing of the past. Much illness could disappear. Man’s life could be prolonged to almost impossible limits. Three hundred years would not be a difficult target – each person could live three hundred years very easily because scientists say the body is capable of living far longer than it lives.People die at the age of seventy just because they have always been dying at that age. It has become a fixed idea in the mind – in the collective mind it has become a fixed idea; it is a kind of autohypnosis. It can be changed.Even the very program in your cells can be changed – when a child is born his cells have a program on how long he will live – but that program can be changed. If we can split the atom, we can split the living cell and change its inner program. We can give it a new program, we can make it live three hundred, four hundred, five hundred years. We can give it a program which will keep it healthy forever, young forever. Old age can disappear. This is possible now.Science has released tremendous power, but it has fallen into the wrong hands and the right hands are not there. We have to create the right hands; we have to create the right consciousness for that.Hence, I will go on working with all the modern media to reach as many people as possible. I am already reaching. You can see here people from almost every country. There is not a single country in the world now where my sannyasins are not. And they are creating a stir everywhere. They are bound to create a stir, they are bound to create a new kind of revolution – the real revolution.Political revolutions are not revolutions; only spiritual revolutions are revolutions because unless the inner being changes, no outer change is going to help.And, remember, I am not an old type of saint: “Why bother about disciples and why bother about reaching many people?” It is not a question of bothering at all – I am enjoying it tremendously! It is not work for me in any way. It is play. And it is urgently needed, too.I can understand Devesh’s question because he works in the film department in the commune. He is sitting there just behind the video camera. He must be getting puzzled – why? He has written many questions of the same type.Just two days ago when Prem Chinmaya left his body, Devesh immediately wrote a question to me: “Even Prem Chinmaya’s departure and the celebration were videotaped. Can’t a sannyasin die in peace?”But he was already dead! Now you can do whatsoever you want – videotape him, film him… And the photographer was arranging his head to the right position – you can do anything now! Chinmaya must have been around laughing, enjoying. He must be saying to himself, “Gosh, had I known it before I would have died sooner! They are doing well.” He must have enjoyed it.And he died in utter peace, he died in absolute peace. And your videotaping cannot disturb him. His cancer was not disturbing him, how can your videotaping disturb him? He was in immense pain, but he remained a witness. He died a beautiful death. That’s the way a sannyasin should die.Now Nartan has come. Just yesterday he wrote a letter to me: “I was fortunate to come and to see Chinmaya’s departure and the celebration because I am also suffering from cancer. The doctors have said, ‘You have only two years left.’ And I have come to be here forever.” Nartan was happy to see the way Chinmaya died and the way everybody celebrated his death.I teach you not only to celebrate life, but death too because death is the climax of life, the crescendo. If you have really lived your life you will celebrate your death too.And he died so beautifully, in such deep surrender. Even Nartan was immensely happy to be present. Now his fear of death is gone. In fact, he is looking forward to it.So, Devesh, get ready!The fourth question:Osho,Why and how did God create the Italians?Sanjayo, are you in love with some Italian guy? Otherwise why this question? And this is really a great question! When I read your question I had to consult the Akashic records because neither the Bible says anything about it nor the Koran nor the Vedas! And really it is something very important. The keeper of the Akashic records is Master Koot Humi, well known to the Theosophists as Master K. H. He is the keeper – I had to ask his permission: “Let me see just a little thing because I don’t know the answer: Why and how did God create the Italians?”He was also puzzled. He said, “Nobody has ever asked this, neither Blavatsky nor Annie Besant. Who is this Sanjayo? Seems to be very esoteric!” I said, “My sannyasins are very esoteric, very metaphysical. They ask such questions that if they were to ask any other saint, either the saint would escape or they would be thrown out! But they can ask me each and every thing.”I had to look hard enough, then I came across a little passage. It says: “In the beginning there was darkness and spaghetti. And God loved spaghetti. One day, in the darkness, he was eating spaghetti and an idea occurred to him. He took a little spaghetti in one hand and a little spaghetti in the other and clapped both hands together and said, ‘Wop!’ and the first Italian appeared.” That’s why they are called wops.The only question remains – please don’t put it to me – who made the spaghetti in the beginning? I could not find the answer even in the Akashic records. And when I asked Koot Humi again and again, he said, “Shut up! Such questions are not written and such answers are not given. And God can do anything, he can do any miracle. Why can he not make spaghetti?” I said, “That seems to be difficult. Without an Italian there in the first place who will make spaghetti?”And you ask, “Why…”In the Akashic records it says: The day God created Italy was a day of grace. Even God stopped to contemplate his work with great satisfaction. “I outdid myself! What a wonder! Look at that beautiful scenery! It is a blessed country!” said God to himself. And then, to balance things, God created the Italians.One thing is certain: without the Italians, the world would have never been so beautiful, would have never been so interesting. Italians have contributed much. Another thing is absolutely certain: without the Italians there would have been no commune here – impossible. I am dispensable, but Deeksha is not! Even if I am not here you can sit in silence, but without Deeksha how long can you sit in silence?A lady was taking the census in a middle class Italian neighborhood. As she rang the bell, a naked man opened the door. She was a very professional type, so she made believe she had not noticed. But the guy explained himself.“I hope you understand me – I belong to a nudist club.”“There is no problem,” said the lady, “I just need some information, sir. Are you married?”“Yes, for the third time.”“Do you have sons?”“Yes,” said the naked man. “I have seven from my first wife, twelve from the second and fifteen from the third.”“Well,” said the lady, “it seems you are not a nudist, you just have no time to dress!”Italians really have contributed great things to the world!A very shy painter met a beautiful Italian woman in a bar and asked if she would pose for him. She agreed if he would pay her one hundred dollars.So the painter borrowed money from all his friends and set up the appointment. Once they were together he said, “Miss, what I would really like to do is to paint your portrait with bare breasts.”She agreed for the price of two hundred dollars. So he sold everything he could and finally raised the money.When she came to his studio and posed with her breasts exposed, he became so excited that he couldn’t resist asking her to pose entirely in the nude. She agreed, but asked for four hundred dollars.Desperate, he sold his favorite paintings and even his art supplies in order to raise the enormous sum of money.Finally she arrived at the studio and removed all of her clothes. The painter became so excited, he said. “Oh! The passion! I am dying with desire for you! What I really want is to make love with you! Say how much, how much?”“Ai!” she exclaimed. “The same price as for everyone else – ten dollars.”Maria has six sons, all dark haired. The seventh, however, is born redheaded.Giovanni is furious. “I know you have betrayed me!” he shouts in anger. “Confess that this is not my son!”“I swear, Giovanni, he is your son. I swear it – I swear it!”But Giovanni, in a blind rage, shoots her. Before dying, the woman asks him to come close and whispers, “I have to confess something to you, Giovanni. He is your son – it’s the others that are not yours!”Roberto left for America with the promise of sending for Maria once he had settled. Before leaving they made a fidelity pact with each other.Two years later Roberto sent for Maria. On her arrival day he said to her, “Wow, you look lovely!”“And you, Roberto, you are so handsome!” said Maria.Soon they were sharing confidences of the past two years.“Do you know, Maria,” said Roberto, “these two years have been a great sacrifice, but I have been faithful to our pact. Every time I went with a woman I would remember our vow and would get up from on top of her. What about you? Did you fulfill our pact, too?”And Maria answered, “You know, Roberto, to get out from underneath is much harder!”Four men are in a bar talking about their professions.The first, a German, says, “I’m a coke-sacker at the coal yard. I fill sacks with coke.”The second, a Frenchman, says, “I’m a sock-tucker at the clothing warehouse. I tuck socks into packages.”The third, a Dutchman, says, “I’m a cork-soaker at the barrel factory. I soak the corks so they’ll make a good fit.”The fourth, an Italian, says, “I’m the real thing.”Without the Italians the world would not be the same. They are the most earthly people. And I love the earthly people; they are the most rooted in the earth. They are not abstract people, like Indians; they are not metaphysicians. That is their beauty.And my work here is to create a synthesis between the sky people and the earth people. I would like my sannyasins to be as earthly as the Italians and as unearthly as the Indians because unless your roots go deep into the earth your branches cannot reach the stars. The deeper the roots go into the earth, the higher is the reach of your branches. Then you can whisper with the stars.Up until now there was a split. The earthly people have been condemned by the religious people as materialists and the materialists have been condemned by the spiritualists as hocus-pocus. Both are true in a way, but both are half. And a half-truth is far more dangerous than a lie because it appears like a truth.The whole truth is that a real, authentic man, the whole man, will contain contradictions. He will be vast enough to contain contradictions. He will be a man and a woman together. He will be earthly and unearthly together. He will be materialist and spiritualist together, with no conflict. Unless this synthesis happens the world is going to remain schizophrenic.My sannyasins are not to be unearthly, they are not only to be earthly either. They have to be both. I am giving them the hardest task ever: they have to be materialists and spiritualists, spiritualists and materialists. They have to drop the whole division of this world and that, of this shore and that, of this and that. They have to make a bridge between the two. And once that bridge is made, man will be whole for the first time. And a whole man is holy. Neither is the spiritualist holy nor is the worldly man holy because both are not yet whole. They are unholy because they are half and any person who is half is bound to suffer. He cannot rejoice, he cannot celebrate, he cannot know what a blessing life is.You have to know that even dust is divine, that your body is a temple. You have to become Zorba the Buddha!Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The Venerable Master said:Tao manifests both as the pure and the turbid, both as movement and stillness.Heaven is pure, earth is turbid.Heaven moves, earth is still.The masculine is pure, the feminine is turbid.The masculine is active, the feminine is passive.Manifesting from its radical essence, Tao flows forth even to the last of things, bringing forth heaven and earth and all that is in between.The pure is the cause of the turbid and movement of stillness.Taoism is not a religion in the ordinary sense of the term. It is not a so-called religion; it is authentically religious. But to be authentically religious it has to be basically scientific. Science and religion are separate only as far as their direction is concerned, but not in their approach. Religion can be scientific without being a science; science can be religious without being a religion. Tao is scientific without being a science.Science means trying to know the objective world without any prejudice, without any a priori conclusions. The same is true about the inner world, the subjective world. One should approach it also without any conclusions. A scientist cannot be a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian; if he is then he is not scientific. At least in his scientific endeavor he should put aside all his prejudices.If Galileo remains a Christian, he cannot discover the truth that the sun does not move around the earth. If Copernicus remains a Christian even while he is doing his scientific research, he cannot go beyond the Bible. And the Bible is two thousand years old; it contains the science of those days. It is very primitive – it is bound to be so.All religious scriptures contain certain facts which they should not contain. They are not religious facts; they are concerned with the objective world. But in the old days everything was compiled in religious scriptures – they were the only scriptures. Religious scriptures have functioned in the world for thousands of years as encyclopedias: everything that was known, was discovered, was theorized, was collected in them.The Vedas in India are called samhitas; samhita means a compilation, a collection. Their function was exactly that of the Encyclopedia Britannica. All kinds of things are compiled in them: the literature of those days, the science of those days, the astronomy of those days, the geography, the history, the art; everything that was possible to know was compiled. As man has progressed, everything has become more and more specialized.Science means the search for truth in the objective world; religion means the search for truth in the subjective world. Just as there is a world outside you, there is a world inside you, too. And, of course, the inside world is far more significant because it is your inside, it is your very being, it is your subjectivity. But about the inner world we are still very unscientific – we still live through beliefs. About the outside world we have become a little more mature; we are ready to drop any belief. If a certain fact is discovered which goes against our older theories, we discard the older theories in favor of the new discovery. But the same is not true about the inner; we have a very deep clinging to the inner.Tao is in that way a scientific approach to the inner – you can call it the science of the subjective, the science of being. This is one of the most significant things to remember while we will be meditating over these sutras of Ko Hsuan.The second thing to remember is that Tao is the first revelation, realization, of the fact that existence is polar. No other religion has been so clear about this tremendously significant fact. “Existence is polar” means that existence is not logical, it is dialectical; it is not Aristotelian, it is Hegelian.Logic is simple, logic is linear; dialectics is a little more complex. It is not simple because dialectics is possible only if the opposite is also involved in it; if the opposite is not there, there will be no dialectics. There can be no electricity without the two poles, the positive and the negative. Electricity is not logical, it is utterly illogical – it is dialectical. There can be no humanity without the masculine energy and the feminine energy. Just think of a humanity consisting only of men or of women: it will die. It will not be able to live – it will not have any energy to live. Energy is created by friction with the opposite.The Hegelian formulation is that thesis needs antithesis. Unless there is a thesis opposed by an antithesis there is no dynamism; life becomes stagnant. Matter is possible only if there is consciousness and vice versa. The sky and the earth, God and existence, the day and the night, summer and winter, birth and death, these are polarities opposite to each other. But the opposition is only apparent; deep down they are complementaries.What Hegel discovered just two hundred years ago, Taoists had discovered almost five thousand years before. They were the pioneers of dialectics; they were the first dialecticians of the world. They contributed one of the most important insights to existence: you will find it everywhere.Life cannot exist even for a single moment without its opposite because it depends on the opposite. The opposition is only apparent; deep down they are complementaries. They have to be – they depend on each other. Man is not man without a woman, woman is not woman without a man; they depend on each other.That’s why there is something missing in a homosexual or a lesbian relationship – there is no dialectics. The homosexual relationship is far more logical, remember, and because it is logical it is simple; because it is logical there is less complexity about it, less conflict in it. It is not accidental that the homosexuals are called “gay” people – they are gay! They are happier than the heterosexual people because there is no conflict. A man can understand another man more easily than he can ever understand a woman. A woman can understand another woman more easily than she will be ever able to understand a man because man is a totally different existence. Their ways differ, their thinking differs: they function from different centers. To each other they look absurd.The man functions through the intellect; the woman functions through intuition. The man goes about everything through reasoning; the woman simply jumps to a conclusion without going through any reasoning. The man is simply amazed! He cannot find any clue. He may have lived with the woman his whole life, still the woman remains a mystery. And the same is true for the woman: the man remains a mystery. He cannot understand simple things which she can see clearly. Smoking can bring cancer: “Why do you go on smoking?” Drinking alcohol will kill you sooner: “Then why are you poisoning yourself?”Mulla Nasruddin’s wife was telling him… When he was drinking whisky one night, she told him, “I have told you a thousand and one times, stop all this nonsense! This is slow poisoning! This is slow suicide!”Nasruddin looked at her and said, “Please don’t exaggerate! You have not told me one thousand and one times – maybe a few dozen times. Don’t exaggerate. Moreover, I am not in any hurry, so let it be slow poisoning! I am not in a hurry to die.”The man and the woman are constantly arguing about each and everything; they never agree about anything. They cannot agree: by their very natures, agreement is not possible, there is always tension. Hence gay people are really gay. When you see two homosexuals hand in hand going for a morning walk you can see the joy! You never see that joy between a husband and wife – impossible. The gay relationship is simple; but because it is simple, because there is no tension in it, no conflict in it, there is no growth either. There is no pain in it, hence it is stagnant. There are no more surprises in it.For the man, the woman always remains to be discovered and vice versa. You cannot exhaust discovering all of a man or a woman. If you belong to the opposite pole it is an endless discovery; you will never come to a conclusion.Existence is not logical and it is good, otherwise there would have been only death and no life. If God were Aristotelian there would have been no life at all. There would have been peace all over – nobody to know it; nobody to experience it. It is good that God is Hegelian, that he has created polarities.Tao talks about yin and yang: that is its most fundamental approach to understanding existence. And you have to go deep into it.There is a great attraction between a man and woman for the simple reason that they are mysterious to each other. The same things create conflict and the same things create attraction. The farther away they are, the greater the distance between them, the more the attraction between them.In modern societies, in advanced countries particularly, the attraction is disappearing for the simple reason that men and women are coming so close to each other, they are becoming almost the same. They dress alike, they have both started smoking, they both drink, they both behave in the same way, they both use the same language. The Liberation Movement has contributed much to this nonsense.The Women’s Liberation Movement is teaching women all over the world to be just like men – strong, rough, aggressive. They can be aggressive and they can be rough, but they will lose something immensely valuable: they will lose their feminineness. And the moment they become just like men they will not be mysteries anymore. This is something new happening in the world; it has never happened before.The wise sages of the ancient days always made it clear to the old societies: make men and women as distinct as possible. Nature makes them distinct, but culture also should help them to be distinct. That does not mean that they are not equal. They are equal but they are different, they are unique. Equality need not mean similarity; equality should not be misunderstood as similarity. Similarity is not equality. And remember, if women start becoming like men they will never be equal to men.The Women’s Liberation Movement is going to do some very deep harm to the women’s cause in the world and this will be the harm: they will become carbon copies of men, they will have a secondary kind of existence. They will not be real men because they cannot be naturally so aggressive. They can pretend, they can cultivate aggression, they can be rough, but that will be just a facade; deep down they will remain soft. And that will create a split in their being, that will create a schizophrenia in their being. They will suffer from a dual personality and they will lose their mysteriousness. They will argue with men with the same logic. But they will be like men and they will become ugly. To be unnatural is to be ugly; to be natural is to be beautiful.I would like them to be equal to men, but the idea of similarity should be dropped. In fact, they should become as dissimilar as possible; they should keep their uniqueness intact. They should become more and more feminine, then the mystery deepens. And that is the way of existence, the way of Tao.Only one modern psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung, had some insight about this Taoist approach. He was the only one in the West who had pondered over and studied Taoism deeply. He introduced Taoism in his psychology and he brought Taoism up to date. If you want to understand Taoism, it will be good to understand Carl Gustav Jung and his understanding about Taoism. He was moving along the right lines but after his death that work stopped. He had taken only a few steps – because Taoism is a vast ocean – he had moved in the right direction, but the work has stopped. It has to be deepened. Many more people have to work to make the insight modern because the language is old and sometimes the old language becomes a barrier.For example, reading these sutras many women here will feel a little offended. But Ko Hsuan means no offense; he is simply using an old way. What could he do? That was the way in those days. There is no evaluation – he is not saying that the masculine is higher and the feminine is lower – that has to be remembered constantly, otherwise you will immediately become closed. Women particularly will become closed to the sutras; they will not be able to understand them. And those women who have, unfortunately, been associated with the Women’s Liberation Movement, will immediately become closed. They will not be able to understand the beauty of the sutras. So for them particularly I have to remind you that it is not biological masculinity and femininity that is meant, but psychological.A man is not of necessity masculine, a woman is not of necessity feminine. A woman can be masculine, for example, Joan of Arc or, in India, Laxmibhai. These women were warriors, great soldiers; they were not feminine at all. Biologically, of course, they were feminine, their bodies were those of women, but their very souls were those of men. They have to be counted as masculine. And there have been men – poets, dancers, musicians, singers, painters – who were very feminine. So soft, so round was their being that psychologically they were women. They may have been able to reproduce children, they may have been able to become fathers and husbands, but deep down they were not masculine; their psychology can only be called feminine. It happens – in fact, it happens more often than you will ever think.Secondly, every man and every woman is also the opposite. Every man, to be alive, carries in the unconscious the feminine principle, otherwise there will be no dynamism in his being, there will be no tension, not enough tension to keep him alive. He will simply die. There will be no reason for him to live. A certain tension is needed in his being. If the tension becomes too much he goes mad; if the tension becomes too little he will be dead.There is a beautiful story in Buddha’s life:A great prince became initiated, became a sannyasin of Buddha. He had lived in great luxury his whole life, he was a great sitarist, his name was known all over the country as a great musician. But he became impressed by Buddha’s inner music – maybe his insight into music had helped him to understand Buddha.When Buddha was visiting his capital, the prince heard him for the first time, fell in love at first sight, and renounced his kingdom. Even Buddha wanted him not to do such a great act so impulsively. He told him, “Wait. Think. I will be here for four months” – because during the whole rainy season Buddha never used to move. In the rainy season he would remain in one place. “So I am going to be here; there is no hurry. You think over it. In four months’ time then you can take sannyas, you can become an initiate.”But the young man said, “The decision has happened. There is nothing more to think about. It is now or never! And who knows about tomorrow? And you have been always saying, ‘Live in the present,’ so why are you telling me to wait for four months? I may die, you may die, something may happen. Who knows about the future? I don’t want to wait even a single day!”His insistence was such that Buddha had to concede; he was initiated. Buddha was a little uncertain about him, whether he would be able to live this life of a beggar. Buddha had known this from his own experience; he himself was a great prince once. He knew what it was to live in luxury and comfort and what it was to be a beggar on the street. It was a great, arduous phenomenon, but Buddha had taken time. It took him six years to become enlightened and slowly, slowly he had become accustomed to being without shelter, sometimes without food, without friends, enemies all over for no reason at all – because he was not hurting anybody. But people are so stupid, they live in such lies, that whenever they see a man of truth they are wounded of their own accord – they feel hurt, insulted.Buddha knew the whole thing was going to be too much for this young man. He felt sorry for him, but he initiated him. And he was surprised and all the other sannyasins were surprised because the man simply moved to the other extreme. All Buddhist monks used to eat only once a day; that new monk, the ex-prince, started eating only once in two days. All Buddhist monks used to sleep under trees; he would sleep under the open sky. The monks used to walk on the roads; he would walk not on the roads but always on the sides where there were thorns, stones. He was a beautiful man; within months his body became black. He was very healthy; he became ill, he became lean and thin. His feet became wounded.Many sannyasins came to Buddha and said, “Something has to be done. That man has gone to the opposite extreme: he is torturing himself! He has become self-destructive.”Buddha went to him one night and asked him, “Shron” – Shron was his name – “can I ask you a question?”He said, “Of course, my Lord. You can ask any question. I am your disciple. I am here to tell you whatsoever you want to know about me.”Buddha said, “I have heard that when you were a prince you were a great musician, you used to play the sitar.”He said, “Yes, but that is finished. I have completely forgotten about it. But it is true that I used to play the sitar. That was my hobby, my only hobby. I used to practice at least eight hours per day and I had become famous all over the country for that.”Buddha said, “I have to ask one question. If the strings of your sitar are too tight, what will happen?”He said, “What will happen? It is simple! You cannot play upon it – they will be broken.”Buddha said, “Another question. If they are too loose, what will happen?”Shron said, “That too is simple. If they are too loose then music will not be produced on them because there will be no tension.”Buddha said, “You are an intelligent person – I need not say anything more to you. Remember, life is also a musical instrument. It needs a certain tension but only a certain tension. Less than that, your life is too loose and there is no music. If the tension is too much you start breaking down, you start going mad. Remember this. First you lived a very loose life and you missed the inner music; now you are living a very tight, uptight life – you are still missing the music. Is there not a way to adjust the strings of the sitar in such a way that they are exactly in the middle, neither loose nor tight, with just the right amount of tension, so that music can arise?”He said, “Yes, there is a way.”Buddha said, “That is what my teaching is: to be exactly in the middle between the two polarities. Tension has not to disappear completely, otherwise you will be dead. Tension has not to become too much, otherwise you will go mad.”And that’s what has happened in the whole world. The East has become too loose, hence there is death, starvation. And the West has become too tight, hence there is madness, neurosis. The West is breaking down under its own weight. The East has become so lazy and lousy out of its looseness.A certain tension is needed, but there is a state of tension which is also a state of equilibrium. And that is the whole art of Tao. The equilibrating pulse of the mystical life, the secret…The words in this sutra are not to be understood biologically, physiologically. Each man and each woman also have their opposite within them. If you are a man consciously, then unconsciously there is a woman in you; if you are a woman, then there is a man unconsciously in you. Your conscious and your unconscious are polar opposites and there is a tension between the two. That tension has to become neither too loose nor too tight. This is the whole art of religion, or the whole science of religion.Tao does not believe in miracles, it believes in scientific methods to transform your life.Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu were walking together along a forest path one day when they came upon a fast-flowing river which barred their way. Immediately Lieh Tzu sat down on the bank of the river and meditated upon the eternal Tao. Ten minutes later he stood up and proceeded to walk on the water to the other side.Next, Chuang Tzu sat in the lotus posture for twenty minutes, whereupon he stood up and also walked across the river.Lao Tzu, watching this in amazement, shrugged his shoulders, sat down on the river bank like the others and meditated for over an hour. Finally, with complete trust in the Tao, he closed his eyes, took one step into the river and fell in.On the other shore, Chuang Tzu laughed, turned to Lieh Tzu and said, “Should we tell him where the rocks are?”Tao does not believe in any nonsense. It is very pragmatic, practical, down to earth.A street vendor was trying to sell his product. All day long he would call out, “Try a bottle of my elixir – long-life lotion!”There was a boy helping him distribute the bottles and taking the money.The vendor kept calling out, “Look! Long-life lotion! A wonder, gentlemen! A real miracle! Every morning I drink one bottle and look at me – don’t I look young? I am more than seven hundred years old!”The people were amazed and skeptical. Finally one of the customers called the boy aside and asked, “Is your boss really over seven hundred years old?”“I can’t guarantee it,” answered the boy.Everyone turned to the boy to hear his answer.“Why can’t you guarantee it?” asked the customer.“Because I have only worked with him for three hundred years,” answered the boy.All other religions are much more concerned with such stupidities – miracles, wonders. Not Tao. Tao is very straight, hence there is a great future for Tao. When all other religions have gone down the drain, Tao will still be around for the simple reason that it will fit with the scientific climate that is growing every day on the earth. It will not only fit with the scientific climate, it will help and nourish it. It will bring new visions to science because it does not ask you to believe in anything, it simply wants you to understand.These sutras are not to be believed in. Please try to understand them and try to understand them by putting aside all your prejudices as men and women.The Venerable Master said:Tao manifests both as the pure and the turbid, both as movement and stillness.Don’t be offended by the word turbid; it simply means muddy, not clear, vague. Both are manifestations of Tao. Tao manifests both as the pure…And the word pure does not mean anything moral, virtuous, etcetera. It has nothing to do with morality. Pure simply means clear, transparent, and turbid means muddy, not clear, vague. These are both manifestations of Tao.The ordinary man is turbid, the Buddha is pure. The man who is sleepy is muddy, cloudy; he is surrounded by much smoke of his own creation. The man who has awakened out of all dreams and desires has a clarity; he has no smoke around himself, no clouds. He is like a sunny day: the sun is there without any clouds.Tao manifests both… and remember, both are Tao. Never forget it. The asleep person is as divine as the awakened one, as godly as the awakened one. There is no intrinsic difference; the difference is only in manifestation. One is full of dreams, desires, hence one is turbid. And the other is finished with the dreams, has become tired of the dreams, has come to know that they are dreams and in that very knowing those dreams have dropped of their own accord. Now his eyes are clear he can see through and through. Tao manifests…both as movement and stillness.So there is no need to insist that you should be still; even in movement you can experience Tao. You can experience Tao in stillness.There are two possibilities. Buddha sat for years in silence and then he experienced Tao. He calls it nirvana; that is his name for Tao. And Jalaluddin Rumi danced for years and then one day it happened while he was dancing: through dance he attained Tao. He calls it God; that is his name for Tao. One can approach either through stillness or through movement.It is because of this fact that in my commune both kinds of meditations are being used. People are dancing, people are singing and meditating. People are sitting in silence – zazen, vipassana – and meditating. And one can move from one to the other because both are your possibilities: you can find it in dance and you can find it in silence, stillness.In fact, your experience will be far richer if you can find it in both ways. If you are capable of finding it in dancing and also whilst sitting silently doing nothing, your experience will be far richer than the experience of Gautam Buddha and Jalaluddin Rumi, both – naturally because you will enter the temple of godliness from two opposite extremes, from two different paths. You will be more fluid and you will have known the beauties of both paths – because on one path you may come across a few things and on the other path you may come across a few other things. Both paths are full of different wonders. The dancer will come to know a few things which the person who is sitting silently will never know. The person sitting silently will reach the ultimate peak, but he will not know a few things that happen on the way of dancing. And the same is true about the dancer: he will not know a few things which happen only on the way of stillness.My emphasis is why miss any enrichment that is possible to you. Why not be multidimensional? Why not experience God through as many ways as possible so that you know all the aspects of God? And in that very knowing you will know that all the religions are unnecessarily arguing against each other. Their arguments are absolutely meaningless – they are talking about the same God. But because they have known different aspects they are insisting on their own aspect: “This is the truth.” And the other is saying that just the opposite is the truth.If you ask a Buddhist, “Can one become enlightened through dancing?” he will immediately say “No” and his “No” will be categorical. He will say, “It is impossible because if one can know through dancing, why did Buddha sit for years? Was he a fool? He would have danced!”If you ask a whirling dervish, a follower of Jalaluddin Rumi, “Can one find God just by sitting silently doing nothing?” he will say, “No. Impossible – absolutely no. Otherwise, why should Jalaluddin have danced? Why should he have worked so hard dancing, day in, day out?”When the ultimate flowering happened Jalaluddin had danced for thirty-six hours continuously. Just as Buddha had sat for seven days continuously not moving, not even moving his eyelids, Jalaluddin had danced, not even waiting for a single moment, not even resting for a single moment – a mad dance for thirty-six hours till he fell down on the ground. But when he opened his eyes, the old man had disappeared, the new man was born. The new man was already there; he was a totally new person. The Sufi will not agree that just by sitting you can find it.But I say to you I have found him through both the ways: I have found him through movement and I have found him through stillness. And I perfectly agree with Ko Hsuan that…Tao manifests…both as movement and stillness.Heaven is pure, earth is turbid.Obviously. Heaven means absolute clarity. The sky is pure; there is nothing in it. Nothingness is the purest thing. The earth is full of many things, hence it is turbid.And just the other day I was telling you that you have to be both earthly and unearthly. Because, in fact, you are made of both. Something in you is contributed by the earth, by the turbid and something in you is contributed by the sky, by the pure, by the clear. You are a synthesis of the earth and the sky.Up until now, except Tao, all the religions have chosen. Either they have chosen to be very earthly – for example, Judaism is very earthly and Jainism is very unearthly. Jainism has chosen the sky component of your being and Judaism has chosen the earthly component of your being, but both are halves. They are not whole; something is missing in both. Tao is whole.And in my understanding, in my realization, Tao is the only experience which is holy because it is whole: Heaven is pure, earth is turbid.That’s why I say to you be a Zorba – but not Zorba the Greek because then you are just turbid, just earth, just muddy. I say to you be Zorba the Buddha – not Gautam the Buddha because to be Gautam the Buddha means you are just sky, no earth, absolutely other-worldly, belonging to the farther shore. Why not be both? When it is possible to be both, why miss anything? Why not use all the opportunities to grow and to be?Heaven moves, earth is still.These are just metaphors.The masculine is pure…At its lowest, masculine means intellectuality – at its highest it means intelligence. It is clear – intellect is clear. Two plus two is four, it is as clear as that. And the highest form is intelligence. Buddha means one who has attained the highest form of intelligence. His words are very clear; his words are not at all in any way muddy. You cannot find clearer statements than Buddha’s. His statements are not mystic, not esoteric.In fact, he used to say to his disciples, “Please don’t ask me any metaphysical questions because they are not needed, they are not going to help. Ask authentic, real questions, questions that are your problems in life, so that I can help you to solve them.”He used to tell this story again and again…Once a man was hit by an arrow. He was a philosopher, a great metaphysician. People rushed to him; they wanted to take out the arrow, but he said, “Wait! First tell me whether the arrow is real or illusory.”Now, that has been one of the most important metaphysical questions, in India particularly: whether the world is real or illusory, real or maya, whether it is, or it only appears so.The metaphysician was asking out of his old habit. “If it is unreal, why bother? If it only appears to be there, what is the point of taking it out? It does not exist. It is like a snake which does not exist. It is only a rope really, but in the darkness you have misunderstood it as a snake. So there is no need to kill it. How can you kill a snake which does not exist in the first place?”He puzzled people so much with all his metaphysical reasoning that they were at a loss what to do. It was difficult to prove… In fact, it is difficult to prove: nobody has been able to prove conclusively that the world exists; there is no way to prove it. It may be all illusory.For example, I am talking to you, but how can you prove that you are not dreaming? Many times you dream.Asang writes to me, “Osho, I am very grateful – you come in my dreams.” Now it will be difficult for Asang to decide whether right now it is a dream or I am really here! There is no way to decide.In Western philosophy, the man who represents this ideology is Berkeley. He says the whole world is your idea, it is just an idea. It is in your mind; it does not exist really. It is just like a dream phenomenon. It is made of the same stuff as dreams are made of.Berkeley was going for a morning walk with his friend, Dr. Johnson. And Dr. Johnson was a very realistic type of person. When Berkeley told him that this whole world is just an idea, it does not really exist, Johnson got so mad – mad because he could not prove otherwise – that he simply took a big rock and threw it on Berkeley’s foot. Berkeley shrieked in pain, screamed, blood started oozing from his foot.And Johnson said, “Now what do you say?”Berkeley laughed and he said, “This is all just an idea! My screaming, your throwing the rock, even you, Dr. Johnson, are just my idea. I am your idea, you are my idea. We are all ideas. Your rock cannot prove that it is real because sometimes I have screamed in my dreams. Sometimes rocks have been thrown at me in my dreams, blood has come out in my dreams. So what? What is the difference?”It is impossible to disprove such a philosophy. Shankara in India represents this kind of philosophy and Berkeley represents it in the West; so far they both remain unrefuted. Nobody believes in their philosophy. I don’t think that even they believed it themselves, otherwise they would have stopped eating, making love, sleeping, because if it is all dream stuff why bother? Berkeley continued to make love and produce children. What nonsense! He continued to eat and when he used to fall ill he would take medicine. Now, killing one idea with another idea! I don’t think they ever believed it themselves.Shankara says that the world is illusory and yet he says: “Renounce it.” If it is illusory, why renounce it? What can you renounce? If it is not there in the first place, how can you renounce it? Something that is not can be renounced? And if the world is not, if the seen is not, then where is the seer? Without the seen, the seer himself becomes illusory. If there is nothing to renounce, the renouncer himself becomes illusory.They don’t believe in their own philosophies but still they cannot be refuted; there is no way to refute them. Thousands of ways have been tried, but nothing can refute them. For example, Berkeley used to say when you go out of the room, your furniture in the room, your books in the room all disappear because there is nobody to project the idea. Obviously, if you take the film out of the projector, there will be no pictures on the wall. Now, how can you prove it? You can say, “I can look through the keyhole.” He will say, “So you have come back through the keyhole. Again they will appear because the idea is projected through the keyhole.”One man worked for years to find some way to refute Berkeley and he went on going again and again. One day he went with the idea that “Now I don’t think you can deny this. When you are sitting in a carriage you don’t see the wheels of the carriage, but the carriage is moving – the wheels are there. You are not projecting them because you are not seeing them, but the carriage is moving. The movement of the carriage proves that the wheels are there.”Berkeley said, “You don’t know. That will be God’s idea. The world is not only my idea; ultimately it is God’s idea, it is God’s dream. In fact, he is dreaming us too – the driver and the passenger and the carriage and the wheels.”It is impossible to deny such philosophies. They are absurd, but they cannot be refuted.Buddha used to say…People, poor people, villagers, gathered and they looked at each other. “What to do with this man?”Buddha was passing by; he heard the whole story. He went to the philosopher and he said, “These questions can be answered later on, we can discuss them later on at our ease. First let us pull out the arrow because this arrow can kill you and if you are alive we can discuss it later on. And whatsoever you decide later on, that the arrow is real or unreal, will be up to you. But right now you don’t need philosophical discussion, you need a physician who can pull out the arrow, who can take out the poison, who can give you some medicine as a protection. Right now no metaphysics is going to help you. Okay, if it is unreal, let it be unreal! But later on we can discuss it.”Buddha used to say that the same is the situation of man, every man. You are suffering, so the whole thing is how to pull out the arrow that is creating your suffering. It is not a metaphysical question. His words are very clear, rational, intelligent, comprehensible by the mind. He says only things which can be comprehended by any intelligent person. That’s why Buddha has become very important today – because his approach seems to be so intellectual.The masculine is pure… That means the lowest form is intellect, intellectuality and the highest form is intelligence.…the feminine is turbid.Turbid here will mean at the lowest, instinct, and at the highest, intuition. Now the mystics, the Sufis, talk in a totally different way. Their words are not so clear, their words are vague. Their words are not easily comprehensible; you have to figure out what their exact meaning is. And that is the state of the feminine mind. But remember, I don’t mean it biologically. Of course, also biologically the woman functions more through instinct than through intellect…Many people ask me, “Why have all the buddhas you talk about been men? Why not women?” For the simple reason that the approach of the feminine mind will be totally different. They cannot be buddhas. They can be Meeras, Magdalenes, Lallas, Rabiyas, but they cannot be buddhas. Their approach is bound to be different. Meera will not talk in an intellectual way, she will sing. Her singing, her dancing has a totally different flavor. She will not argue – argument is not the way of the feminine mind. Her argument will be her dance, her ecstatic dance. If you can see her dance, if you can feel her dance… I will not say if you can understand her dance because dancers cannot be understood, they can only be felt, they can only be experienced. Her words will be very instinctive.For example, Freud has condemned very much all the women mystics he knew about. He never knew about Meera, otherwise he would have condemned her the most. He knew about St. Theresa; he has condemned her because she talks about being married to Christ. Now that is enough for Freud to bring his whole sexual theory in. That’s enough – nothing more is needed. Married? That means this woman is suffering from some sexual perversion. She must have repressed her sexuality and because she cannot have a sexual relationship with a real man, now she is contemplating an unreal man in the sky – somebody called Christ, the son of God. Now she is trying to create a love affair with Christ.It is really a misfortune that Freud never knew about Meera – had he known about her he himself would have danced out of joy! Because Meera uses such allegories like, “My Lord, my beloved, when will you be coming? I have prepared the bed. I have prepared the bed with roses and I am waiting! And the night is passing and you have not come yet. And I am crying and weeping for you. When will you come and make love to me?”Now, she is not even referring in an indirect way, she is talking directly. Freud would have taken the whole thing literally; that was his technique. He could prove that all these mystics were perverts. In fact, he himself was a pervert because he could not understand the feminine mind at all.That was one of the reasons why Jung had to desert him, for the simple reason that his whole understanding was simply intellectual. There was nothing intuitive in it. And Jung had a more feminine mind, a deeper capacity to feel.All men who have come in contact with women know that they function in a very different way. You cannot talk with a woman logically. It is impossible – it is as if she belongs to some other world, to some other planet. And the same must be the experience of women. They can’t understand men – continuously in their heads, in their intellects, never understanding anything of the heart. Man tries to argue, tries to convince the woman logically, but she cannot be convinced. That is not her way; logic has no appeal for her.Slowly, slowly the husband learns that a roseflower is far more important than logic. If you bring a roseflower to your wife she will understand it more than all your arguments. You can argue for months, “I love you,” and that won’t convince her. Just bring a roseflower and that will be enough. Her approach is instinctive. Man cannot understand her because whatsoever she says seems illogical and absurd.Slowly, slowly husbands start remaining silent, they become deaf. They allow the woman to talk: “Whatsoever nonsense she wants to talk, let her talk. Who listens?”Do you know why God created first the man and then the woman?To allow the poor guy to say at least two words!Overheard at Vrindavan canteen…one sannyasin was saying to another sannyasin, “It took a lot of willpower, but I finally gave up trying to diet.”A lot of willpower…“Rob told me I was the eighth wonder of the world!” said Shirley.“What did you say?” asked Pearl.“Not to let me catch him with any of the other seven!”“Can you operate a typewriter?” the boss asks the secretary.“Yes, sir. I use the biblical system.”“I never heard of it.”“Seek and ye shall find,” replies the secretary.Why do husbands become henpecked? All husbands become henpecked. In fact, to be a husband means to be a henpecked husband. There are no other kinds for the simple reason, for how long can one argue? And it makes no sense. You look foolish to yourself – you are talking to the walls! You argue and the woman cries! You tell her, “Cool down and let us sit down and talk it over at the table,” and she starts throwing things! She slams the door, she breaks cups and saucers. Now what is the point? You cannot argue. There is no possible way to connect, to relate with a woman coolly. That is not possible; it is always hot. Either you follow her or she will create trouble. And from her side all your arguments are just nonsense.Then there was the guy so henpecked by his wife that when they were in the nudist colony she told him what not to wear.The man says to the lawyer, “I’m going to ask for a divorce.”“Why?” asks the lawyer.“Because my wife is always knitting!”“But, for God’s sake, that is no reason to ask for a divorce! Lots of women knit.”“While they are making love?”The husband frequently traveled in his work. One day he returned home unexpectedly and found his wife in bed with another man. Enraged, he grabbed a gun and pointed it at the man.The wife screamed, “Don’t shoot! Are you going to kill the father of your sons?”The young lady walks into a drugstore and asks, “Do you have intimate deodorants?”“Yes, we do,” answers the druggist. “What kind would you like?”“Chlorophyll”“No, sorry, we will receive it tomorrow.”“I cannot come tomorrow. Could you give it to my husband?”“How am I going to know who your husband is?” inquires the druggist.“Oh, it is very simple. He is a tall, dark-haired guy with a green mustache.”The masculine is active, the feminine is passive.Manifesting from its radical essence, Tao flows forth even to the last of things, bringing forth heaven and earth and all that is in between.The pure is the cause of the turbid and movement of stillness.But don’t forget because of these anecdotes that Ko Hsuan does not mean the biological masculine and feminine are exactly synonymous with the ultimate masculine and feminine. In a certain way yes, they are related, but not totally synonymous.[At this point a cuckoo begins to call, loudly and insistently…]This is feminine! Now, she is saying, “All this Tao is nonsense!” This is just a protest.Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Please explain how I can meditate over something without using my mind.Meditation has nothing to do with the mind; meditation simply means a state of no-mind. The functioning of the mind is the only disturbance in meditation. If you are trying to achieve meditation through the mind you are bound to fail, you are doomed to fail. You are trying to achieve the impossible.A Zen initiate was meditating for years and whenever he would come to his master, whatsoever experience he would bring to the master, the master would simply reject: “It is all nonsense. Go back and meditate again.”One day the master came to the hut of the disciple – he was sitting in a buddha posture. The master shook him and told him, “What are you doing here? If we needed a stone buddha we have many in the temple! Just by sitting like a stone buddha you will not attain meditation. Do what I have been telling you to do. Just by stilling the body, your mind is not going to disappear because it is through the mind that you are enforcing a certain discipline on the body. Anything done by the mind is going to strengthen the mind. It is a nourishment for the mind.”A year passed. The master came again. The disciple was sitting almost in a kind of euphoria, enjoying the morning breeze and the sun with closed eyes, thinking that he was meditating. The master took a brick and started rubbing it on a stone in front of the disciple. It was such a disturbance that finally the disciple had to shout, “What are you doing? Are you trying to drive me crazy?”The master said, “I am trying to make a mirror out of this brick. If one goes on rubbing it enough I think it will become a mirror.”The disciple laughed. He said, “I always suspected that you were a little mad – now it is proved! The brick can never become a mirror. You can go on rubbing it on the stone for lives together; the brick will remain a brick.”The master said, “That shows some intelligence! Then what are you doing? For years you have been trying to make meditation out of the mind; it is like trying to make a mirror out of a brick.”And the master threw the brick into the pond at the side of the tree the disciple was sitting under. The brick made a great splash in the pond and the very sound of it was enough to do the miracle. Something awakened in the disciple. A sleep was broken, a dream was shattered: he became alert. For the first time he tasted something of meditation.And the master immediately said, “This is it!”It happened that the disciple was taken unawares. He was not waiting for this to happen, that the master would suddenly throw the brick into the pond and the splash…Basho has a beautiful haiku:The ancient pond.The frog jumps in.The sound…That’s all. The sound can awaken you.Meditation is not a question of effort because all effort is going to be through the mind, of the mind, by the mind. How can it take you beyond the mind? You will go round and round in the mind. You have to wake up! Mind is sleep. Mind is a constant process of dreaming, desiring, thoughts, memories.You ask me: “Please explain how I can meditate over something without using my mind.” Can’t you see something just with your eyes? Can’t you watch something without bringing your mind in? The birds chirping, this silence… What need is there for the mind? It is a question of watchfulness not of concentration.But it is not only your problem, it is the problem of millions of people who become interested in meditation all over the world. They all misunderstand concentration for meditation. Concentration is something of the mind. It is being taught in the schools, colleges, universities. It has its uses – I am not saying it is useless. It is focusing on a certain object.In science it is needed. You have to focus your mind on a particular object totally so that you can observe deeply. You have to exclude everything else, you have to break it out of everything else. You have to narrow down your consciousness; you almost have to make a pinpoint of it. That’s the scientific way as far as the objective world is concerned.But as far as the subjective world is concerned it is of no help, not at all. There, you are not to focus your mind on anything – on the idea of God or on some inner light, flame, love, compassion – you are not to concentrate at all. You have to be simply aware of all that is.The man of concentration can be distracted easily. Anything can become a distraction because he is trying to do something unnatural. Just a child crying and he will be distracted; the traffic noise and he will be distracted; an airplane passing by and he will be distracted; a dog starts barking and he will be distracted. Anything can distract him. And of course, when he is distracted he will feel miserable, frustrated – he has failed again. The man of meditation cannot be distracted for the simple reason that he is not concentrating in the first place.Existence is not linear, it is simultaneous. For example, I am speaking here, the birds are chirping, the traffic noise is there, the train is passing by – all these things are happening together. You have to be simple, silent, watchful, witnessing all that is – no need to exclude anything because the excluded thing will try to distract you. If nothing is excluded, if your awareness is all-inclusive, then what can distract you? Can this bird distract you? In fact, it will enhance your silence. Nothing can distract you because you are not in a tense state.Concentration is tension, hence the word attention. It comes from the same root, tension. Awareness is not attention; awareness is relaxation, it is rest.So rest silently. Thoughts will pass; there is no need to be worried – what can they do? Desires will come and go. Watch them coming and going. Don’t have any evaluation. Don’t say, “This is good; this is bad.” Don’t say, “Aha! This is something great, spiritual, far out!” Some sensation in the spine – it may be just an ant crawling up and you start feeling your kundalini is rising, or just imagination. Or you see some light inside, which is not difficult – you can see light, you can see colors, psychedelic colors. You can experience beautiful things, but it is all imagination, howsoever colorful and howsoever beautiful.Don’t start saying that it is good that Jesus or Krishna or Buddha is standing in front of you and that now you start feeling you are coming closer and closer to the ultimate realization. Buddha says, “If you meet me on the way, kill me immediately!” He means, “If I come in your meditation, don’t start feeling very good about it because if you start feeling good about it you will start clinging to the idea – and it is only an idea. Just watch it with no preference, with no choice.” If you can be choicelessly aware of everything outside and inside, meditation will happen one day. It is nothing that you have to do.You can do only one thing and that is to learn the art of watching, watching without any judgment. Then one day you simply relax and in that total relaxation there is pure awareness. All thoughts disappear, all desires disappear; the mind is found no more. When the mind is not found, this is meditation. A state of no-mind is meditation.So you have been misunderstanding me. When I say “Meditate,” I mean “Watch.” If I say “Meditate on the songs of the birds,” I am simply saying “Watch.” I am not saying “Concentrate” – I am against concentration. And because I am for watchfulness… You can watch anything: you can sit in the marketplace and watch people and that will be meditation. You can sit in the railway station and you can watch all kinds of noises: the trains coming and the passengers getting down and the coolies shouting and the vendors and then the train goes away and a silence falls over the station. You simply watch, you don’t do anything.And slowly, slowly you start relaxing, your tensions disappear. Then insight opens up like a bud opening and becoming a flower. Great fragrance is released. In that silence is truth, is bliss, is benediction.The second question:Osho,Is knowledge absolutely useless?Knowledge has its uses, it is not absolutely useless. But if you are going inward it becomes more and more useless; the deeper you go the more useless it is. If you are going outward, the farther you go into the world the more useful it becomes. The world respects the knowledgeable person. It needs experts; it needs all kinds of people carrying information, knowledge, expertise. But in the inner world the question does not arise: in the inner world the same knowledge becomes a hindrance. That which is useful in the outside world becomes a barrier to the inner. It is a bridge to the world, a barrier to the inner exploration.Whenever I say anything against knowledge I simply mean that for those who are pilgrims, explorers of their subjectivity, it is utterly useless. There, something else is needed: not knowledge but wisdom. Knowledge is information; wisdom is transformation. Knowledge is borrowed; wisdom is your own. Knowledge is ego-fulfilling; wisdom happens only when the ego is dropped, utterly dropped, totally dropped. Knowledge gives you the feeling that you are higher than others. It is a certain kind of power, just like money. Knowledge is power. So if you have a postgraduate degree you feel better than those who don’t have postgraduate degrees. If you have a PhD you feel a little more egoistic. If you carry a DLitt of course you become very special. If you have many degrees, then you start feeling that you are not an ordinary person.Once in Varanasi a man came to see me; he was known all over the world because he had twenty MA’s. He was the only person in the whole world who had twenty postgraduate degrees, but I have never come across such a stupid man. He was utterly stupid, obviously; he had wasted his whole life in acquiring knowledge. And he was moving from one subject to another. His whole effort was to have as many MA’s as possible. When he came to see me he was almost sixty-five years old and he was preparing for still another examination. When he died he had acquired thirty MA’s. But when I talked to the man he was very childish, very mediocre – no sign of intelligence, but very egoistic.In fact, an intelligent person cannot be egoistic. It is impossible. If your intelligence cannot show you the simple thing that ego is a false phenomenon, you don’t have intelligence at all. But people love to brag about their knowledge.In the inner world, humbleness helps, simplicity helps. In the outer world these certificates and degrees are certainly of some use.A distinguished man enters Harrod’s in London, asks for a hippopotamus and insists that the animal should be delivered that same afternoon.“You see,” he explains, “I need this animal terribly. If I don’t have it by this afternoon I’ll go crazy!”Curious, the clerk asks, “And where should we put it?”“In my bathtub,” replies the man.Even more curious, the clerk exclaims, “You mean, sir, that you want a hippopotamus in your bathtub?”“Yes! You see, it’s for my wife. Whenever I say something she invariably replies, ‘Yes, I know it already.’ And so tonight when she comes to me saying, ‘There’s a hippopotamus in the bathtub!’ I will finally be able to reply, ‘Yes, I know it already!’”If you want that kind of stupid ego to be fulfilled, knowledge has a use; otherwise it is useless. But the outside knowledge has even corrupted religions. I can understand a scientist acquiring knowledge because he cannot function without it. Science depends on tradition, remember. Religion does not depend on tradition, although people think just the reverse. They think religion depends on tradition and science is a rebellion against tradition. That is not so, not at all.Science is traditional. Without Newton there would have been no Edison. Without Edison there would have been no Albert Einstein. That’s what I mean when I say science depends on tradition: it depends on the past and you have to be well informed about the past, otherwise no work is possible in scientific inquiry. First you have to know whatsoever is known already, only then can you proceed to discover something which is not known. If you don’t know what is already known, you may be trying to discover something which was already discovered and you may come to know it only later on. Then all your effort has been a waste.But religion is nontraditional. It is rebellion, it is pure rebellion! There is no need for Krishna to be for Buddha to happen. Buddha can happen without Krishna. Christ can happen without Moses, Mohammed can happen without Christ, Ramakrishna can happen without Buddha. Religion is individual; science is collective. Because science is collective it has to depend on knowledge. Religion is individual; you have to make the whole discovery again. You cannot depend on Buddha, you cannot depend on Christ, you cannot depend on anybody else. You always have to start from ABC. You cannot take things for granted. You cannot say, “This was discovered by Buddha so what is the need for me to discover it again?”Yes, Columbus discovered America, now there is no need for you to discover it. Even if you go to America you cannot call it your discovery. People have reached the moon. Now even if you go to the moon it won’t be of any great value – you won’t be a pioneer. But the same is not true about your inner being.Your inner being has not been discovered yet. Buddha discovered his being. That is not your being. If you believe in him you will remain only knowledgeable, and the knowledgeable person is always false as far as the inner is concerned.And my whole concern is the inner. I am not teaching you chemistry, physics or mathematics here, I am teaching you only one single thing: how to discover yourself. That’s why I condemn knowledge.A rabbi and a cantor are praying together in the synagogue, beating their breasts and crying, “O Lord, I am nothing, nothing, nothing!”The synagogue janitor, hearing them, puts down his broom and joins them, beating his breast and crying, “O Lord, I am nothing, nothing, nothing!”The cantor turns to the rabbi and says, “Look who thinks he’s nothing!”Just a janitor, just a nobody – and thinking he is nothing? Even to be nothing you have to be somebody special. You see the stupidity of it?Borrowed knowledge is of no help at all.A thief and a theologian decided to escape from prison.As the thief climbed over the wall, the guard heard some rattling. “Who’s there?”“Meow,” said the thief, imitating a cat and passed safely.Up came the theologian and again the guard heard some noise. “Who’s there?”“It’s nothing,” answered the theologian. “Just another cat!”Knowledge is of no help at all in the inner world. You will have to know yourself. Unless you know yourself, all your beliefs will create a burden. They will not help you to be unburdened, they will not help you to be liberated. They will create new bondages, beautiful bondages.The bride-to-be is taken by her mother to the chicken roost where she is shown the rooster “doing his work.”“It is going to be something more or less like that, my dear!” exclaims the mother.On the wedding night the young husband comes into the bedroom wearing pajamas and is surprised by the scene he sees: the young bride is lying on the bed naked, with a helmet on her head.“What is this all about, baby?” he asks.“You can do whatever you like with me, but you are not going to peck my head!” she answers.Borrowed knowledge is always going to create that kind of state in you. You can repeat Jesus, you can repeat Krishna, you can repeat Moses, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu, but repetitions won’t help. You have to learn on your own. Yes, imbibe the spirit of the masters, of the awakened ones, but remember it is not knowledge that is going to help you but wisdom. And wisdom comes when all knowledge has been put aside. Call it knowledge or call it mind, it is the same thing. The mind is knowledge. When you have put aside all knowledge you have put aside the mind itself; you are in a state of not-knowing. And to be in a state of not-knowing is the most beautiful experience because it is innocence. You will be full of wonder and awe. You will be a child again. This will be a rebirth. Only this rebirth can release the hidden splendor of your being.You are carrying within you a great light, a great treasure, the very Kingdom of God, but you are clinging to borrowed things. Rather than clinging to borrowed things, go in and discover your own center. Knowledge keeps you on the circumference. Jump from the circumference. Renouncing knowledge is the greatest renunciation.I don’t tell you to renounce your money, your house, your family because they are not the problem. Renounce your knowledge, your mind; that is the real problem because that is something that is hindering the path. It is blocking your way in reaching your own center.Renounce knowledge and rejoice in the state of not-knowing and great wisdom will be released in you. The buddha within you will be awakened. Only that can give you the taste of eternity – not words, not scriptures, not beliefs, not knowledge.The third question:Osho,You have said that to be together one must know how to be alone. But I can be alone: the problem comes with being together because then comes the wanting and the expectation. Is it that one must know how to be alone together?It seems the path of love must be taken with tremendous awareness.Yes, I have been telling you again and again that you can be together only when you know how to be alone, but by “alone” I don’t mean “lonely.” You must have misunderstood me. Everybody can be lonely, but to be alone is a tremendous achievement, it is a great realization. Loneliness is very ordinary. People suffer from loneliness. You can manage not to suffer: you can put up a face, a facade, you can cultivate certain things so that you don’t feel the pain of loneliness, but that is not the art of being alone.It is not just a question of avoiding suffering while you are lonely. Aloneness means positively enjoying it, being positively ecstatic about it, being positively blissful about it, so much so that if you are never together with anybody again no question arises, no problem arises, not even the desire, not even a lurking desire somewhere in the unconscious. When you are so contented – not just satisfied, remember, those words are totally different. One can create satisfaction without being contented.Satisfaction is a kind of “accepting the inevitable.” What else can one do? If one is lonely, one is lonely; one has to live with it. And man is capable of adjusting to any situation. Even if you are marooned alone somewhere in a desert or on an island you will adjust to the life there; you will still survive. You may even create certain satisfactions there.I have heard about a man, a Christian priest. His ship was sunk but somehow he survived. He reached a small island – there was nobody on the island. After twenty years another ship passed by. He waved, shouted, and the captain heard. The captain saw the man. He stopped the ship and made arrangements to bring the man on board. He himself came in a small boat to take him to the ship.The lonely priest told the captain, “Before we leave this island I would like to show you my work of twenty years.”He was also an architect; before he had become a priest he had been an architect. He had planned almost a small city, a miniature city.The captain was delighted. He said, “Wait! Let all the passengers from my ship come and see. This is a miracle! You have done something beautiful. Small houses, just like playthings, but beautifully designed. How did you manage this?”He said, “I had to do something to keep myself engaged, occupied, to remain satisfied. And I was really satisfied. After a few years I completely forgot about the world. Even the desire to reach the world again left me – at least I thought it had left me. Seeing your ship, suddenly I realized that no, it had not left me; otherwise I was very satisfied. This island has everything that I needed to create these small houses.” All kinds of houses…And then he said, “The most beautiful thing is… I will show you.” He took him to a church, he showed him the church, the Catholic church. He had made it a little bigger than the houses – you could enter it – because he used to worship there. Of course, he was alone, but the old habit…When they came out, the captain was puzzled and all other passengers were also puzzled because just in front of the church there was another church, a Protestant church.They asked the priest, “Isn’t one church enough for one man? Why have you made another church?”He said, “That is the church I don’t go and this is the church I go to!”Old habits…but he was perfectly satisfied. He said, “Nobody goes there; it is always deserted. I have never seen anybody go there.”There was nobody there in the first place except himself and he was going to the Catholic church because he was a Catholic priest, but he was very happy and satisfied that the Protestant church was deserted. He had made it very ugly too, but he had made it – he himself had made it.One can be satisfied with any situation. Man is immensely adaptable; that is one of the great qualities of man. That’s why man can survive any kind of climate, any kind of temperature: extreme cold, extreme hot, too much rain, no rain. Man can survive everywhere, anywhere. Why? – because man is capable of it. He is liquid.So you can be lonely and you can think yourself satisfied, but when you are together that is the test whether you were really contented. If you were contented in your loneliness it was not loneliness, it was aloneness. If being together brings no disturbance, no wanting, no desiring, no expectation, no jealousy, no possessiveness, no unconscious hankering to dominate the other, then it was aloneness. Otherwise it was only loneliness covered, disguised by a certain false sense of satisfaction.You have not yet been able to be alone because if you are alone then this question will not arise at all. Then whether you are alone or together you are alone, and your aloneness is so immensely beautiful that who bothers to dominate? Why? For what? You are so full of joy that there is no need to possess anybody; it will be so ugly. You will be able to see the ugliness of it.But if when you are together all these ugly desires start moving again, rising again, raising their heads again, if all these snakes and these scorpions start crawling upward toward the conscious from the unconscious, that simply means they were waiting for the right opportunity. Now the opportunity is there. Only the opportunity proves where you are.That’s why I don’t tell my sannyasins to leave the world and go to the mountains because there you will simply be missing the opportunities. You will start living in a cave and you can deceive yourself your whole life thinking that you have known what aloneness is, what solitude is. You will only be lonely and solitary and you will start thinking that you are contented and blissful. And you will only be satisfied and not miserable, but not blissful. Just being not miserable is not equivalent to being blissful.Not being ill is not equivalent to being healthy and whole. Health has something more to it than just not being ill: it has a certain well-being. There are many people who are not ill, but they are not healthy. Sometimes it can happen that a person may be ill and yet healthy because health has a totally different connotation. Health is not only a medical concept, it is something far bigger, far more comprehensive than medical science.For example, Prem Chinmaya was utterly ill. What more illness can you have? He was suffering from cancer. The cancer was spreading every day, but he was healthy. He had a certain well-being. His illness was only in the body, it was not reaching his consciousness, he remained floating above it.His nurse, Puja, wrote just the other day: “Osho, I am immensely blessed that I served Chinmaya. I have watched many people die in my life, but this death was totally different, qualitatively different. I have never seen any man die with such beauty, with such silence, with such meditativeness.”At the last moment, when he was hearing my last discourse… Puja has written to me – she was there: “He was in deep pain as far as the body was concerned. The pain was so great that even injections of morphine were not of any help. Even double, treble doses of morphine were not helping at all. The pain was so great that nothing seemed to help him. But when he heard the joke about Jesus and the cancer patient,” Puja writes to me, “he smiled.”And she writes also: “I could see that the smile was not only of the body because the body was not in a state at all to smile. It was coming from somewhere deep. And I could see and feel that deep down he was laughing. That smile was just a little bit of that laughter which had come up to the body.”He was healthy in a totally different sense, in a nonmedical sense. There are many people who are healthy in a medical sense, perfectly fit medically, but utterly unhealthy. Deep down there is nothing but turmoil, emptiness, anguish. One can hide it, one can repress it and not only deceive others, man is so capable of cunningness that he can deceive himself.You say, “You have said that to be together one must know how to be alone.” I repeat it again: yes, unless you know how to be alone your togetherness will become troublesome, your togetherness will create misery because your togetherness will bring out everything that remains asleep in you while you are lonely. When you are together the other provokes it, the other becomes a challenge. You become a challenge for the other, the other becomes a challenge for you.A man–woman relationship brings the unconscious to the surface; they come into their true colors. Of course, in the beginning it is not so. In the beginning it cannot be so because in the beginning you keep the facade. When you meet only for a few hours on the sea beach or in the full-moon night you keep the facade because you still are not certain, the other is also not yet certain whether he can expose his reality to you. But once the honeymoon is over everything is over.In fact, almost every marriage ends with the end of the honeymoon; then the reality starts. Then the mirage of marriage is over. Now both can take it for granted that the other cannot escape easily. Now you need not be afraid; now you can come into your true colors. And both start exploding. They have been repressive for so long that all their repressions start coming up and togetherness becomes ugly.That’s why for centuries people have escaped into the forests, into the monasteries, into the mountains, just to escape from togetherness. But that is not the true way of spirituality, that is not the true way of growth. That is escapist, that is out of fear, that is cowardly.I would like you to be in the world. I insist: Be in the world and yet remain alert, aware, watchful. Don’t be repressive. If you are not repressive in your aloneness, your aloneness will become a blissful, beautiful experience. Meet with the other person out of your bliss, not out of your misery and then togetherness does not only double your bliss, it multiplies it.Togetherness always multiplies whatsoever you bring to it. If you bring misery to it, it multiplies misery. Two miserable persons together is not only a double misery, it is multiplied. Two persons blissfully together, the bliss not only doubles, it multiplies. Then togetherness is beautiful, but one should learn to be alone first.And if you know how to be alone, you will know how to be alone together because it is not a question of learning it again in a different way; it is the same phenomenon. If you know how to be alone you will know it everywhere, whether in a relationship or not in a relationship. To be alone… Then togetherness helps spiritual growth and integrity tremendously because it gives you an opportunity, a great challenge. It exposes you to the full light and you can see yourself. The other becomes the mirror.A relationship is a mirror. You cannot see your face without a mirror. You cannot see your reality without the other. The other becomes a mirror – mirrors are good.I have heard about an ugly woman who was against mirrors – naturally – because her idea was that mirrors made her look ugly, that mirrors were in a conspiracy against her. Because this was her logic: “Whenever there is no mirror I don’t feel any ugliness, I am perfectly okay. It is only when there is a mirror that I immediately become ugly. The mirror must be doing something.”She was so against mirrors that she used to break them. Wherever she would come across a mirror she would immediately destroy it because mirrors were enemies.Her logic is no different from that of your monks and nuns. They are doing the same. Going into a monastery means escaping from the mirrors – condemning relationships, condemning love, condemning the world. All your saints are afraid of mirrors, that’s all. But to be afraid of mirrors simply shows you are afraid of your own ugliness; you don’t want to see it. And without mirrors of course you will not see it, but that does not mean that it has disappeared – it is there. Any time, anything…if not a mirror then maybe just a silent lake and you will see it. And whether you see it or not, others will see it.You can see your saints’ faces, your so-called mahatmas. They are all sad, they don’t seem to be blissful. They don’t seem to be like lotus flowers, they look like rocks – almost dead, utterly dull, mediocre.There seems to be no sharpness of intelligence because they have escaped from where they could sharpen their intelligence. Their intelligence goes on gathering dust, but they think they have achieved satisfaction, they have achieved what God meant them to achieve. They have simply missed the opportunity.God will ask them, “I had given you life and you escaped from life. You rejected my life, you rejected my gift. You were against me.”George Gurdjieff used to make a very strange statement – but only a man like Gurdjieff can say the truth utterly naked – he used to say “All your saints are against God.” When you come across such a statement for the first time you cannot believe it – saints and against God? But Gurdjieff is right. He really means it, he is not joking! Your saints are against God because they are against life.I am not against life. I am in tremendous love with life.Learn to be alone – and that will happen only through meditation – and then allow mirrors into your life so that you can see where you are, what you are, how much you have grown.In this commune we are doing something new which has never happened ever before. There are growth centers in the world, particularly in the West, where therapy groups are run. There are meditation centers, particularly in the East, where people meditate. This is the only place where people meditate and do therapy groups together. On the surface it will look contradictory because meditation means learning how to be alone and group therapies mean learning how to be together. But this is my fundamental approach; you have to learn both.And you are right that: “The path of love must be taken with tremendous awareness.” And the same is true about the path of awareness: it must be taken with tremendous love. In fact, love and awareness are two aspects of the same coin.The fourth question:Osho,Instead of giving philosophical lessons, why don't you just tell jokes for a while? I think your sannyasins would appreciate it.The question shows that you are not my sannyasin.You say: “I think your sannyasins would appreciate it.” You have fallen into wrong company, it seems. You are not meant to be here. You must have come with a wrong notion. You must have come here to learn philosophy. You must be a serious person – and seriousness is pathological.Philosophy is all bullshit! I am not interested in philosophy and of course my sannyasins are not interested in philosophy either. Those who belong to me are interested in life, not in philosophy. Life is the real thing; philosophy is the false thing. But philosophy has been praised for centuries and we live with this conditioning. Nobody tells you that philosophy is a false thing.Buddha is not a philosopher: he loved to tell parables. Jesus is not a philosopher: he used so many parables.My jokes are New Age parables – because to me laughter is one of the most significant things in life. People who are not capable of laughing become incapable of living.But it happens. Many times – in fact, more often than not – you come here for the wrong reasons, thinking that you are going to some oriental philosopher. I am neither oriental nor a philosopher! I am not even religious in the old sense: I am not a saint nor a mahatma. In fact, you can’t put me in any category. You will have to create a new category for me because no existing category will be adequate. I won’t fit in it and I don’t want to fit in any category. Things fit in categories, not people, not real people.A lady enters a clothing store and asks if they have falsies.“Certainly, lady,” answers the formal salesman.“What I want to know,” she continues, “is if you have the best quality falsies.”“Of course!” exclaims the salesman “In this store we don’t sell imitations!”All philosophies are false and all philosophies are imitations. I am existential. But you are certainly in the wrong place. Either you will have to change or you will have to leave – I don’t leave any other alternative. If you want to be with me, you have to understand what is happening here and you have to become part of it. If you feel that is not possible, that you already know what is right, then this is not the place for you, then this is not the right company for you.Do you know about the two scientists who first discovered the flying machine, the airplane, which could not leave the ground? Do you know their name? Their name was the Wrong brothers.And these are Wrong brothers and you seem to be a very right and righteous person. Either you have to become part of this strange company… This is a Noah’s Ark – all kinds of animals are here! In the new commune I am not going to call it Buddha Hall again, it will be Noah’s Ark!But if you are interested in philosophy you can go to any university; there are thousands of universities in the world. If you are interested in something false it is very cheap. But remember, all the time that you waste will simply be wasted and one day you will repent.A tourist threw a coin into the wishing well at Disneyland. He had just expressed a sinful wish when a beautiful girl tapped his shoulder and told him to follow her. She took him to a luxurious flat, gave him silk pajamas and after she put on some music and lit some candles, she handed him a martini. Then she started undressing.She took off her long blonde hair, which was a wig, she took off her false eyelashes and then her beautiful false breasts. Then the tourist saw that she was not even a woman and in despair he exclaimed, “What does all this mean?”And the boy replied, “Now you will learn not to throw false coins in the wishing well, you darling little cheater!”You ask me, “Instead of giving philosophical lessons, why don’t you just tell jokes for a while?” And what have I been doing here all along? Do you think I have been giving philosophical lessons? Then you have not heard me at all. It is not the philosophical lessons that I am interested in, I am interested in the jokes. It is not to illustrate philosophy that I use jokes, just the contrary: to illustrate the jokes I use philosophy!You think that I first look at your questions? Nonsense! First I look at my jokes and then at your questions. If your question fits with my jokes, okay – otherwise it goes into the waste basket. Those who really want their questions to be answered, they have learned the trick: first they send the jokes, then they send the question. Then they can be certain their question will be answered. But first, the jokes!I am much more interested in your laughter…You say, “I think your sannyasins would appreciate it.” They love it! But for that they have to be my sannyasins. You are not yet a sannyasin, otherwise you would have said, “We would appreciate it.” You say “your sannyasins.” You are keeping yourself apart, you are excluding yourself from my sannyasins.What, in fact, is philosophy? It is thinking about things which are unthinkable. It is trying to comprehend something which is incomprehensible. It is an absurd activity. The philosophers know it, but they enjoy the activity. It is like a game, like chess. Just as people enjoy chess there are people who enjoy philosophy.A philosopher wanted to change the world. He thought that God had made many mistakes and that he should have thought a little longer before creating the world in seven days.One day, as he was lying in the grass contemplating, some birds flew overhead, while a grazing cow passed slowly by his side.“Look,” he said to himself, “another mistake of nature! Cows, which are very utilitarian to humanity, must drag themselves down the road, while birds, which have no utility at all, can fly and move very easily!”At that very moment, one of the birds overhead shat on his head.The philosopher, stunned, contemplated for a few moments and then said out loud, “Excuse me, God, I really didn’t mean that cows should fly!”What is philosophy? It is just contemplating about useless things. For example, just the other day I was saying to you, “In the beginning was darkness and spaghetti.” Now, if you are a philosopher you will torture yourself with the question: “Who made spaghetti? From where did it come?” And I know this is true because I know my Italian sannyasins. I know my medium, Radha. Whenever I touch her third eye there is no third eye – just layers and layers of spaghetti. I go on and go on… It has been years now! But I still like and love touching her third eye – it is very soft! So I know the story is true.But philosophers have been asking such questions: “God created the world. Then who created God?” And whatsoever answer you give will create another question. If you say XYZ, or anybody, then they will ask, “Who created X? Who created Y? Who created Z?” It will go on and on. Somewhere it has to stop.So when Koot Humi shouted at me and said, “Shut up!” I immediately understood – he is right because somewhere one has to shut up!I am very existential. Rather than bothering about who created spaghetti I looked into Radha and found that it is true. The akashic records are saying something absolutely right. And everybody should be jealous of it because to be full of spaghetti is far better than being full of cow dung. Indians are full of holy cow dung! They used to drink cow’s urine and now much progress has happened: Morarji Desai drinks his own urine. This is progress. This is evolution! Nobody can deny this is evolution, moving from cow’s urine to your own urine. It is a lesson in independence.Formally you are my sannyasin – really become my sannyasin. Enjoy this great opportunity of being nonserious, of taking life as fun, of enjoying it. Life consists of small things, but if you learn how to enjoy those small things the ordinary becomes extraordinary, the mundane becomes sacred, the profane becomes profound.Religion is not something that disconnects you from life and its joys. It deepens your joys. In fact, only a really religious person can eat, drink, and be merry. It has been said against the irreligious; it has been said that it is the materialist philosophy, to eat, drink, and be merry. But I tell you that the materialist cannot eat, drink, and be merry, only the spiritualist can because he can think deeper. Then spaghetti becomes spiritual. Who bothers about the third eye? What is the need for the third eye? Even the two are creating so much trouble! And three eyes will create more trouble – they will create a triangle in you!But you must be here almost unconscious.A philosopher enters a bar and asks for ten glasses of whisky.“Ten?” exclaims the surprised bartender.“Ten!” answers the philosopher.So the bartender brings him all ten drinks and to his surprise the philosopher drinks them all.Next he asks for nine glasses of whisky. After drinking them he asks for eight, then seven and so forth, until he finally asks for just one glass of whisky.After finishing the last glass he somehow manages to mumble to the bartender, “T-t-tell me, br-bro-brother, w-why is it th-th-that the l-l-less I dr-dr-drink, the mo-more dr-dr-drunk I g-g-get?”The last question:Osho,When more of the existential happens in a person than can be absorbed and digested at one time, is it not then wise to repress until trust and innocence grow? My body is in bad shape because of repression but it feels as though I have bought much needed time.Repress and resist; how out of repression and resistance can trust and innocence grow? You will be making it more and more impossible. Innocence means a state of total nudity, of utter non-repressiveness. Repressed persons become complex, they cannot become innocent. Everything in them becomes crippled, paralyzed, devious. They start becoming split; in fact they become many, not just two. They have one door to show themselves to the world and another door, a back door, through which they live. They say something, they do something – and they think something else. They are always in a chaos, they cannot be innocent.Innocence does not need repression, it needs spontaneity, it needs naturalness. Whatsoever you repress will become your problem. If you repress anger, anger will become your problem. Then anger will be hiding in everything. In fact, if there is too much repressed anger you will be angry twenty-four hours a day for no reason at all. Because now it is not a question of having any valid reason for being angry, you are just boiling within – any excuse will do, or if there are no excuses to be found you will start inventing excuses.A group of nuns were traveling to a convent in the interior of Africa when they were kidnapped by a ferocious tribe of Africans. The United Nations was immediately informed and some days later a military troop was sent by plane to the heart of the black continent.It was a successful operation. The soldiers surrounded the tribe, rescued the nuns and brought them to the plane.All the nuns boarded the plane with torn clothes, swollen lips, hair a mess and with their breasts exposed.“It’s so good that you came!” they said, “We couldn’t bear it any longer. All those blacks with those enormous ‘things’ and all day long fucking, fucking, fucking!”The soldiers tried to console them, one by one. Finally the last nun came on board. She was very pretty, with her habit in perfect condition. She was clean, combed and composed.One soldier said to her, “What a pity, sister. How you ladies suffered! All those blacks with those big ‘things’ all day long fucking, fucking, fucking.”And the pretty one answered, “No, not with me.”“Why not?” he asked.“I wasn’t into it!” she said.If you repress you will find some way. If you repress sex you will find some way to be raped so that the responsibility is not on you, so that you can feel completely free of the responsibility. It is out of repression that there is rape. It is out of repression that there are crimes of all kinds. It cannot lead you into innocence.No, if you want to be innocent you don’t need time, you need understanding, you need insight. Time won’t help because what will you be doing meanwhile? You will continue your old habits: you will go on repressing. You need immediate insight. You have already repressed for many lives – enough is enough. Now see the point and drop all your repressions. And this is the place! If you cannot drop your repressions here, you cannot drop them anywhere in the whole world.That’s why I am condemned so much – obviously, because all the societies in the world exist on repression. And my whole approach is that of non-repressive spontaneity. Only then can innocence come back to you. It is your nature. Innocence is not something that has to be achieved; it has only been repressed deep down in you. If all the repressions are removed it will start surfacing. You will become a child again.And Jesus is right when he says: “Unless you are a child again, unless you are reborn, you will not enter my Kingdom of God.”Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Are children really as intelligent as you always say they are?Intelligence is not something that is acquired. It is inbuilt, it is inborn, it is intrinsic to life itself. Not only are children intelligent, animals are intelligent in their own way, trees are intelligent in their own way. Of course they all have different kinds of intelligences because their needs differ, but now it is an established fact that everything that lives is intelligent. Life cannot be without intelligence; to be alive and to be intelligent are synonymous.But man is in a dilemma for the simple reason that he is not only intelligent, he is also aware of his intelligence. That is something unique about man, his privilege, his prerogative, his glory, but it can turn very easily into his agony. Man is conscious that he is intelligent; that consciousness brings its own problems. The first problem is that it creates ego.Ego does not exist anywhere else than in human beings. It starts growing as the child grows. The parents, the schools, colleges, university, they all help to strengthen the ego for the simple reason that for centuries man had to struggle to survive and the idea has become a fixation, a deep unconscious conditioning, that only strong egos can survive in the struggle of life. Life has become just a struggle to survive. And scientists have made it even more convincing with the theory of the survival of the fittest. So we help every child to become more and more strong in the ego and it is there that the problem arises.As the ego becomes strong, it starts surrounding intelligence like a thick layer of darkness. Intelligence is light, ego is darkness. Intelligence is very delicate, ego is very hard. Intelligence is like a roseflower, ego is like a rock. And if you want to survive, the so-called knowers say that you have to become rocklike, you have to be strong, invulnerable. You have to become a citadel, a closed citadel, so you cannot be attacked from outside. You have to become impenetrable.But then you become closed and you start dying as far as your intelligence is concerned because intelligence needs the open sky, the wind, the air, the sun, to grow, to expand, to flow. To remain alive it needs a constant flow; if it becomes stagnant it becomes slowly, slowly a dead phenomenon.We don’t allow children to remain intelligent. The first thing is that if they are intelligent they will be vulnerable, they will be delicate, they will be open. If they are intelligent they will be able to see many falsities in the society, in the state, in the church, in the educational system. They will be able to become rebellious. They will be individuals; they cannot be bullied easily. You can crush them, but you cannot enslave them. You can destroy them, but you cannot force them to compromise.In one sense intelligence is very soft, like a roseflower, in another sense it has its own strength. But that strength is subtle, not gross. That strength is the strength of rebellion, of an uncompromising attitude. One is ready to die, one is ready to suffer, but one is not ready to sell one’s soul.And the whole of society needs slaves; it needs people who function like robots, machines. It does not want people, it wants efficient mechanisms. Hence the whole conditioning is to make the ego strong. It serves a double purpose. Firstly it gives the person the feeling that now he can struggle in life. And secondly it serves the purposes of all the vested interests. They can exploit him; they can use him as a means to their own ends.Hence the whole educational system rotates around the idea of ambition; it creates ambitiousness. Ambitiousness is nothing but ego. “Become the first, become the most famous. Become a prime minister or a president. Become world known. Leave your name in history.” It does not teach you to live totally, it does not teach you to love totally, it does not teach you to live gracefully, it teaches you how to exploit others for your own purposes. And we think that the people who are clever are the ones who succeed. They are cunning, but we call them clever. They are not intelligent people.An intelligent person can never use another person as a means; he will respect the other. An intelligent person will be able to see the equality of all. Yes, he will see the differences too, but differences make no difference as far as equality is concerned. He will have tremendous respect for others’ freedom – he cannot exploit them, he cannot reduce them into things, he cannot make them stepping-stones for his own fulfillment of some absurd desire to be the first. Hence we go on conditioning children and the question arises…Your question is relevant because it is not only me who is saying that children are intelligent. It was said by Buddha, by Lao Tzu, by Jesus, by all the awakened ones. Jesus says, “Unless you are like a small child there is no hope for you.” Again he says, “Unless you become like small children you cannot enter my Kingdom of God.” Again and again he repeats one of his most famous beatitudes: “Blessed are those who are the last in this world because they will be the first in my Kingdom of God.” He is teaching non-ambitiousness – to be the last. He says, “Blessed are the meek, for theirs is the Kingdom of God” – the meek, the humble, the people who are standing last in the queue. It was natural, very natural that the society he was born in was against him because he was destroying the very roots of their ambitiousness.And Jews have always been very ambitious people, so much so that for centuries, against all hazards, they have carried the idea in their minds that they are the chosen people of God. A thousand and one calamities have happened because of this stupid idea; if they can drop it they will be more acceptable in the world. But they cannot drop it – their whole ego is involved in it. And it is an ancient ego, at least three thousand years old. Since Moses they have been carrying the idea that they are the chosen people of God.And here comes this man who says, “Be the last!” “We are meant to be the first and he says, ‘Be humble and meek’! And we are the chosen people. If we are humble and meek then those who are not chosen will become the first!” And Jews are earthly people; they don’t bother much about the other world. They are worldly. “Who knows about the other world? He is saying, ‘If you are the last here you will be the first in my Kingdom of God.’ But where is your Kingdom of God? It may be just a fiction, just a dream.”Jesus looks like a dreamer, a poet maybe, but he is destroying their very foundation. They cannot forgive him; they have not even forgiven him yet. They still carry the idea that “we are the chosen people.” They have suffered much for it; the more they have suffered the stronger the idea has become – because if you have to face suffering you have to become more and more egoistic, more rocklike so that you can fight, struggle, so that nobody can destroy you. But they have also become very closed.Jesus was creating an opening for them; they refused him. He was telling them to come into the open sky. He was telling them to be just ordinary: “Drop this nonsense of being special.” If they had listened to Jesus, their whole history would have been different, but they could not listen.Hindus have not listened to Buddha for the same simple reason that they also are carrying the idea they are the holiest people in the world and their land is the holiest land. Even gods long to be born in India! No other country is so holy.And Buddha said, “This is all nonsense!” They had to reject him. Buddhism was thrown out of this country. No society can tolerate such people who are telling the truth, because they seem to sabotage the very structure.But now the time has come when we have suffered enough. All over the world, in different ways, people have suffered so much and it is time to have a look at history and its stupidity and its ridiculousness and drop the whole idea of these egoistic patterns.Watch small children and then you will not ask me – you will see their intelligence. Yes, they are not knowledgeable. If you want them to be knowledgeable, then you will not think that they are intelligent. If you ask them questions which depend on information, then they will not look intelligent. But ask them real questions which have nothing to do with information, which need an immediate response and see – they are far more intelligent than you are. Of course your ego won’t allow you to accept it, but if you can accept it, it will help tremendously. It will help you, it will help your children because if you can see their intelligence you can learn much from them.A Sufi mystic, Hassan, was dying and a man asked him, “Hassan, you have never told us who your master was. We have asked again and again; you always somehow managed not to answer it. Now you are leaving the world. Please tell us who your master was. We are very curious.”Hassan said, “I never answered the question for the simple reason that there has not been only a single master in my life, I have learned from many people. My first teacher was a small child.”They were puzzled. They said, “A small child! What are you saying? Have you lost your senses because you are dying? Have you gone mad, crazy?”He said, “No, listen to the story. I went into a town. Although I had not known the truth up to that time, I was very knowledgeable. I was a scholar. I was well known all over the country; even outside the country my name was spreading. People had started coming to me thinking that I knew the truth. I was pretending that I knew it and I was pretending without knowing that I was pretending – I was almost unconscious. Because people believed that I knew, they convinced me that I must be right, I must be knowing the truth, otherwise why should so many people be coming to me? I had become a teacher. Without knowing, without experiencing anything of truth, without ever entering my own inner world, I was talking about great things. I knew all the scriptures; they were on the tip of my tongue.“But for three days I was moving in a country where nobody knew me and I was very much hankering to find somebody to ask me something so that I could show my knowledge.”Knowledgeable people become very exhibitionistic; that is their whole joy. If a knowledgeable person has to remain silent he would rather commit suicide. Then what is the point of living in the world? He has to exhibit his knowledge.Only a wise man can be silent. For the wise man to speak is almost a burden; he speaks because he has to speak. The knowledgeable person speaks because he cannot remain silent. There is a vast difference; you may not be able to know it from the outside because both speak. Buddha speaks, Jesus speaks and Hassan was also speaking. And they all say beautiful things. Sometimes the knowledgeable people say wiser things than the wise people because the wise persons may speak in contradictions, in paradoxes, but the knowledgeable person is always logical, consistent. He has all the proofs and arguments, he has all the scriptures to support him.But for three days Hassan had to keep silent. It was almost like fasting and he was feeling hungry – hungry for an audience, hungry for somebody. But he had not come across anybody who knew him, so nobody asked anything.He entered this town. It was just getting a little dark, the sun had just set. A small child was carrying an earthen lamp and he asked the child, “My son, can I ask you a question? Where are you taking this earthen lamp?”And the child said, “I am going to the temple. My mother has told me to put this lamp there because the temple is dark. And this was my mother’s habit: to always put a lamp there in the night so at least the god of the temple does not have to live in darkness.”Hassan asked the child, “You seem to be very intelligent. Can you tell me one thing – did you light this lamp yourself?”The child said, “Yes.”Then Hassan said, “A third question, the last question I want to ask you: if you lit the lamp yourself, can you tell me where the flame came from? You must have seen it coming from somewhere.”The child laughed and he said, “I will do one thing – just see!” And he blew the flame out and he said, “The flame has gone out just in front of you. Can you tell me where it has gone? You must have seen!”And Hassan was utterly dumb; he could not answer. The child had shown him that his question, although it looked very relevant, meaningful, was absurd. He bowed down to the child, touched his feet.He said to the inquirer, “That child was my first master. That very moment I realized that all my metaphysics, all my philosophy was meaningless; I didn’t know a thing on my own. I didn’t even know from where the light comes into a lamp, to where it goes when the light has been put out – and I have been talking about who made the world, how he made the world, when he made the world! For that moment I have always remembered the child. He may have forgotten me, he may not even recognize me, but I cannot forget that incident.“And since then thousands of people have taught me. I have avoided the question again and again because there is not a single person I can call my master. Many have been my masters, I have learned from many sources and from each source I have learned one thing: that unless you know through your own experience, all knowledge is futile.“Then I dropped all my learning, all my knowing; I burned all my scriptures. I dropped the idea of being a scholar, I forgot all my fame. I started moving like a beggar, absolutely unknown to anybody. And slowly, slowly, going deeper into meditation, I discovered my own intelligence.”Even though the society destroys your intelligence it cannot destroy it totally; it only covers it with many layers of information.And that’s the whole function of meditation: to take you deeper into yourself. It is a method of digging into your own being to the point when you come to the living waters of your own intelligence, when you discover the springs of your own intelligence. When you have discovered your child again, when you are reborn, then, only then will you understand what I have been meaning by emphasizing again and again that children are really intelligent.But start watching children, their responses – not their answers but their responses. Don’t ask them foolish questions, ask them something immediate which does not depend on information and see their response.The mother was preparing little Pedro to go to a party. When she finished combing his hair, she straightened his shirt collar and said, “Go now son. Have a good time – and behave yourself!”“Come on, mother!” said Pedro. “Please decide before I leave which it is going to be!”You see the point? The mother was saying, “Have a good time – and behave yourself.” Now, both things cannot be done together. And the child’s response is really of tremendous value. He says, “Please decide before I leave which it is going to be. If you allow me to have a good time, then I cannot behave; if you want me to behave, then I cannot have a good time.” The child can see the contradiction so clearly. It may not have been apparent to the mother.A passerby asks a boy, “Son, can you please tell me what time it is?”“Yes, of course,” replies the boy, “but what do you need it for? It changes continuously!”A new transit sign was put in front of the school. It read: “Drive Slowly. Do Not Kill a Student!”The following day there was another sign under it scribbled in childish handwriting: “Wait for the Teacher!”Little Pierino comes home from school with a big smile on his face.“Well, dear, you look very happy. So you like school, do you?”“Don’t be silly, mom,” replies the boy. “We must not confuse the going with the coming back!”While slowly walking to school the little boy prays, “Dear God, please do not let me arrive at school late. I pray you, God, let me arrive at school on time.”At this moment he slips on a banana peel and slides on the path for a few meters. Pulling himself up he looks at the sky annoyed and says, “Okay, okay, God, there is no need to push!”A little boy is having a test with a psychologist. “What do you want to do when you grow up?” asks the shrink.“I want to become a doctor or a painter or a window washer!” replies the boy.Puzzled, the psychologist asks, “But… You aren’t very clear, are you?”“Why not? I’m very clear. I want to see naked women!”The father was telling stories to his sons in the living room after dinner. “My great-grandfather fought in the war against Rosas, my uncle fought in the war against the Kaiser, my grandfather fought in the war of Spain against the Republicans and my father fought in the Second World War against the Germans.”To which the smallest son replied, “Shit! What’s wrong with this family? They can’t relate to anybody!”The second question:Osho,Who are you?I am just a mirror – nothing more, nothing less. If you come close to me you can see your face as it is. Many people will see ugly faces and they will become angry at me. They will think that this ugliness is part of me. Many people will see beautiful faces; they will become infatuated with me. They will think that this beauty is part of me. Both are wrong.Just a few days ago The Statesman has published an article about me. The title of the article is “Osho – Sage or Satyr?” The writer is a famous Bengali scholar, a follower of Sri Aurobindo. He has written many books, particularly on Aurobindo’s philosophy. He cannot come to a conclusion, he wavers. I enjoyed his article. One moment he thinks I am a saint, another moment he thinks I am a sinner. One moment he feels I am divine, another moment he thinks I am just the Devil incarnate. The whole article is an exercise in utter confusion! That shows his face: he must be a man living in confusion. The confusion may have surfaced through reading my books because he must have been reading Sri Aurobindo his whole life.I don’t see anything important in Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy because it is only a philosophy. He was a great scholar, a man of great intellectual talents, a genius, but not a master, not a buddha. He has written a great system of thought, very logical. His approach is as it should be: academic, scholarly, logical. He tried to live according to the Indian ideal of the sage and he managed to live it as far as it is possible to manage it from the outside. He cultivated a great character around himself, but it was only a character without any consciousness in it, it was a conscience without any consciousness in it. He was simply following the Hindu ideal of the sage.This writer also has a certain idea of the sage. I don’t fit into that category. I cannot fit into any category – Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist. I don’t belong to the past, I belong to the future. I am creating a new category of my own. In the future there will be people who will fit my category. It is a new phenomenon, hence it has no history behind it. It has a future but no past.Because he cannot make me fit according to the Hindu ideal of a sage – obviously, the logical mind thinks in terms of either–or – then I must be a devil! But he cannot fit me into that category either; about that too he seems to be shaky and wavering. That too is not possible because the sage and the devil are polar opposite categories to each other. They both belong to the past – I don’t belong to the past at all. So he goes on moving continuously from one point to the other and he ends in confusion, inconclusively.But if he can see the point… The point is that he has come face-to-face with a mirror in which he can see his own conflict, in which he can see his conflict between the past and the future, in which he can see his conflict between his own conscious and unconscious, between his conscience and consciousness, between his character and his reality. But he may not be aware of that at all. He thinks that he is thinking about me – he is simply looking at his own face.You ask me, “Who are you?” But you can understand it – you who are here, who are with me. You can understand this fact: I am just a mirror. Sometimes you become angry. Remember, that anger has something to do with you, it has nothing to do with me. Sometimes you become very happy and very blissful; that too belongs to you, it has nothing to do with me. I don’t take any credit. If you become enlightened that is up to you; I will not take the credit for it. You need not even feel any thankfulness to me. I don’t expect even a thank you from you. On the contrary, I will be thankful to you because now you will not need my mirror and my mirror can become available to others. You will become a mirror yourself and you will start mirroring others’ faces, their realities.I want all my sannyasins to become mirrors so they can help millions of people in the world. If you can remember this, great things will start happening to you. Otherwise you will go on blaming me because each time I assert something it is going to hurt you. If you have carried a certain idea for a long time and it has become deep-rooted in you and I start hitting… And I can do only that. Anything wrong and the mirror is bound to show it to you. The mirror is not at fault. If your face is looking sad the mirror will show it. Don’t destroy the mirror.That’s what the poor man was doing here who threw the knife to kill me. He could not tolerate the mirror. He had listened to me for only three, four days, but he became so agitated because what I was saying showed his fanaticism, showed his Hindu chauvinistic attitude and it became intolerable for him.Jesus became intolerable to the Jews for the simple reason that he was showing them their own faces.People are carrying ugly faces and without a mirror they cannot see their faces so they remain perfectly contented. When you can’t see your face you think you are beautiful. And people are polite, nobody says anything to you. That’s why they have to say things when you are not there, they have to talk about you behind your back. They gossip, but they never gossip when you are present. They gossip about others with you and with others about you – and you do the same.Psychologists say that if every person in the world decides to be absolutely authentic and true just for twenty-four hours, decides: “We will not be polite and we will not tell lies and we will not be formal. We will simply say the truth as it is, as it appears to us” – then there will no longer be any friendship in the world, no more husbands, no more wives, no more lovers. All will be finished!That’s why to my sannyasins I always suggest that if you want to continue your relationship with somebody, it is best not to live together because if you start living together, how long you can be polite? How long you can be formal? Sooner or later the truth starts surfacing.Just a few days ago Vasumati wanted to live with Krishna Prem. Their relationship has lasted for almost one and a half years. It is such a long time in this commune – almost impossible! – for the simple reason that they are not living together so they meet only once in a while. They cannot even meet every day because Vasumati is sharing with other people, Krishna Prem is sharing with somebody else. So only once in a while, when they can manage some privacy, they can meet – only for a few hours per week, twice or thrice per week. So it remains a love affair; it has not yet become a marriage. Otherwise it would have been finished long ago!But then Vivek came to me and said, “Vasumati wants to live with Krishna Prem.” I said, “That’s what every woman wants and that’s how every woman destroys. And the man cannot say no because if he says no that means it is immediately finished! But,” I said, “if she wants to, then we will manage it in some way.”There was one opportunity – I inquired of Krishna Prem. He proved to be really wise. He wrote a letter, he said to me, “Osho, you decide because I don’t know what is right. My desires say, ‘Be together,’ but I am an unconscious person – I don’t know what will happen out of it. I can’t see very far into the future, but you can see so you decide.” So I decided that they live separately.Just a few weeks ago Radha went to Italy with her lover, Amito, just for four weeks. And immediately I told Vivek, “This relationship is finished!” I told her not to say such a thing to anybody because at least for four weeks let them enjoy. But this is finished! Four weeks together and in Italy…there is no hope, no future for this relationship.And that’s what has happened. Just the other day Radha wrote a letter saying that now she wants to move with Asang. I knew that this was going to happen, it was as absolutely clear as things can be because when you live together for twenty-four hours a day you have to put aside your masks. At least sometimes, when you go to sleep, you have to put the masks aside. Your real face starts showing. And for one, two, three days you can somehow manage: you can act nice, good, beautiful, but for how long? One cannot act twenty-four hours a day for many days; it becomes tiring, it becomes boring. One has to say the real thing.And I can perfectly understand the psychologists’ idea that if for only twenty-four hours we decide to be true, absolutely true, everything on earth will fall apart. Every relationship will fall apart because truth is truth and there are very few people who can absorb truth; they have become so accustomed to lies. That’s why so much gossiping goes on all around because you have to say the truth somewhere, otherwise it becomes a burden. You have to unburden yourself. So you feel unburdened when you have told somebody, you feel better. And the other person can unburden himself to you, and this goes on and on. Everybody is helping as a psychoanalyst to everybody else.In the West, psychoanalysis is needed, not in the East, for the simple reason that in the East people have enough time to listen to each other. In the West, people have no time to listen to each other – you have to pay for it. The psychoanalyst does nothing; his whole art consists of pretending to be attentive to you.A psychoanalyst went to a pet shop. He wanted a parrot which did not talk. The owner was puzzled. He said. “You are the first customer who wants a parrot which does not talk. Everybody else comes for a parrot who talks!”He said. “I am tired of talking parrots!”The owner said, “Have you got many talking parrots?”He said. “No, many talking patients, but they are parrots. They almost all repeat the same thing. Every husband is talking about his wife and every wife is talking about her husband. Every parent is talking about his children and every child is talking about his parents. I am tired! And I have to pretend that I am listening attentively because that’s what they are paying for – and they are really paying too much.”Now it is one of the best professions in the West, one of the most profitable businesses – and with no investment. You just need a couch. And Freud was very inventive about the couch because if you are facing the patient your face may start showing boredom, you may start yawning. Who is concerned with all that nonsense and rubbish about their lives that people go on talking? And the psychoanalyst has been listening to so many people and the story is almost the same. It is always the same because it is the story of the unconscious mind; it can’t be much different.Only conscious people have uniqueness. One buddha absolutely differs from another buddha. If you have to listen to the story of Jesus it is going to be tremendously different from the story of Gautam the Buddha or the story of Lao Tzu. They are unique people. But unconscious people, what is their story? The same sexuality, the same repression, the same greed, the same anger, the same hatred, destructiveness, suicidal instinct, possessiveness, jealousy. It is almost the same story. Only persons differ, but the role they play is the same. The same triangles – two women and one man or two men and one woman. The same triangles. One is bound to get tired.Freud invented one of the great things of this century: the couch. The patient has to lie down on the couch and the therapist sits behind him so that the patient cannot see his face. The therapist can go on smoking, yawning or reading or he can plug his ears and there is no need to bother about what the person is saying – let him talk. But the person feels immensely relieved. When after one hour’s analysis he comes out, he looks fresh, unburdened, younger, less tense, more at ease, collected, calm. He has said many stupid things which he cannot say to anybody else because people will think he is mad. And here you are supposed to be mad so there is no problem!This psychoanalyst said, “I want a parrot which does not talk.”The pet shop owner was in a little difficulty because he had all kinds of parrots but they were all talking parrots. This was the first customer who had asked for a non-talking parrot. But he went in and brought out a dumb crow.The psychotherapist said, “Is this a parrot?”He said, “Yes, it is an African parrot. It is a nigger! And he cannot talk because he knows no English.”So he said, “That’s perfectly all right,” and took the crow.After a month the pet owner met the psychotherapist in the park one morning and he asked him, “How are things going? How is the parrot?”And the psychoanalyst said, “You have given me really a beautiful parrot. He never says a single word and whatsoever I say he listens so attentively that I talk to him for hours. I am feeling so unburdened, so free. I rejoice in him! The whole day I am looking forward to the evening. I rush home.“There are many people who suspect that it is not a parrot – my wife says, ‘You are a fool! This is not a parrot.’ – but it doesn’t matter whether it is a parrot or not. He pays attention, he listens so attentively! That’s the only thing, that is the quality I was looking for.”In the East, psychoanalysis is still not part of the style of life and I think it will take a long time for it to become part of life because everybody is functioning as a psychoanalyst to everybody else. People can talk to each other and unburden themselves. In the West, there is no time. Nobody is ready to listen to you; you have to pay professional listeners.A master is not a psychoanalyst, he is a mirror. He simply reflects you with all your burdens, tensions, anxieties, anguish, with all your problems, with all your miseries. And naturally you can become offended.One sannyasin has just written to me, “Osho, whenever you talk about the differences between man and woman I become very resistant.” But why should you become resistant? What can I do if there are differences? The rose is different from the marigold. If somebody becomes resistant that means something is wrong in his inner world; something is repressed and that repression starts uncoiling itself. Maybe you have been carrying the idea that man and woman are not different. Maybe that has become your fixation.There are many people who think men and women are not different and they find a thousand and one rationalizations to explain why they are not different: that it is only psychological conditioning that makes them different otherwise they are not different. They are different. Psychological conditioning can reduce their differences or can enhance their differences, but differences are there. Basic differences are there and those basic differences should not be overlooked.A kind of unisex is being born in the world. This sannyasin must be a believer in unisex. Men and women are wearing almost the same clothes, trying to look alike. And of course if you become psychologically conditioned, your biology also, your physiology also follows suit.In the East, the differences have always been accepted. Not only accepted but strengthened. There is great wisdom in it because the farther away they are, the more attraction there is between them; if they become alike the attraction will be lost. And in the West it is happening: for the first time in the history of humanity, sex is losing its appeal. And once sex loses its appeal you are at a loss – what to do? Where to go?Sex is a natural phenomenon which gives you glimpses of meditation. From sex you can go to meditation, but if sex loses its appeal the doors for meditation are closed because you won’t have any glimpses of meditation. It is only in sexual orgasm that you melt, merge, disappear. And those few moments of disappearance, dissolution, give you the first taste of what it will be to dissolve forever. Those drops of nectar can give you some idea of the ocean that a buddha carries in his being. But if sex loses its appeal, then even those drops become impossible. And a person who has not even tasted a drop of nectar cannot conceive that there is a possibility of any oceanic experience. For him, Buddha will become a fiction.Try to understand my approach. I want you to transcend sex – but through sex, not by becoming indifferent to it, not by dropping it in an immature way.The East has always emphasized the difference between man and woman for the simple reason that the East knows the immense value of orgasmic experience. It gives you a glimpse of meditation and then from there you can move on; that can become a jumping board. But in the West, sex is losing its appeal and one of the causes of its losing its appeal is that the differences are being reduced to zero. And it is affecting the physiology also.In the East, you will see that women and men have more prominent physiological differences than in the West. Western women are becoming more and more flat-chested; their breasts are becoming smaller and smaller. There is a possibility in the future that they may almost disappear! In the East you can see it very clearly, very prominently, that the women have bigger breasts than Western women. The same is the case with the buttocks too. Western women are becoming almost straight lines with no curves; all the curves are disappearing. And then if you are wearing the same clothes, the same pants and shirt, it becomes almost difficult to differentiateEven for me sometimes it is difficult. Every evening Mukta has to go on looking to see what I am writing, “swami” or “ma” because she has to correct me many times: “Osho, this is a ma! This is a swami!” I don’t think any buddha had this problem before. I must be the first one who is encountering this problem and I feel puzzled, sometimes utterly puzzled. No spiritual insight helps! I have to depend on Mukta: if she misses, then almost every day there will be at least one case: a ma will become a swami, a swami will become a ma.But this sannyasin who has written to me, “There is great resistance whenever you talk about differences…” The resistance must be coming out of the idea that men and women are equal. I am not saying that they are not equal, I am simply saying they are not similar. Never confuse equality with similarity. They are perfectly equal but they are absolutely dissimilar – and that is their beauty. If you have this wrong notion that similarity means equality then you will be feeling a resistance.I am just a mirror – don’t be angry with me. And there will be ninety percent of cases when you will feel anger against me because I will have to bring out much pus in you. I will have to open your wounds. You may have forgotten about them, completely forgotten; you may have started believing that they no longer exist. And I will have to reopen them to show you where you are, because unless you know where you are you cannot move a single inch, you cannot grow. You can move only from where you are.And there will be ten percent of cases when you will feel ecstatic. Then don’t think that I am giving this ecstasy to you – nobody can give truth to you. I can inspire you, I can challenge you. I can invite you, I can seduce you into the journey, but I cannot give the truth to you. You have to find it yourself. I can only show you your real face.I am simply a mirror.Fanfani is on an official visit to France and he is taken to the Louvre. The museum director shows him around and they stop in front of a painting.“Cezanne?” Fanfani asks.“No,” replies the director, “Renoir.”They come to another painting and again Fanfani asks “Pizarro?”“No, Your Excellence, Degas.”After walking around a little more he stops in front of another one and asks, “Is this a self-portrait of Toulouse-Lautrec?”“No, Your Excellence this is a mirror!”My sannyasins have to remember always that you are here to discover your real faces, your original faces. And the master not only reflects your so-called face, he reflects your original face too. But he begins by reflecting your mask and it hurts to know that you are wearing a mask. And you are not wearing only one mask, you are wearing many masks – masks upon masks. You have to be peeled like an onion and it hurts. But unless your original face is discovered, the work that I want to do will remain incomplete. God will recognize you by your original face, not by any artificial mask, howsoever beautiful it is.Three Cambridge dons were walking by the river one beautiful hot summer day. Coming to a secluded spot, they could not resist the temptation to have a dip. Not having costumes with them they went in the buff.Unfortunately just as they came out, a punt full of pretty female undergrads came round the bend, whereupon in some consternation, two of the dons grabbed some clothes around their middles while the third threw something over his head. After the girls had gone the two who had covered their middles turned on the other and said, “Why on earth did you do that?”Whereupon he answered, “Where I come from, we recognize people by their faces!”God will recognize you by your original face; nothing else will be recognized there. No degrees, no fame, no money, no power, no prestige, nothing else will be recognized there but your original face. You will have to stand utterly naked before him.The master simply represents God on the earth. You have to be utterly naked before the master, only then will you be capable one day of facing your God. If you are capable of facing your master you will certainly be able to face your God.The third question:Osho,What is it to meditate?What, again? Just the other day I was talking about meditation. Where have you been? – you must have been fast asleep! In fact, whenever I talk about meditation, many of you go into sleep – you think you are going into meditation. You wake up only when I am telling a joke! Then I don’t see a single person asleep.Meditation is a member of the Tate family.In a church bulletin the following was read:“Do you know how many members of the Tate family belong to your parish? There is old man Dic Tate who wants to run everything, while Uncle Ro Tate tries to change everything. Their sister Agi Tate stirs up plenty of trouble, with help from her husband Irri Tate.Whenever new projects are suggested, Hesi Tate and his wife Vege Tate want to wait until next year. Then there is Aunt Imi Tate who wants our church to be like all others. Devas Tate provides the voice of doom, while Poten Tate wants to be a big shot.But not all members of the family are bad. Brother Facili Tate is quite helpful in church matters. And a delightful, happy member of the family is Miss Felici Tate. Cousins Cogi Tate and Medi Tate always think things over and lend a helpful, steadying hand.And, of course, there is the black sheep of the family Ampu Tate, who has completely cut himself off from the church.”The last question:Osho,I would like to know if there is anything that I should be serious about.Except my jokes, don’t be serious about anything else. But about jokes I am not joking!Having come from a small village, Giovanni had never seen a train in his life. So one day he decided to go and see one. Standing on the rail he heard the train whistle, “Tooo-tooo!” Before he knew what hit him, the train was upon him and knocked him off the rail. The last thing he could remember was flying through the air.When he gained consciousness, Giovanni found himself laid up in the hospital for several months. During this time his wife used their accident insurance money to buy a well-equipped, modern flat in the city.Once fully recovered, Giovanni went to his new home. His wife made a cake to celebrate his recovery and put the new kettle on the stove to make some coffee to go with the cake. As the water boiled, the kettle whistled, “Tooo-tooo!” Startled, Giovanni jumped up, rushed to the kitchen, grabbed the new kettle and smashed it on the floor, kicking it several times.“What the hell are you doing?” cried out his wife.“These things!” shouted Giovanni, “You’ve got to kill them while they’re young!”It is good that in the very beginning you have asked this question: “I would like to know if there is anything that I should be serious about.”Only be serious about jokes. About everything else, from the very beginning, beware, don’t get serious. Whatsoever I say, all the sutras have to be forgotten. And you have to forgive me for all the sutras. Just remember me for my jokes, but take them very seriously. They will help you immensely.A drunk sat alone at one end of the bar watching the well-dressed playboy smoothly talking to one woman after another. Finally he slithered over to the man: “Hey, mister, how come you get to talk to all these women?”“Well,” said the man, “I have a special technique I figured out. It works every time. Look!”They waited for a buxom redhead to walk by.“Tickle your ass with a feather?” whispered the playboy.The woman wheeled around, “What! What did you say to me?” she stormed.“Particularly nice weather,” said the man coolly. “Won’t you join us for a drink?” The woman sat down and before she left the man had her phone number and a date.Then a pretty brunette came along. Again the man said, “Tickle your ass with a feather?”“I beg your pardon!” exclaimed the lady.“Particularly nice weather!” cooed the man.Charmed, the lady joined them for a while. When she left, Mr. Suave-and-Debonair said, “So you see how it works now?”“Yeah, I get it,” slobbered the drunk.“Now you try it on the next broad,” said the playboy.So when a gorgeous blonde walked in, the drunk gathered up his courage and yelled, “Hey, lady, stick a feather up your ass?”“What!” she raged. “What did you say?”“Pretty fuckin’ nice out, ain’t it?” replied the drunk.I know you are absolutely in a drunken state. Everything is upside down in you, everything is in a mess. You don’t know what you are doing, why you are doing it. You don’t know why you are here in the first place! But I know perfectly well why I am here and what I am doing. I am trying to wake you up – you are fast asleep.Just take one thing seriously and that is to become more and more alert of your sleepiness. And all my efforts here, sutras or jokes, are nothing but a means to wake you. Sometimes a joke can wake you up more easily than a serious sutra because listening to a serious sutra you tend to fall deeper into sleep. It is so serious that you can’t be awakened by it. But a joke is so light that you don’t want to miss it; you listen attentively.And between the jokes I go on dropping a few dangerous things into your head – just small bombs, between the jokes! Just remember to take the jokes seriously and the remainder you leave to me. The remainder I will do. Just if you are awake between two jokes, I am there to drop a bomb inside you which will explode sooner or later. And the moment it explodes you are finished!Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I am a judge. Have I any chance of ever entering nirvana? If your answer is no, then I can change my profession; I can become a doctor. I am also trained as a homeopath.There is no record of any judge ever entering nirvana. Just because of you, the whole night I had to look in the Akashic records again! I could only find one thing in them:Satan and St. Peter decided to hold a soccer game in paradise. It was to be hell versus heaven.When everything had been arranged, St. Peter said to Satan, “Look, I can’t be dishonest with you. There is no way that your side can win. All soccer players are simple, pure people and when they die, they all go to heaven. Heaven is full of soccer players.”“I thank you for your sincerity.” replied Satan. “But don’t worry, we can defend ourselves.”When St. Peter had left, Satan’s secretary said, “St. Peter is right – we will lose the game. All the good soccer players go to heaven.”“Don’t worry,” said Satan. “Where do you think all the judges go?”Changing your profession from judge to doctor is not going to help you either! About that also there is a reference in the Akashic records.A doctor came to heaven’s door. St. Peter looked at the guy, asked his profession and said, “Wrong door son. Please go to hell.”The doctor was puzzled, looked very confused and said, “But I went there first and they said, ‘Go to the other door.’”“I know,” said St. Peter, “they meant the back door.”“But why?” asked the doctor.St. Peter said, “That is the entrance for the suppliers.”This is not going to help. Why don’t you become a sannyasin? Then there is no need to bother about nirvana because you enter it immediately. Then it is not be a question of tomorrow. You can look at my sannyasins. Nobody is worried about nirvana – they are already in it. To be a sannyasin means to be in nirvana. A sannyasin does not need to enter nirvana; nirvana enters him. Hence, wherever he is, nirvana is. You can throw him into hell, but he will be in nirvana; it will not make any difference at all. If your nirvana depends upon certain conditions it is not much of a nirvana.Nirvana is a state of unconditional acceptance. Wherever you are, if you can accept your life with totality, with joy, with gratitude, if you can see your life as a gift, then nirvana is never a problem. The problem arises only because you don’t accept your life, you reject life. And the moment you reject life you start looking for some other life and you become worried about whether it is going to be better than this life or not. It may be worse. That’s what hell is: the fear of a worse life than this. And that is nirvana: the greed for a better life than this. But there is no other life. There is no hell, no heaven. Only fools are interested in such things.But you being an Indian has meant that you were brought up with the idea of a geographical concept of heaven somewhere above and hell somewhere below. In fact, there is no above and no below. Existence is unlimited, unbounded; there is no bottom to it and no roof either. Something can be above the roof of Buddha Hall – for example, this plane passing by. This is “above” the roof. You are below the roof and the ground, the floor, is below you and the earth is below the floor. But existence has no roof, no bottom. It is unbounded on all sides.What Indian scriptures say about hell is nothing but talk about America! If right now you dig a hole wherever you are sitting here and go on digging you will reach America because the earth is round. But the Americans also think in the same geographical way, that hell is below. If they look into the hole, you will be in hell. You will think they are in hell and they will think you are in hell. And only my sannyasins will laugh at the whole affair. Who is above and who is below?These heaven–hell concepts have nothing to do with geography or space and they don’t have anything to do with time either. So it is not a question of tomorrows, nor a question of something after death. It is a question of understanding, it is a question of meditation, it is a question of becoming totally silent, herenow. There is no other space than here and no other time than now. These two words contain the whole existence: now, here.Swami Rama Teertha used to tell a beautiful parable:There was a great philosopher; he was an absolute atheist, continuously arguing against God. Twenty-four hours a day he was concerned with destroying the idea of God. He would try to convince whosoever came to him.On the wall of his sitting room in big letters he had written “God is nowhere” – just to start an argument with anybody. Whosoever the visitor was he was bound to ask him, “What do you mean by writing this?” It was impossible to overlook it – such big, bold letters. The whole wall was covered with big letters: “God is nowhere.” Anybody was bound to ask, “God is nowhere? What do you mean? Are you an atheist?” And that was enough to start the argument. And he was really very skillful at arguing.Atheists are always more skillful as far as argumentation is concerned than the theists. Theists are believers; they are gullible people. Atheists believe in logic and nothing else and logic knows only how to deny. Logic has no idea of how to say yes. The word yes does not exist in the logician’s mind, only no.Then a child was born to the great atheist and the child was learning language. It was difficult for him to read the whole word nowhere; it was such a big word. One day he was trying to read “God is nowhere.” Seeing that the word was too big, he divided it in two. He read instead “God is now here.”The father was shocked. He had never thought about it before that this word can be divided and read in such a way. “God is now here?”“Nowhere” turned into “now here”! The philosopher must have then been in a certain beautiful space, in a certain silent space. He started thinking about now and here, he became interested in the phenomenon of now and here. “What is ‘now’? What does it mean?” He had never experienced now and he had never experienced here.And that is the case with millions of people in the world: they think of the yesterdays and the tomorrows, they never experience the now. They think of every other place. They never think, they never experience, they never taste what it means to be here.This child opened some doors to the greatest mystery of life. The philosopher forgot about God, he forgot about arguing against God. His whole interest started revolving around now and here.And there is only one way to know what is now and what is here and that is meditation. One has to become utterly silent because the mind is always going either backward or forward; either it moves into memories or into imagination. It never stays here, it never remains in the now, for the simple reason that to be in the now means the death of the mind. It is afraid of the now, it is afraid of the present.Slowly, slowly he learned the art of being now and here. And the day he succeeded in being now and here he experienced God.My suggestion to you is forget about nirvana. Nirvana means something that will happen after this life – don’t be concerned about it. Be concerned with this moment, because this is the only true moment there is, and enter it. And that very entrance is the entrance to nirvana. And once you have found it, nobody can take it away from you.Then you can remain a judge, you can become a doctor, you can be whatsoever you want to be. It does not matter. There are great stories…A Chinese parable says:Lao Tzu used to send his disciples to learn the art of meditation from a butcher. The disciples were very puzzled – why the butcher? And Lao Tzu would say, “Go and see. The man lives exactly the way one should live, always herenow. It does not matter what he is doing. He is not the doer at all. He is just a watcher, he is a witness. It is a role that he is playing – he is acting as a butcher.”And he was no ordinary butcher. He had been especially appointed by the emperor of China to his own kitchen.The emperor asked Lao Tzu, “How to learn to be herenow? – because you are always talking about herenow.”Lao Tzu said, “You need not ask me; your butcher is the right person. Even I send many of my disciples to watch him.”The emperor was shocked. He said, “My butcher! What does he know about it?”Lao Tzu said, “Watch him work.”And the emperor watched. And it was really a tremendously ecstatic experience even to watch him working. His instrument, his knife, was so sharp, so shining, as if it was absolutely new, as if he had brought it for the first time.The king asked – he was very interested in weapons. He asked, “From where did you get this beautiful knife?”He said, “This knife was given to me by my father who died forty years ago. For forty years I have been working with this knife, cutting animals with this knife.”“Forty years!” the king said. “And the knife looks so new, so fresh!”The butcher said, “There is an art in it. If you are doing everything watchfully, alert, conscious, then no rust gathers – not only in you, not only on the inside, but even on the outside no rust gathers. I am fresh, my knife is fresh. I am young, my knife is young. And I am I working as a meditation. Being a butcher is just a role that I am playing.”A Zen master used to tell his disciples the story of a master thief who became enlightened…So don’t be worried about being a judge or a doctor – even a thief can become enlightened. The question is not what you do, the question is how you do it. The question is not about the act but is about the consciousness that the act arises from.This is one of the most famous Zen stories. I love it tremendously.The thief was known as a master thief – no ordinary thief. Even the king respected him because never in his life was he caught. And everybody knew that he was the greatest thief in the country. In fact, his fame was such that people used to brag that “Last night the master thief entered our house,” that “Our treasure was stolen by the master thief.” It was a privilege because the entry of the master thief meant you were really rich because he would not go to any ordinary person. Only kings and very rich people had the privilege of the master thief visiting them.The thief was becoming old. His son said to him, “Now you are old and soon you will die. Teach me your art!”The master thief said, “I was also thinking about it. But it is not an art, it is rather a knack. I cannot teach you, it cannot be taught, but it can be caught.”That’s how religion is: it cannot be taught, it can only be caught. That’s the difference between a teacher and a master: the teacher teaches, the master only makes himself available to be caught. You have to imbibe his spirit. If you only listen to his words you will miss him. If you start tasting his wine, only then will you understand him.The thief said, “It is a knack. If you can catch it, I am ready to help you, I will make myself available to you. I had been wondering myself, but it is such a great skill – like poets, real thieves are born not made. But one never knows unless one tries. Come along with me tonight.”The son followed. The son was young, healthy, very strong. The old man was really old, more than eighty. The old man arrived at a rich house. He broke the wall, he removed the bricks – but the way he was doing it! And the young man was just watching, standing there and trembling. It was a cold night and the young man was perspiring and trembling. And he was so afraid: he was looking all around – somebody might be coming. “And what kind of man is my father? He is doing everything so silently, so gracefully, as if this is our own house! No hurry, no worry.”The father did not look around even once. He entered the house and gestured to the son to follow. He followed trembling, perspiring, his whole body was just bathed in perspiration; it was flowing like water. He had never experienced this kind of perspiration even on hot summer days – and it was a cold winter night, ice cold! And the old man was moving in the house, in the darkness, as if he had always lived there. He didn’t stumble against anything.He reached inside the house, he opened the innermost room. Then he opened a closet and told the son to enter the closet. He entered the closet – and what his father did was unimaginable to him. The father locked the closet – his son was inside! – and shouted loudly, “Thief! Thief!” and escaped.The whole house was awoken, the neighborhood was awoken. People rushed here and there; they looked all around inside the house. You can imagine the situation of the son! He thought, “This is the end. I am finished! My father is mad. I should not have asked – this is not for me. He was right to say that thieves are born not made. But is this a way to teach? If I stay alive I will kill this old man. I will go home and cut his head off immediately!”He was really angry – anybody would have been in his situation – but there was no point in being angry. Right now something had to done and he could not think of anything. The mind simply stopped.That’s what meditation is: the mind simply stops. It cannot figure out what it is all about, what to do because all that it knows is useless. It has never been in such a situation before. And the mind can only move again and again in the world of the known. Whenever anything unknown is encountered, the mind stops. It is a machine. If you have not fed it the right information before, it cannot work at all, it cannot function.Now this was such a new situation, the young man could not conceive what to do. There was nothing to do. And then a woman servant came with a candle in her hand, looking around for the thief. A thief had certainly entered the house: the wall was broken, the door had been opened – all the doors had been opened. The thief had entered the innermost room. He must be hiding somewhere.She opened the closet door to look in – maybe he was hiding inside. She would not normally have opened the door of the closet, but something had happened inside the closet and that was why she opened it. She heard some noise, some scratching noise as if a rat were biting clothes. She opened the door to look for the rat really. It was the young man making this scratching noise, he was doing it. And it had come to him spontaneously, it was not from his mind. Seeing somebody entering with a light… He could see that somebody was inside the room, he could hear the footsteps, he could see the light outside; suddenly it was not so dark. The only way to get the doors opened was to do something. What to do? Out of nowhere, intuitively – this is not out of intellect but out of intuition – he started scratching like a rat and the door was opened. The woman looked inside with her candle. Again, out of intuition, out of the moment, he blew out the candle, pushed the woman aside and ran away.The people followed – almost a dozen people were following him carrying torches and lamps – and it was certain he would be caught. Suddenly he came across a well. He took a rock and threw it into the well and then stood by the side of a tree to watch what happens. It was all just happening, he was not doing it. All the people surrounded the well – they thought the thief had jumped in. “Now there is no point in bothering about him on this cold night. In the morning we can see. If he is alive we will put him in jail. If he is dead he is punished already.” Then they went back.The young man reached home. The father was fast asleep, snoring. The son pulled his blanket aside and said, “Are you mad or something?”The father looked at him, smiled and said, “So you are back – that’s enough! No need to tell the whole story. You are a born thief! From tomorrow you start on your own. You have caught the spirit of it. I am not mad – I gambled. Either you would be finished or you would come out of it proving that you have the intuitive insight – and you have come out of it. No need to bother me at this time in the night. Go to sleep. In the morning, if you feel like telling me, you can tell me. But I know what has happened – if not the details, then the essence of it and that’s enough. That’s my whole art, my son; you have learned it. And if I die tomorrow, I will be dying happily because I will know I am leaving somebody who knows the art. This is how my father taught me – this is the only way. One has to risk.”Even a thief can become enlightened. Even a thief can live in the moment, can drop out of the mind.So I am not too concerned about what you are doing. That’s why I never ask anybody, “What profession do you belong to? What you are doing?” Whosoever comes to me to be initiated I initiate, irrespective of his profession. Sometimes people themselves say, “Osho, before you initiate me let me tell you that I am a drunkard,” “…that I am a thief,” “…that I am a murderer” – this and that – “…that I have just come out of jail.” I say to them, “Don’t bother me with all these details. Whatsoever you have done in your sleep is all the same. Whether you have been virtuous or a sinner, whether you have been a saint or a devil incarnate, it does not matter.”Unconscious acts are unconscious acts. They are all the same. One man can dream that he is a sinner, a murderer; another can dream he is a great saint. In the morning both will find that they were dreaming – all dreams are the same. So don’t bother me at all.Not only that, people have taken sannyas who are imprisoned. From their jails they write to me: “We are imprisoned for life. Can we become sannyasins?” I say, “Why not? – because everybody is imprisoned for life! A few are imprisoned outside, a few are imprisoned inside the prison. It is the same. You are in a smaller prison, others are in a bigger prison; it does not matter. But if you want to become a sannyasin, the only thing is you will have to learn the knack of being herenow. You can become a sannyasin.”There are many prisoners who have taken sannyas, from almost all countries. I have given them sannyas. Of course, they cannot wear orange, they write to me, “It is impossible because of the prison rules. We have to wear certain clothes.” I say, “No need to worry about it.”One prisoner wrote to me from Germany: “I will carry an orange handkerchief; that much is possible. I will keep your mala in my pocket. I cannot wear it – it wouldn’t be allowed.” But I can understand. That’s okay. He writes: “But I will meditate every day.” And he has been meditating; for these two years he has been meditating regularly, again and again writing to me, “I am immensely happy. In fact, I feel it a great blessing that I have been imprisoned. If I was not imprisoned I may not have become your sannyasin. It is in the prison library that I came across one of your books.” Now the prison has become his door to nirvana.Don’t be worried. Don’t be concerned about those akashic records and the stories that I was telling you. There is no need to change your profession. If you want to change it there is no need to find any excuse – you can change it. You can become a doctor, you can become anything you want, but don’t make it something great, don’t make it an ego trip. But start meditating.If you can take a jump into sannyas you will have proved yourself a man of courage. Then right now you will be in nirvana. And I believe in nirvana now or never!The second question:Osho,You are teaching us to believe in nothing. But why should I try to drop my ego without believing that life is better without an ego? Before I drop my ego I cannot know how life is without an ego. Therefore I have to believe that life is better without an ego before I try to drop the ego. But I can't believe it because I suppose that life without an ego is life without a will of my own. The idea of giving up my own will is horrible to me. I cannot imagine that anybody would do this of their own free will because my ego is all I have.Osho, please talk to us about this.Bernd Schweiger, it happens all the time that I say one thing and you understand something else, for the simple reason that I am talking from a state of no-mind and you are listening through the mind. It is as if a person who is awake is talking to a person who is fast asleep. Yes, even in sleep you can hear a few words, fragments of words, maybe even fragments of sentences, but you will not be able to understand exactly what is being said to you. You are bound to misunderstand.That is one of the problems faced by all those people who have experienced something of the beyond. The beyond cannot be put into words. It remains inexpressible for the simple reason that you can understand only that which you have experienced.I am not saying drop the ego. That is impossible. Even if you want to drop it you cannot drop it. It is impossible because the ego does not exist. How can you drop something which does not exist? You can only drop something which exists in the first place. But the ego is a false phenomenon; nobody has ever been able to drop it.Then what do I mean when I say learn the secret of being egoless? I do not mean that you have to drop it but that you have to understand it. There is no question of belief.Now, the whole question has come out of your misunderstanding, but you are making it look so logical that anybody looking at your question will think, “Of course, how can you drop the ego without believing that life will be better without the ego?” And I say don’t believe in anything. I repeat again: don’t believe in anything. I am not saying that you should believe me and become egoless, I am simply saying – sharing my own experience – that the more I tried to understand the ego the more I became aware that it is nonexistential. When I became fully conscious of it, it disappeared.It disappears on its own accord. You don’t drop it. If you drop it, then who will drop it? Then the ego will survive. Then it will be the ego dropping another ego, dropping the gross ego. And the gross is not dangerous, the subtle ego is more dangerous. Then you will become a pious egoist, you will become a humble egoist, you will become a spiritual egoist. Then you will become an “egoless” egoist. And that is getting into more trouble because that is getting into more contradictions.All that I am saying to you is very simple. Try to understand what this ego is. Just look at it, watch it. Become aware of all its subtle ways, how it comes in. And there are moments when it is not – watch those moments also. Even you have those moments when it is not. It needs constant pedaling – it is like a bicycle. If you go on pedaling it, it can go on moving. If you stop pedaling it… How far can it go without pedaling? Maybe a few feet, maybe one furlong, two furlongs, but then it is bound to fall.The ego needs to be constantly nourished. There are moments when you forget to nourish it and it disappears. For example, seeing a beautiful sunset it disappears because the sunset possesses you so totally. It is so beautiful, it is so extraordinary, so exquisite, it fills you with wonder and awe. For a moment you forget completely that you are, only the sunset is and the clouds and the luminous colors on the clouds and the birds coming back to their nests and the day ending, entering into a silent night. As the sun starts disappearing below the horizon, something in you stops.It happened to Ramakrishna – his first experience of egolessness. He was only thirteen. He was coming home from the field – he was a poor man’s son and he lived in a small village. He was passing by the lake. A silent evening, the sunset and there was nobody on the lake. His coming to the lake… There was a big crowd of white cranes sitting by the side of the lake. They suddenly flew up – it was so sudden, as if out of nowhere – and against the backdrop of a black cloud which was shining like velvet against the setting sun, those white cranes in a row flashed before his eyes like lightning. It was a moment, a tremendous moment!He fell on the ground. He was so possessed by the beauty of it he became unconscious. He had to be carried home by others. Somebody found him lying down there on the shore of the lake after an hour. It took six hours for him to be brought back to consciousness.When he came back to consciousness he started crying and they asked, “Why are you crying? You should be happy you are back to consciousness.” He said, “No, I am crying because I am back to the ordinary world. I was not unconscious. I had moved to a higher plane of consciousness. I had moved to some new plane. I don’t know what it was. But I was not there and still there was great joy. I have never tasted such joy.”That was his first experience, his first satori, a moment of egolessness. Then he started searching and seeking for it deliberately, consciously. He would go to the lake again and again, in the morning, in the evening, in the night. And it started happening again and again more easily. It happens to you too. It has happened to everybody. Existence comes to everybody. You may have forgotten it. It has not forgotten you – it cannot. It is not only that you are searching it. It is also groping for you. It is also searching for you…I am not telling you to drop the ego, I am telling you to understand it, to see it – seeing it, it disappears. See and become aware of those moments when it disappears of its own accord. Making love, it disappears. In a deep orgasm, it disappears; you melt, merge into existence. The wave becomes the ocean again; it is no longer separate, it falls back into the ocean. It is only for a moment. Remain conscious of that moment and you will see the beauty of it. Once you have seen the beauty of egoless moments, then it will be easy for you to see the ugliness of the ego, the misery of the ego.You need not believe me, I am simply inviting you to experience it. I am not inviting you to believe in anything. I am utterly against belief – belief is the cause of the destruction of religion on the earth. It is belief that has made religions false and pseudo.Now listen to your question again. You say, “Osho, you are teaching us to believe in nothing.” Absolutely true. “But why should I try to drop my ego…?” Who has said this? You must have heard it, that I can understand, but I have not said it.A young man went to a sex therapist for advice about his staying power. “Ah yes,” said the therapist. “Premature ejaculation is quite a common problem for many young men. It is entirely due to over-eagerness and there is a definite cure.”“What is that, doctor?” asked the young man.“Next time you go to bed with a woman, imagine that you are about to eat a delicious meal in a gourmet restaurant. Imagine every aspect of the meal, from the soup to the coffee.”“Begin with the soup…imagine it steaming in the bowl…taste each spoonful. Next, order the wine, perhaps a rosé. Smell the bouquet of the wine, look at it sparkling with each sip. Imagine the main course…perhaps a mushroom-garnished steak with a baked potato, sour cream and chives and a fresh green salad. Eat it very slowly, tasting each bite. After the main course order dessert…perhaps a chocolate mousse or a pecan pie with whipped cream. And then…you are ready for your coffee…Brazilian, French roast, or maybe cappuccino. Then you can relax and feel the contentment of having enjoyed a very satisfying meal.”“By the time you have enjoyed such a banquet in your imagination your problem will disappear. You will have such an orgasm, such fulfillment – together!”The young man thanked the therapist and went away, delighted. That same evening in bed with his woman friend, they began making love. So he started to fantasize. He pictured the restaurant in his mind, sat down at the table and called out, “Hey, waiter, we’ll have the tomato soup…and a cup of coffee!”You may have heard it, but I have not said it! You say, “Before I drop my ego I cannot know how life is without an ego.” You have known it many times already. Nobody is so poor… I have never come across a man who has never known a few moments of it. Just try to remember. Or now, if you cannot remember, just try every day to watch. Soon you will be able to see a few moments which are without ego. Even this moment, if you are not too concerned about your question, this moment can be without ego; it is so for everybody else. It may not be for you because you will be very disturbed that I am destroying such a logical question of yours, that I am avoiding the real question, that I am trying to evade it, that I am not being logical. I never am because what I am trying to indicate is basically supra-logical.If you try to listen to me as if this were not Schweiger’s question but some other fool’s – some idiot has asked this, not you – then even this moment can be of tremendous beauty and you can experience egolessness. And then you can compare. Only comparing your own experience will make it possible for you to decide. Who am I to decide for you? I never decide for anybody else.The third question:Osho,I am going back to the West. Please tell me a few jokes about therapists.[At this point there was a power failure and the lights went out in Buddha Hall.]It is night… You see how miracles happen!A therapist is walking down the street when a woman with a basket filled with flowers comes to him and says, “Do you want to buy flowers, sir?”“No, thank you.”“But don’t you want to take flowers to the woman you love?”“Stop this, lady. I’m a married man!”An old therapist visits another therapist. “Friend,” he says, “I have a problem. I am eighty years old and I still run after young girls.”“Well, your case is quite common. It happens to almost everyone at your age,” replies the other shrink.“But, you see, I have forgotten why I’m after them!”A psychotherapist is laughing in his study.“What are you laughing at?” asks his wife.“Oh, nothing special, dear. It is just that I love to tell jokes to myself and this last one was new!”And the last:A very old shrink comes to a prostitute. They agree on the price and the old man starts undressing himself. He takes off his jacket, tie and shirt and throws them all out of the window. As he holds his trousers in his hand, ready to throw them out of the window, the prostitute grabs him by the arm and says, “Why are you doing that? When we are finished you cannot go naked on the street!”“Well,” answers the old shrink, “you see, darling, by the time I come, these clothes will be out of fashion!”The fourth question:Osho,First a joke: Two madmen went into a pub and while looking around for a place to sit they saw themselves in a big mirror on the opposite wall. One madman said to the other, “Hey, look at those two guys over there. They look so familiar to me. Let's go over and say hello to them.”As they start moving, however, the other madman says, “Never mind, they are already coming to see us!”This joke says a lot about how I have been feeling since I started work two months ago. The closer I come to you, the closer I come to myself and vice versa. Yet when I feel close to you sometimes great fear arises. Could I be too much afraid of love?Please comment.Love certainly creates great fear because we have been brought up to hate, not to love. Our whole conditioning is against love, but the strategy is very subtle and very few people become aware of the phenomenon that we are brought up to hate. The Hindu hates the Mohammedan, the Mohammedan hates the Christian, the Christian hates the Jew. The religions all hate each other. The theist hates the atheist, the atheist hates the theist. All political ideologies are based on hatred. Communists hate fascists, fascists hate socialists. All nations are rooted in hatred; they all hate each other. This world is full of hatred. Your blood, your bones, your very marrow are full of hatred. Even if sometimes you seem to be united you are always united against something, against the common enemy, never otherwise. It is not a union of love.Adolf Hitler was aware of this psychology. He writes in his autobiography, Mein Kampf, that people are not united because of love: “Love has no power: all power comes through hatred. Create hatred and they will become united.” And I can fully understand his insight. He may have been a lunatic, but sometimes lunatics have great insights. This is a great insight into mob psychology.He says in another place, “If you want your country to be ready and alert, always keep them full of the fear that they are going to be attacked, that the war is just knocking on the doors, that everybody surrounding the nation is your enemy. Whether they are enemies or not does not matter; if they are, good. If they are not, still invent, propagate, that they are enemies. Only then will your country be united.”Hindus become united if there is a fear of the Mohammedans. Mohammedans become united if they are afraid that Hindus are going to attack. India becomes united if the fear arises that Pakistan is getting ready for war. Russia goes on piling up more and more atom bombs, hydrogen bombs and whatnot, just out of the fear that America is getting ready for war. And America goes on piling up the same atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, in the fear that Russia is getting ready for war. This whole world seems to live out of fear and hatred.Love was destroyed. For centuries, for thousands of years, your love was paralyzed and poisoned, so whenever love arises in you, your whole conditioning goes against it. It creates trembling in you, it creates fear in you. If it is pseudo then there is no problem, you can manage. But if it is real, if it is authentic, then certainly you are going to be tremendously afraid of it, as if you are being thrown into a fire.Something very strange has happened to man. Love is man’s intrinsic nature. And without love nobody ever grows, without love nobody ever blooms, flowers. Without love nobody can ever feel fulfilled, contented. Without love there is no God. God is nothing but the ultimate experience of love. Hence because your love is pseudo – and you can manage only pseudo love because it creates no fear in you – your God is also pseudo. The Christian God, the Hindu God, the Jewish God, these are all false gods. God cannot be Hindu and cannot be Christian and cannot be Jewish. Can love be Hindu? Can love be Christian? Can love be Jewish? But there are many books on “Christian love.”It seems that the whole earth has become a madhouse. Soon you will find books on Christian roses, Hindu marigolds, Buddhist lotuses. If love can be Christian, then why not roses? Everything that is false is manageable. Marriage is manageable, love is not. If you want to remain in control without any fear, then go on playing with toys; then real things are not for you.But if you have come here, then all toys have to be broken. That’s my whole work: to destroy all toys, to make you aware that you have played with toys your whole life, that you are not yet mature, you are still childish. And remember, to be childish is ugly. To be childlike is a totally different phenomenon. To be childish means to be retarded; then one goes on playing with toys, paper boats and sand castles.If one is really mature, integrated, one is childlike, innocent, full of wonder and awe, sensitive to the beauty of existence, so sensitive that one’s whole life becomes an overflowing of love. You are surrounded by such a beautiful existence and if your heart does not dance with it, you can’t be said to be alive. You must be dead, you must be living a posthumous existence, you must be already in your grave. And I am trying to pull you out of your grave. I am calling to you, “Lazarus, come out of your grave!” And if you have lived for a long time in the grave – and graves are very comfortable places, in fact, there is nothing more comfortable than the grave. Nothing ever happens in a grave, no fear because there is no longer any death possible, no disease, no illness, no old age. You cannot be cheated, you cannot be deceived, you cannot be robbed, you cannot go bankrupt. You are safe, secure.Life is insecure. Life basically is dangerous. And I teach you how to be alive, how to live dangerously because that is the only way to live. There is no other way. If you want to live safely, comfortably, that simply means you are desiring death, you are suicidal, you are a coward, an escapist.Your feeling is true. You have come across something immensely significant. Now don’t turn back.You say, “When I feel close to you sometimes great fear arises.” Let it arise! That means the beginning of life. Accept it. Go through it. And it will not harm you; it will help you – it will make you stronger than ever. If you can go through the fear consciously, fear will disappear and you will come out of the fire of it purer, like pure gold.Love is the death of the ego, hence the fear. The ego is very much afraid of going into love. It can pretend to, but it cannot go into love. It can come only up to a certain extent; beyond that it becomes afraid. Then it starts shrinking back, turning back. Anybody who has ever been in love knows it.And with me, of course, it is going to be far deeper than it can be with an ordinary love. The love between a disciple and the master is the greatest love that existence has ever known. It is trust, it is trusting the unknowable. It is going with a madman into the uncharted sea, leaving the shore behind where all the security was. Getting into a love relationship with a master means in the worldly eyes going mad.Once, Jesus went in the early morning to a lake. A fisherman had just thrown his net, the sun was just on the horizon. A beautiful morning: the birds singing and the silent lake and the silence and the freshness… And Jesus put his hand on the shoulder of the fisherman. The fisherman looked back. For a moment no word was uttered by Jesus or by the fisherman. Jesus simply looked into his eyes: the man fell in love. Something had transpired.Jesus said, “How long are you going to waste your life in catching fish? Come along with me! I will show you the way to catch God.”The man must have been of immense courage. He threw his net in the lake. He didn’t even pull the net out. He followed Jesus without asking a single question, without asking, “Who are you and where are you leading me?”The psychologists will say that he was hypnotized. If it is hypnosis, then it is available only to the very fortunate ones. It is not hypnosis. In fact, he was not hypnotized because the word hypnosis comes from a root which means sleep. He was awakened – he was asleep before. His whole life he was just catching fish; that was sleep. Now this man has stirred a new longing in him, a new desire; a new star has risen in his heart. He would like to go with this man. And without any question he followed him.When they were just going outside the town, a man came running. He told the fisherman, “Where are you going? Have you gone mad? This man is mad! Come home! And, moreover, your father who was ill is dead so we have to make arrangements for his last rites and rituals.”For the first time the fisherman spoke to Jesus. He said, “Can I be allowed to go home just for three days to fulfill my duties as a son to my dead father?”Jesus said, “Don’t be worried. There are so many dead people in the town – they will take care of it. The dead will bury the dead. You come along with me. If you come with me then there is no going back. If you have chosen me then there is no going back. Come along with me!”And the man followed. The person who had come to inform him stood there amazed. “What is happening? Even with the death of his father this man is following a madman!”Jesus was known as being mad. Buddha was known as being mad. Mahavira was known as being mad. And in a way they look mad to people because their ways are so different, so diametrically opposite to the worldly people.I am a madman and you have come and fallen in love with me. There is no going back, fear or no fear. Gather courage! You have to come with me; the journey has already started. Even if you go back you will not find the old shore again. Even if you go back, those old toys will not be of any help anymore. You are finished with them, you will know they are toys. Now the real has to be found, has to be inquired into. And it is not very far away either – it is within you.Falling in love with a master means really falling in love with your ultimate nature, falling in love with your Tao. Hence your joke is beautiful.Two madmen went into a pub and while looking around for a place to sit they saw themselves in a big mirror on the opposite wall. One madman said to the other, “Hey, look at those two guys over there. They look so familiar to me. Let’s go over and say hello to them.”As they start moving, however, the other madman says, “Never mind, they are already coming to see us!”The closer you come to me the closer you will be to yourself. The day you are dissolved in me you will be dissolved in yourself. I will disappear immediately. I am just a device, just an excuse to dissolve. Suddenly you will find yourself, you will discover yourself.The function of the real master is to help you to discover yourself, to help you to be yourself. And unless you are yourself you are not free – and you cannot know what bliss is and you cannot know what truth is and you cannot know what God is.The last question:Osho,A master surrendering to the birds!Thanks for the lesson.The birds are far more intelligent than the so-called people. The birds are never stupid – they cannot be because they don’t have schools, colleges, universities. The birds are never mediocre – they cannot be because they are not part of any church, any religion, any sect, any belief, any dogma. They are free of all nonsense; they are very sensitive, they are not foolish. It is only man who falls from Tao.The whole of existence moves according to Tao, except man. And why does man fall? – for the simple reason that man is the only conscious being; it is his privilege to be conscious. Now, consciousness is a double-edged sword. If you use it rightly you will enjoy Tao far more deeply than any bird, than any tree, than any river, than any star. But if you are not conscious you will fall from Tao; you will be miserable – more miserable than any bird, than any tree, than any river, than any star.The birds are not miserable – they cannot be because they cannot go against Tao. They have no egos, they simply follow the Tao; it is a natural phenomenon. They cannot understand it, they cannot be conscious of it. Their bliss is unconscious.Man is conscious hence either he will be very miserable or he will be very consciously blissful. Either he will become an idiot or he will become a buddha. And you have to choose between the two, you cannot simply remain in between. You cannot say, “Why can’t I remain just like a bird or a flower or a river or a mountain?” You cannot. Either you will be an idiot or you will be a buddha. Either you have to fall below nature or you have to rise above nature. The birds are really in a beautiful space. You can also be in the same space – and in a far better way, in a far deeper way.Surrender to nature, that’s the lesson. Surrendering to nature means surrendering to Tao.You cannot believe that you can be buddhas; because you are living such idiotic lives, it seems impossible. Even Jesus’ parents could not believe, Buddha’s father and wife could not believe, Mahavira’s brother, wife, daughter could not believe that he has attained. You are living such an idiotic life, in your darkness how can you conceive that there is a possibility of attaining light?I have heard…In 1912, after his inauguration, Woodrow Wilson visited an old deaf grand-aunt.“What are you doing for a living now Woodrow?” she asked.“I’m President,” he bellowed into her ear-horn.“President of what?”“President of the United States!”“Woodrow, don’t be silly!”She cannot believe that this Woodrow can be the President of the United States. But this is not something special – anybody can be the President of the United States. But if Woodrow had said, “I have become Jesus Christ!” then she would have really laughed. She would not have even said, “You are silly,” she would have said, “You have gone mad! Just see a psychotherapist or get yourself admitted to a mad asylum. What nonsense you are talking!”Birds are intelligent people. And here in this buddhafield they become more and more full of the vibe that sometimes you miss; they go on drinking it. They are not aware, certainly, but they drink to the full.A family was moving from one house to another in a small city in the interior of Brazil. They were moving by bullock cart. All the furniture was piled high and tied with ropes. On the very top was the parrot in his cage.As the cart moved along the rough road it occasionally hit a hole in the road. Each time a hole was hit, the parrot’s cage fell off and someone would rush to pick it up. Then the cage was placed back on top of the huge pile of furniture.By the fifth fall, the parrot was very irritated. When he fell again the sixth time he exclaimed in frustration while frantically arranging his feathers, “Look, do something! Give me the fucking address and I’ll walk there!”Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The Venerable Master said:When man attains the power to transcend that which changes, abiding in purity and stillness, heaven and earth are united in him.The soul of man loves purity, but his mind is often rebellious. The mind of man love stillness, but his desires draw him into activity. When a man is constantly able to govern his desires, his mind becomes spontaneously still. When the mind is unclouded, the soul is seen to be pure. Then, with certainty the six desires will cease to be begotten and the three poisons will be eliminated and dissolved.The reason men do not possess the ability to achieve this is because their minds are not clear and their desires are unrestrained.He who has the power to transcend his desires, looking within and contemplating mind, realizes that in his mind, mind is not; looking without and contemplating form, he realizes that in form, form is not; looking at things still more remote and contemplating matter, he realizes that in matter, matter is not.Tao believes in spontaneity – not in cultivating virtues, not in creating a character, not even in conscience, but only in consciousness. Character, discipline, conscience are all ego efforts and ego is against Tao.Tao is a state of let-go: to be in tune with existence with such totality that there is no separation at all. You are not even the part, you are the whole. You are not the wave but the ocean itself. Hence there is no question of doing. Tao means being.All other so-called religions insist on doing. They believe in commandments: “Do this, don’t do that.” They have many shoulds and should nots. The Buddhist scriptures have thirty-three thousand rules for a monk. Even to remember them is impossible. People forget even what the Ten Commandments are – how can they remember thirty-three thousand rules? Their whole life will be wasted only in remembering them. When are they going to cultivate these rules? It will take millions of lives.Maybe because of this, the idea of many, many lives became so significant in the East because time is needed to cultivate so many rules. One life is not enough – even a thousand lives will not be enough – you need millions of lives to cultivate all this. In fact, the whole approach helps you to go on postponing. Tomorrow becomes bigger and bigger, almost infinite and today is so small that you can deceive yourself, you can say to yourself, “Let me remain whatsoever I am today. Tomorrow I will change. And today, anyway, is so small, nothing much is possible. I will start tomorrow.” Of course tomorrow never comes. It is there only in the imagination.Tao believes in this moment; Tao has no idea of future. If you can live this moment in purity, in silence, in spontaneity, then your life is transformed. Not that you transform it: Tao transforms it, the whole transforms it. You simply allow the river to take you to the ocean. You need not push the river.But when such great truths are put into language, difficulties arise because our language is made by us. It is not made by people like Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Ko Hsuan, it is made by the mediocre people that the world is full of. Obviously, language is their invention and it carries their meanings, their attitudes toward life. So whatsoever you say is going to be somewhere inadequate – not only inadequate but deep down wrong also.This has to be remembered and even more so about these sutras because these sutras were written originally in Chinese. Chinese is a language totally different from any other language, it is the most difficult language in the world for the simple reason that it has no alphabet, it is a pictorial language.Pictorial languages are the most ancient languages. They must have come from the very dawn of human consciousness because when man is a child he thinks in pictures, he cannot think in words, so his language is pictorial. That’s why in children’s books there are so many colored pictures; the text is not much but pictures are many. The child is not interested in the text, he is interested in the pictures.Looking at the picture of a mango, a very juicy colorful mango, he may become interested to know what it is called, how it is written and he may read the text – just a few words about the mango. Slowly, slowly the mango disappears, giving place to language. In the university books, pictures disappear completely. The more scholarly a book is, the less is the possibility of pictures; all is language. In your sleep you still dream not in a linguistic way but in a pictorial way because in your sleep you become a child again.Chinese is a dream language. And we know the difficulty with dreams – you have dreamed something, but in the morning you cannot figure out what it means. You will need an expert to interpret it and even experts don’t agree. The Freudian will say one thing, the Jungian will say something else, the Adlerian may say just the opposite. And now there are many more new trends, new schools of psychoanalysis and they all have their interpretations. And whomsoever you are reading will look valid, reasonable because they can all provide great rationalizations. The dream is yours, but you don’t know what it means because a dream can mean many things. A dream is multidimensional.And that’s the difficulty with the Chinese language: it is a dream language, a pictorial language – each picture can mean many things. Hence there are translations of Chinese scriptures, many translations, and no two translations ever agree because a picture can be interpreted in as many ways as there are people to interpret it. The Chinese language is only symbolic; it indicates. It is very poetic, it is not like arithmetic.If you remember this, only then will you not fall into the trap in which almost all the scholars have fallen.These sutras were not written in an alphabetical language so whatsoever is being said in these sutras is an interpretation. And I myself don’t agree in many places. If I were to translate it, it would be a totally different translation. I will tell you where I differ and why:The Venerable Master said:When man attains the power to transcend that which changes, abiding in purity and stillness, heaven and earth are united in him.The first thing that’s absolutely wrong is the idea of attainment. Tao does not believe that you have to attain anything or that you can attain anything. You are already that which you can be: nothing more can be attained. The very idea of attainment, of achievement is alien to the Taoist approach. There is nothing to attain, nothing to achieve. The idea of attainment and achievement is rooted in our egos. The ego is always ambitious; it can’t be otherwise. Either it has to attain worldly things or it has to attain otherworldly powers, siddhis, but something has to be attained. The ego lives by attaining.And Tao says the ego has to be dissolved, you cannot be allowed to be ambitious – to be ambitious is to go against Tao. Tao teaches non-ambitiousness. You have just to be yourself as you are. You are already perfect; you have never left your perfection for a single moment. You are already in Tao. It is just that you have started dreaming that you have lost it, that you have gone far away.It is just like as in your sleep: you remain in your room, in your bed, but you can dream of faraway places. You can visit the moon and Mars, you can go to the stars, but in the morning you will find you have not left your bed, not even for a single moment.When one becomes conscious, one becomes aware of the whole ridiculousness of all the achievements and failures. It is the idea of achievement that brings in its wake failure and frustration. If you succeed it brings ego. Ego is misery because the more ego you have, the more you think that you are separate from the whole – that you have become somebody special, unique, superior, higher, holier, that you don’t belong to the ordinary world, that you are a saint, a mahatma. If you fail, then there is frustration. That brings pain, that brings anguish. Whatsoever happens, success or failure, you will suffer. Ego brings suffering; whether it succeeds or fails makes no difference. Hence the idea of attainment is totally wrong. This is the Taoist approach – remember it.The translator says: When man attains the power… Again the word power is not right because Tao does not believe in power. It believes, really, in utter powerlessness because when you are powerful you are fighting against the whole. Adolf Hitler is powerful, Alexander the Great is powerful, Ivan the Terrible is powerful; Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, these are powerful people, but they are fighting against nature, spontaneity.Jesus is not powerful, Jesus is utterly powerless. When Jesus was crucified his disciples were waiting: “Now is the time he will show his power.” The enemies were waiting, the friends were waiting for the same thing: “Now he is going to show his miraculous power, now he will prove that he is the only begotten son of God.” He didn’t prove anything, he simply died. He died like any mortal – he died like the two thieves who were crucified with him. He was just in the middle; on either side of him there was a thief. The enemies were frustrated, the friends were frustrated even more. What happened? Where had his power gone? And he was always talking about being the son of God… But to be the son of God simply means to be utterly powerless.How we go on misunderstanding people like Jesus, Lao Tzu, Ko Hsuan! Our misunderstanding is almost infinite. Jesus surrendered to God. Yes, for a moment he himself had become aware of all the expectations. Almost one hundred thousand people had gathered to see and friends were very few. He must have seen the expectation in people’s eyes – they were expecting miracles. Great things were going to happen, something that only happens once in thousands of years. For a moment he may have been impressed, hypnotized by so much attention, by so much expectation. The whole atmosphere must have been charged with only one desire: to see his power.And he asked God, “Have you forsaken me?” But then immediately he understood – he was a man of intelligence, tremendous intelligence. Immediately he understood that whatsoever he has said is wrong. How can God forsake him? The very idea that God can forsake him is negative, is ugly. It is not trust.If God shows miracles, then it is very easy to trust. If he is proving your power then it is very easy to trust; anybody will be able to trust. No intelligence is needed to trust, no special understanding is needed to trust. Any fool would have trusted.But nothing was happening and the last moment had arrived. Jesus immediately understood the point – this is the time to understand. He surrendered. He said, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” Don’t listen to me, simply go on doing whatsoever you want to do. Who am I to suggest? I am no more, I am in your hands.This was real powerlessness. This is Tao. Ko Hsuan would have understood it; the Jews could not understand it. And the whole gathering was of Jews, friends or enemies. They had always believed in achievement, in power, in ambition – all their prophets had been doing miracles. If they were angry with Jesus, the reason was that he was not proving the point; he was not proving himself to be really a prophet – the ancient prophets had done so many miracles.And my feeling is that he never did any miracles. If he had done any miracles, all the Jews would have converted. They would not have crucified him. It is enough proof that he never did any miracles. And all the miracles that are propounded by the Christians are invented. These Christians are also of the same mind, the same desire, the same ambition: “How can our Lord be without miracles? If ordinary prophets were doing so many things, how can our Lord be without miracles?” So they have invented even better miracles, greater miracles than those of all the prophets.But my feeling is that Jesus was a man of Tao. He was really a man who can be called religious.I have heard a beautiful story. It is not recorded anywhere. It must have gone from one master to another, just by word of mouth:Moses, Abraham, Ezekiel, three ancient prophets, were sitting under a tree in heaven talking about great things, talking about the Old Testament. Then suddenly Abraham said, “We know everything about the Old Testament. Had Jesus been here he would have told us something about the New Testament.”Moses laughed and he called a boy who was sitting just by the side of the tree and said, “Jesus, please go and bring three cups of coffee for us.”Abraham was shocked. This is Jesus? And Jesus went to bring three cups of coffee for the old prophets.But I love this story. Only Jesus can do that – so utterly powerless. His powerlessness is his miracle: he has annihilated himself totally. They were not even aware of his presence, that he is sitting by the side of the tree. He didn’t say a single word like: “I am Jesus Christ, the only begotten son of God. And what are you saying? I should go and bring three cups of coffee for you? Go yourself! Is this the way to talk to the son of God?” But he simply went.Only Jesus can do it, or Lao Tzu or Ko Hsuan or Bodhidharma or Basho. These are people who have dropped the whole power trip, the whole number.Ko Hsuan cannot mean what the translation will create in your mind. It says: When man attains the power to transcend that which changes…No. If I were to translate it… I don’t know Chinese at all, but who cares? I can still translate, not knowing a single word of Chinese because I know the spirit of Tao; that’s my experience. If I were to translate it, I would say: When man surrenders to the power of Tao, he transcends that which changes…When man becomes utterly powerless as a separate entity, then he transcends that which changes. Then he abides in purity and stillness. Then the purity that comes to him is not something cultivated from the outside.It is not something that you have to maintain continuously, that you have to be on guard otherwise you will lose it. Your saints are continuously on guard. They know perfectly well that if they are relaxed for even a single moment they will lose all their purity. They don’t abide in it. It is not natural to them, it is something artificial: arbitrary; they have imposed it on themselves.You don’t need to breathe, you need not remember to breathe; otherwise you would have been dead long before now because any time you forget about breathing – a beautiful woman passes by and you forget about breathing and you are finished! There is the full point. Then you cannot breathe again. But breathing continues even while you are asleep – not only while you are deeply asleep, even if you are in a coma breathing continues; it does not depend on you.Once I went to see a woman… Her husband loved me very much. He came crying and weeping and he said, “This was my wife’s last wish, that she wanted to see you. But for nine months she was in a coma and the doctors say there is no possibility that she will ever become conscious. But please come with me just to fulfill her last desire. That was her last desire before she became unconscious.”So I went to see the woman. For nine months she had been in a coma, but she was breathing perfectly. To be in a coma means to be almost dead. And she died after three months; after remaining one year in a coma she died. But for one year she continued to breathe. Her breathing was perfect, there was no disturbance in it.Tao takes care of your breathing; it is natural. Your blood circulates continuously, day in, day out, year in, year out. For centuries man used to think that there was no circulation of the blood in the body. Blood simply filled the body as water filled a pot. It is only three hundred years ago that it was discovered that blood does not just fill the body; it continuously circulates, it goes on circulating at a very great speed. That keeps your inner world alive, dynamic. Who is circulating your blood? – certainly not you, otherwise you will forget it. Who digests your food? – certainly not you. In fact, if you become very conscious of digestion you will disturb your stomach.Try a simple experiment for twenty-four hours: when you are eating just become conscious that the food is going into the stomach and now you have to digest it. Troubles will start: you will feel heavy and you will not know what to do, how to digest it. Just remain conscious that the food is in the stomach and it has to be digested and then you will be almost incapable of doing anything. Do a few yoga exercises, stand on your head, jog, jump, and within twenty-four hours you will have a bad stomach. You will have disturbed the whole process. It does not need you at all. Once the food has gone below your throat you need not bother about it. Tao takes care of it.All that is essential is natural, and to live your whole life in a natural way is the only teaching of Tao. It teaches you powerlessness, but there is great power in powerlessness – the power of existence, the power of the whole, not your power, not my power, not anybody’s power.Then there arises a purity in you. You are not the author of it, you are not the architect of it; you are simply a witness, a watcher. And there arises a tremendous stillness, not something forced from the outside. That’s what your so-called religious people are doing all over the world: they are forcing purity. And whenever you force purity on yourself, whenever it becomes a cultivated phenomenon, it is repression and nothing else. And repression only creates ugliness; it creates a split in you, it makes you schizophrenic.A priest invites another priest to lunch at his house. At the end of the meal, the guest, who is slightly drunk, notices how pretty the maid is.He turns to his colleague and says, “You are an old friend, you can tell me – do you sleep with the girl?”The host is very angry. “How dare you speak like this in my house?” he cries. “Please leave immediately!”After his friend has gone, the priest notices that a beautiful silver spoon has disappeared, so the following morning he sends his friend a note saying, “My dear holy friend, I am not saying that you are a thief, but if you find my silver spoon, please send it back!”The answer comes quickly:“My dear holy friend, I am not saying that you are a liar, but if you had slept in your own bed last night, you would have found your silver spoon!”All cultivated purity creates hypocrisy, it creates a duality in you. It is bound to create it because you have not understood, you have simply denied something. It has not disappeared; it is there waiting to take revenge. And it will find its own way – it will come from the back door. If you don’t allow it to come from the front door it will come from the back door.Tao does not believe in any cultivated character. It believes in a natural purity, in a natural stillness. You must have watched how if you try to become silent then each and every thing becomes a disturbance, a distraction.Just a dog barking, who is not at all aware that you are trying to meditate, who has nothing against meditation, who is not an old enemy, who is not taking any revenge on you for some past karma… He is enjoying his barking; that is his meditation. Maybe he is doing Dynamic Meditation! He seems to be more modern and up to date than you – you are doing Vipassana and he is doing Dynamic! But you will be disturbed. He is not disturbed by your Vipassana and you are disturbed by his Dynamic Meditation for the simple reason that you are forcing something; it is not natural. It is just a very thin layer of stillness that somehow you have painted upon yourself.Deep down, a thousand and one dogs are barking and they immediately understand the dog barking and they start feeling a great urge to bark. The distraction comes from your inner dogs, it is not coming from the outer dog. The outer dog is not responsible at all. If your silence is natural, the dog’s barking will not be a distraction; it may even enhance your stillness, it may become a background to your stillness. That’s how it happens.When in the night you see the stars, beautiful stars, have you ever thought what happens to these stars in the day? They don’t go away – where can they go? They are there, but because the background is no longer there, the darkness is no longer there, you cannot see them. In the night the darkness functions as a background: the darker the night, the more shining are the stars. They are not shining so much on a full-moon night, but when there is no moon at all the stars are really beautiful.The same is true about a real silence: everything that ordinarily proves a distraction becomes a background. The dog barking, the traffic noise, somebody shouting, children crying, running, the wife cooking food in the kitchen – everything becomes a background and everything deepens your silence because you are not concentrating, you are not forcing anything. You are simply relaxed. Things go on happening, you remain untouched; you remain absolutely centered and effortlessly centered.This thing has to be remembered: Tao teaches you effortless naturalness. It does not believe in effort as Yoga does. Yoga and Tao are totally opposite to each other. That’s why Yoga could not penetrate China. Buddha impressed China for the simple reason that he also says that you should be natural, that your meditation should be effortless, that it should not be imposed from the outside, that it should arise from your innermost core. It should not be a plastic flower, it should be a real rose: When man attains the power to transcend that which changes, abiding, in purity and stillness, heaven and earth are united in him.That’s what I call the meeting of the East and the West, the meeting of materialism and spiritualism. That’s my idea of Zorba the Buddha: …heaven and earth are united in him.Tao is not otherworldly like Jainism; it is not this-worldly either like Charvakas. It believes in the unity of existence. It does not divide existence in any way. Its whole vision is that of total unity, organic unity.Heaven and earth are one; in you they are already meeting. Your body is part of the earth, your soul is part of heaven. The meeting is already happening – you are not aware of it. If you relax you will become aware of it and the meeting is tremendously beautiful. Earth alone is dead. That’s why a materialist philosophy of life sooner or later comes to realize that life is meaningless.That’s what has happened in the West. All great thinkers of this century in the West are obsessed only with one problem: the meaning of life. And they all agree on one point at least: that life is meaningless.Dostoyevsky’s famous novel The Brothers Karamazov is one of the most important novels ever written. If I am asked to name the ten best novels in the world, then this will be one of those ten – not only one of them, but the first of those ten. It is one of the greatest creations.In The Brothers Karamazov one of the characters says to God, “Where are you? I want to meet you – not that I am interested in seeing you, not that I want to know about you; I simply want to give you back the ticket that you gave me to enter this world. Please take it back! This whole world is absolutely meaningless.”Marcel says in one of his writings that suicide seems to be the most important metaphysical problem. If life is meaningless then of course suicide seems to be the most important metaphysical problem. Why go on living? In the past people used to think that it is only cowards who commit suicide; now the pendulum seems to have moved to the other extreme. The materialists are feeling so meaningless that the idea is arising slowly and gathering force that it is only cowards who go on living. It is the brave people who try to commit suicide. Why go on living if there is no meaning?But this has happened because only earth was accepted, not the sky, not heaven. Earth is meaningless, barren; without the sky there is no soul – you are just a body, a corpse. And what meaning can a corpse have? When the soul leaves the body, meaning has left the body. And if you don’t believe in the soul then you are bound to feel sooner or later that life has no meaning.The West is feeling this great meaninglessness and the East believed only in heaven, only in the soul, but that is an abstraction. The body is concrete, the soul is only an abstraction; it is intangible. And when you start running after intangibles, after invisibles, you lose track of all that is concrete. That’s why the East is poor, starving, ill, burdened with thousands of problems – and seems to have no way of solving them for the simple reason that for centuries we have never bothered about the earth. Our eyes were fixed on the sky.An ancient Greek parable says:A very famous astrologer was looking at the sky in the night, watching the stars, studying the stars. He lost his way, naturally because he was not looking at the earth where he was walking and he fell into a well. Then he became aware, but then it was too late. He started shouting, “Save me!”He was outside the village, but an old woman who lived nearby somehow managed to save him. When he got out of the well he told the woman, “You may not know me, you may not recognize me in this dark night, but I will tell you who I am: I am the king’s special astrologer! It is very difficult for people even to approach me, but you can come to me. I will tell you about your future.”The old woman laughed. She said, “You fool! You don’t know even where the well is and where the road is, and you will tell me about my future!”That’s what has happened in the East: the East has fallen into the well, lost track of the concrete, become too metaphysical.Tao seems to be the only life vision which is total. It does not deny the earth, it does not deny the sky. It accepts both, it accepts the unity of both. It says that the man who has come to know spontaneous purity and stillness, who has become relaxed with the whole, with the law of the ultimate – in him heaven and earth are united.That’s my concept of a sannyasin too – in you I would like this meeting to happen. You will be misunderstood all over the world: in the East people will think you are materialist, in the West people will think you have become metaphysical. That means you have gone crazy, berserk, that you are talking mumbo-jumbo. They will say, “Stop all this nonsense! Be realistic, be pragmatic.” You will be misunderstood everywhere because the East has believed only in half and the West has believed in half.I believe in the whole. To me, to trust the whole is the only way to be holy and to trust the whole is the only way to be whole. And when you are whole, life is bliss, life is benediction, life is a celebration.The soul of man loves purity…but his desires draw him into activity.Man has three layers and those three layers have to be understood. The first, the deepest core, is the soul; the soul means your center of being. And the outermost circumference consists of desires. And between the two is another concentric circle, half way from both, from the outer and from the inner. It is neither outer nor inner – that is your mind.The soul of man loves purity… By “purity” Ko Hsuan always means innocence. So don’t misunderstand it with any moralistic meaning of purity because Tao does not believe in any morality or any immorality: only innocence.That’s why the child is innocent because when he is born he is just the intrinsic center; the two circles have not yet gathered around the center. That’s why every child looks so beautiful. Have you ever come across an ugly child? It is impossible. And what happens to all the beautiful children? – because if all children are beautiful, all people should be beautiful because these same children become grown-up people. But somewhere on the way they all disappear and something ugly sets in. We give them wrong circumferences; we give them wrong minds, wrong desires. We create such a dichotomy in their being that they become a crowd, not a unity. They are no longer integrated beings. They become fragments. And to be fragmentary is to be ugly because you lose all harmony and without harmony there is no beauty, no grace.The soul of man loves purity… If you reach your innermost core you will suddenly find innocence arising in you, roses of innocence flowering.…but his mind is often rebellious.But the mind is not willing just to be innocent. Innocence says yes, it is trust. The mind says no, it is doubt. The mind always lives through the no, it is negative; the soul is always positive. The soul has no idea of saying no, it knows nothing about the no. And the mind knows nothing about the yes. If the mind sometimes has to say yes, it only says it unwillingly. You can watch it in yourself: whenever your mind says yes it says it unwillingly because it cannot find any way of saying no, that’s why it says yes. Yes is not spontaneous for the mind, no is spontaneous.Watch the truth of this statement. These are not theories, hypotheses, these are simple facts. You can just watch it in yourself. The first thing that happens to your mind is no. It immediately says no – even if there is no reason to say no.Just the other day I received a letter from a sannyasin: “Osho, when you talked about Prem Chinmaya’s coming back, his dying from the sixth center and that he will have to live only one more life, I cannot believe you or trust you.”You may not know anything about reincarnation; you can simply say, “I don’t know about it, so how can I believe or disbelieve?” You can remain open.But you will not miss any opportunity of saying no. Now this sannyasin must be waiting for something to say no to. Do you know what it means to die from the sixth center? Have you any idea of the inner physiology of man?Ask Puja and Sheela what happened when Chinmaya died. They were surprised – they could not believe what was happening: his whole body became cool, his head became very hot. He complained also that “Something strange is happening, as if my whole energy has come into the head. My body is cool and calm, but my head is feeling almost as if it is on fire.”Whenever the soul leaves the body, the center that becomes its leaving center becomes hot – naturally because the whole energy concentrates there. The energy that is spread all over the body gathers together at one point and that point certainly becomes absolute fire.You don’t know anything about the inner physiology. If you don’t know, I am not telling you to believe in it – I am the last person to tell you to believe in anything – but there is no need to say no either. You can simply remain open, you can say, “I will see what happens when I die.”And then he says, “I don’t believe you, I don’t trust you. Does it matter?” To me it does not matter, not at all because I don’t depend on your belief, but it matters immensely for you. I am not saying force yourself to say yes to me because a forced yes will be only a disguised no. I am simply saying be here and be open. There is no need to say yes or no, you can simply say, “I don’t know.” Function out of a state of not-knowing so that you remain available to experiment, to experience. If you say no you have become closed and you can say yes only when you have experienced.So I am not asking you to believe in it, but I will certainly request you not to disbelieve. There is no need for belief and no need for disbelief. But this sannyasin’s mind must have been waiting for some opportunity.It is very rare here because I don’t talk about things which you will find difficult to believe – I rarely talk about things which are beyond you. I leave them; I prepare you so that you can experience them one day. But once in a while something happens. For example, Prem Chinmaya’s death was such an occasion that I had to say something about death, something about which center he died from. I had to say this, that he will be back here soon. And these things are not beyond your comprehension if you are going deep into meditation, but if you are not going into deep meditation they are beyond comprehension.The mind wants to say no and if you listen to the mind you stop listening to the master. If you want to listen to the master, first you have to be open so that one day yes can surface in you spontaneously. It matters much as far as you are concerned.Being here and saying no in some way simply means you will be physically here and spiritually absent. It will be a sheer waste of your time. Then there is no need to be here.The whole effort of this buddhafield, the whole purpose of it, is to help you to go beyond mind, to go beyond no.Ko Hsuan’s sutra says:The soul of man loves purity, but his mind is often rebellious. The mind of man loves stillness, but his desires draw him into activity.The soul loves purity, innocence; that’s its natural joy. The mind is not interested in purity, in innocence because innocence needs yes as a foundation and the mind lives through no. But because the mind continuously says no it has to suffer much turmoil, hence there is a great need in the mind to be still, to be silent, to be calm and quiet: The mind loves stillness…But then there is another outer circle in your being – the circle of desires which don’t even allow you silence. They drag you into activity. The mind drags you into no’s, into negativity; that disturbs your purity. Yes is your innocence, no means you have lost your innocence. Then there are desires which don’t leave you at the mind, they want some activity; just no won’t do. They drag you into a thousand and one activities – the Chinese expression is into “ten thousand things.” They keep you constantly occupied – money, power, prestige; they go on goading you, “Do this. Achieve this. Without achieving this you are not a real man. Prove that you are powerful, prove that you are great, prove that you are special.” And to prove it you have to move almost into a state of insanity. That’s what politics is.Politics is the other pole, exactly the opposite pole to religion. Religion takes you to the essence of your being and politics takes you to the accidents of your desires. The desires keep you so occupied with the mundane, with the futile, that you start forgetting everything that is intrinsic, that is really valuable. Running after money, you forget all about the inner treasure. Running after power, you forget all about the power of Tao, which is the supreme power. Running after name and fame, you forget completely that name and fame are just momentary. But they go on goading you; they won’t leave you for a single moment. In the night you will dream about desires, in the day you will run after desires. And all desires are mirages, like the horizon that looks so close that you will be able to reach it within an hour. But you never reach it because it does not really exist.But you go on forgetting everything: you forget the soul, heaven; you even forget the body, the earth. You become almost mad. All your politicians are mad. All your people who are running after money are mad, who are running after fame are mad. But because they are in the majority, they appear to be absolutely right. In fact, the person who is not interested in name and fame, power and prestige, seems to be a little out of his senses. What has happened to this man?You will be asked again and again, “What has happened to you? Why are you not interested in accumulating more money? What do you do just by sitting silently looking inward?” You will be condemned by the world because the world consists of extroverts. They will call you introverts, they will tell you that introversion is a kind of perversion, they will tell you that you are selfish, that you are narcissistic, that you are only interested in your own joy, that you should be concerned with others, that you should live like everybody else, that you should be part of the crowd. Of course, they are many and you will be very alone.Jesus has said to his disciples, “I am sending you amongst wolves.” And I know what he means. When I send you into the world I also know I am sending you amongst wolves. You are trying to be silent, innocent, childlike, and the world is trying to achieve just the opposite ends.When a man is constantly able to govern his desires, his mind becomes spontaneously still.Again wrong words have been used: When a man is constantly able to govern his desires…No, Ko Hsuan cannot say …to govern his desires… because that means repression, that means control. He can only say: When a man is able to understand his desires, his mind becomes spontaneously still.Only understanding is needed; nothing else ever helps. If you understand a desire it disappears. Desires are like darkness: you bring light and darkness disappears. You need not throw it out, you need not repress it, you need not close doors to keep it out – you cannot do anything directly with darkness, you just have to bring light in. A small candle will do and all darkness disappears. Just a little light of understanding and desires start disappearing. Then arises spontaneous stillness.Remember this word spontaneous. That is the key word as far as Tao is concerned.When the mind is unclouded, the soul is seen to be pure.And when there are no desires, thoughts automatically disappear because thoughts are servants of desires. When there are desires, your mind is full of thoughts, full of plans – what to do, how to do, how to fulfill these desires. When desires disappear you have cut the tree from the very root. Then leaves start disappearing, branches disappear, the tree itself disappears of its own accord and the mind is unclouded. In that unclouded state of mind, in that thoughtless state of mind you will be able to see the purity of your inner being.Then, with certainty the six desires will cease to be begotten and the three poisons will be eliminated and dissolved.This is something very significant to remember.All the religions have talked only about five senses. It is only Tao that talks about six senses. All the religions have talked about five desires because man consists of five senses; Tao talks about six desires. The insight is tremendous because just recently, just in this century, science has discovered the sixth sense – otherwise the sixth sense was not known. Your ear has two senses. Your ear is not a single sense – hidden inside it is another sense: the sense that keeps your body balanced.That’s why when you see a drunkard walking you can see that he cannot walk straight; zigzag he goes. His steps are not in harmony for the simple reason that alcohol affects the sixth sense, that which keeps your body balanced. It is a Taoist insight for the last five thousand years that there are six senses. Through the eye the desire for beauty arises, through the ear the desire for music arises, from the nose the desire for nice smells arises, from the tongue the desire for taste and from the whole skin the desire to touch – these are the five traditional senses – and from the sixth sense the desire to remain in control, balanced. If somebody hits your ear hard you will lose balance; you will see stars in the day.For a buddha, these six desires no longer arise. Not that the eyes go blind. In fact, now they can see beauty more truly, but there is no desire to possess beauty. Not that you become deaf to music, but now there is no desire to possess anything. You enjoy more because your energy is free and your senses are more clear, more transparent.Nobody can see beauty more clearly than a Buddha, nobody can hear music more deeply than a Lao Tzu, nobody can taste better than Jesus. All their senses become truly sensitive, they are then really senses. Your senses are dull. Your society helps you to keep them dull because the society is afraid. If your senses are really very keen and very sensitive then you can be a dangerous person because of your desire to possess. You see a beautiful woman: she is somebody else’s wife and if your eyes are really able to see the beauty and you have the desire to possess also, you will grab the woman, you will escape with the woman, you will rape the woman. Something criminal is bound to happen.Nature allows you total sensitivity only when you become capable of dropping all possessiveness, all ideas to possess. Then you can touch and then even rocks feel velvety. Then everything starts having a divine quality, everything is transformed.…and the three poisons will be eliminated and dissolved. What are the three poisons? The first is sexuality – not sex, remember, but sexuality. Sex is natural. Tao is not against sex, it is the only religious approach which is in total agreement with sex. Tao has its own science of sex, it has its own Tantra, which really goes far deeper than Indian Tantra. But sexuality is a totally different phenomenon; sexuality means a perverted state of sex energy. Then it becomes poisonous.The second poison is anger and the third poison is greed. Sexuality, anger, greed: these three poisons combined together, this unholy trinity, creates your ego. And all these three can be dissolved, eliminated. If sexuality disappears you will be surprised that anger disappears – without any effort on your part. Anger simply means that your sexuality is hindered. Anybody who hinders your sexuality creates anger in you; he is your enemy. And sexuality creates greed – greed is a form of sexuality, it is a perverted form. Money becomes your object of love because the society does not allow any other kind of love. It allows money, power. They can become your objects of love. It helps to change your object of love. First it changes your sex into sexuality…See the difference. Sex is a natural phenomenon; it is your capacity to reproduce. Sexuality means your mind is continuously occupied by sex. It is no longer a natural phenomenon, it has become cerebral. It is no longer confined to the sex center, it has gone to the head. Now you are constantly thinking of sex.Just watch for one hour how many times you think of sex – you will be surprised. Psychologists say that you are in for a great surprise if you watch your mind to see how many times in an hour you think about sex. Men think about it twice as much as women do; that may be one of the causes of conflict between them. They have a different kind of sexuality. Man’s sexuality is more repressed than woman’s for the simple reason that man has to earn money, has to become famous, has to be a prime minister or a politician. Naturally, from where is he going to get all this energy to be the president? There is only one energy; you don’t have many energies in you, mind you, you have only one kind of energy. Whatsoever name you want to give to it you can give, XYZ, but you have only one kind of energy. Sigmund Freud has called it libido, but it simply means sex – that is your only energy. Now if you want to have more money or more power, you want to be the president or the prime minister of the country, then you have to take your sexuality and channel it.I have heard…One day Carter and Brezhnev met for a long meeting. The two wives waited outside the meeting room for so many hours, they eventually struck up a conversation. Soon they were finding they liked each other and were sharing intimacies.Rosalyn Carter confessed, “You won’t believe this, my dear Brezhnova, but Jimmy just isn’t the same man that I married. For such a long time now he hasn’t even looked at me. He comes home so tired he immediately goes to bed and falls asleep.”“With me it is the same,” said Brezhnova. “I just don’t know what to do.”“The other night,” explained Rosalyn Carter, “I finally decided to tempt Jimmy. I put on my transparent black negligee and some expensive perfume, turned down the lights, put some sexy French music on the stereo and piled pillows on the bed. And then I waited for him in the bedroom.”“He came into the bedroom already talking about all the problems in the Middle East, the dollar going down, etcetera, etcetera and I threw him down on the pile of pillows, took off his shirt, opened up my negligee to show him my bare breasts and asked him, ‘Jimmy, does this remind you of anything?’”“He looked at my tits, put his hand to his forehead and said, ‘Of course. I must call Moshe Dayan!’”“That’s nothing,” said Brezhnova. “With me it was worse. I did everything you did, except I didn’t bother with the negligee. As soon as he lay down on the bed I jumped on him and put my cunt right in front of his face and said, ‘Look at this, Brezy. Does it remind you of something?’ And he replied, ‘Oh yes! I forgot to call Fidel Castro!’”It is bound to happen. You have to divert your sexual energy; then money, power, prestige, they become your sexual objects. And these people can talk about morality and discipline easily. They can teach others how to control their sexuality very easily, but in fact what they are doing is nothing but sex perversion. And these people become very violent. They are violent – they keep the whole world always on the brink of war.When sex becomes perverted, love becomes hatred. Nothing is wrong with sex, but everything is wrong with sexuality. Sex should be allowed a natural flow. Yes, one day, if you live it naturally, transcendence happens. But it is spontaneous, it is not celibacy. It comes through celebration.Just as at the age of fourteen you become mature sexually, at the age of forty-two, if you have lived your sex naturally, you will go beyond it. But it is a strange world. Children become sexual, children who are not sexually mature because the whole atmosphere is poisoned. Small children start thinking of sex. Seeing films, reading novels, looking at obscene magazines, they start thinking about sex.Italian Piero comes to a village. He asks a farmer, “Do ya know where little children come-a from?”“They grow out of cabbages!” the farmer answers.Piero walks a little further and meets the milkman. “Hey!” says Piero. “Do ya know where little children come-a from!”“Sure,” answers the milkman, “the stork brings them.”Piero continues on his way a little despondent, then… “Ah!” he thinks, “here comes-a the right-a man to ask-a! Vicar! Do ya know where little children come-a from?”“Yes, my son,” responds the Vicar. “God sends them from heaven.”“Shit-a!” exclaims Piero. “Isn’t there anyone in this-a village who fucks-a?”Children become sexual before the normal age and you can also find eighty year-old men running after women. Both are ugly and in an unnatural state.Tao believes in total naturalness. It is not against sex, it is against sexuality because it knows that if sexuality does not enter your life – that means if perversion does not enter your life – if nobody teaches you to be against sex there will be no perversion. It is because of your saints and moralists and puritans that you all have become perverted – children and old men, all. If sex is left alone without interference from any moral teaching, then one day the child will become sexually mature nearabout fourteen and one day nearabout forty-two he will transcend it. He will have seen by that time that it is child’s play and enough is enough. And that transcendence is beautiful. Anything that happens on its own is beautiful because it comes through Tao. And then anger will not be there in your life, neither will greed.The reason men do not possess the ability to achieve this is because their minds are not clear and their desires are unrestrained.Meditation brings both clarity and a certain inner discipline. And by “meditation” Tao simply means watching your mind and its functions.He who has the power to transcend his desires, looking within and contemplating mind…That is the definition of meditation according to Ko Hsuan: …looking within and contemplating mind… Just silently watching all the processes of the mind – thoughts, memories, imagination, dreams, desires – then a realization happens, a realization that:…in his mind, mind is not…This sutra is immensely significant. When you watch the mind clearly, silently, the mind starts disappearing. More watchfulness, less mind. One percent watchfulness, ninety-nine percent mind. Ninety-nine percent watchfulness, one percent mind. One hundred percent watchfulness and there is no mind in the mind. All thoughts have gone, the mind is absolutely empty. And in that emptiness Tao comes in, rushes in. You have created the right space for it.…looking without and contemplating form…Then you are capable of looking without. First look within, let the mind disappear, attain clarity, then look without: …looking without and contemplating form… Then meditate on the forms outside: the trees, the clouds, the stars, the moon……he realizes that in form, form is not…Then you will be surprised to see that the waves are not there, only the ocean. In the form there is no form. The trees are not there but only life expressing itself in millions of forms – but not confined to any form; it is formless.…looking at things still more remote and contemplating matter, he realizes that in matter, matter is not.That too is of great significance. It is only now that modern physicists have said that matter does not exist, but Tao was saying for five thousand years that: …in matter, matter is not.If you can meditate, start from within, then look around, and then look into things at their deepest core. First the mind disappears, then form disappears, then matter disappears. Then what is left? That which is left is Tao, is nature. And to live in that nature is to live in freedom, is to live in eternal bliss.Tao is the word of Ko Hsuan for God. Dhamma is the word of Buddha for Tao. Buddha says, “Aes dhammo sanantano – this is the eternal law.” Once you have seen the eternal law you become part of eternity. Time is transcended, space is transcended. You are no more and for the first time you are. You are no more as a separate entity, but for the first time you are the whole.This is my vision too. My agreement with Tao is absolute. I cannot say that about other religions; with Tao I can say it without any hesitation. Tao is the most profound insight that has ever been achieved on the earth.Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 1 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Why can't I say yes to myself? I have the feeling that all my misery is rooted in this incapacity.Anand Renata, it is one of the greatest problems. Every human being has to face it because the whole society up until now has been based on self-condemnation. All the religions, all the societies, all the cultures create a tremendous guilt in you that you are not what you should be. They give you perfectionist ideals to fulfill which are impossible. They simply drive you crazy.Perfectionism is the root cause of all neurosis. Nobody can be perfect – nobody need be perfect. Life is beautiful because everything is imperfect. Perfection is death; imperfection is life. It is because of imperfection that growth is possible. If you are perfect then there is no growth, no movement. Then nothing can happen to you; all has already happened. You will be utterly dead.Hence I say God is the most imperfect phenomenon because God is the most evolving factor in existence, and evolution and perfection are against each other. It is because of this that all the religions have been against the idea of evolution. Christianity condemned Darwin and his philosophy as much as possible. The reason was this: Christianity believed in a perfect God and a perfect God can create only a perfect world. How can imperfection come out of a perfect creator? Then there is no possibility of evolution. If the possibility of evolution is accepted, then the world, the creation, is imperfect and ultimately it will lead to the logical conclusion that the creator is imperfect.No religion has dared to declare that God is imperfect, but I declare that God is imperfect because imperfection means evolution, imperfection means life, imperfection means flow, growth. And God is infinitely imperfect; he will never become perfect. The moment he becomes perfect the whole of existence will disappear into nonexistence.But because of this idea of a perfect God, we have all been trying for centuries to be perfect and there are two outcomes of it. One is: if you are simple, innocent, you will start trying to be perfect and you will go neurotic. And you can never become perfect, hence you will carry a mountainous burden of guilt. It will crush you, it will destroy all your joy in life, it will poison you. It won’t allow you to celebrate, to sing, to dance. It is suicidal. Or if you are not innocent and simple, if you are cunning and clever, then you will become a hypocrite. You will talk about perfection. That will be just a facade, a mask and hidden behind the mask you will go on being whatsoever you are.Both are ugly phenomena. Going crazy, becoming, neurotic, guilt-ridden is ugly; becoming a hypocrite is ugly. But your so-called religions leave you no other alternative. They all talk about saying yes, but they all teach you saying no. They all think they are theistic – they are all atheistic because to me atheism means a deep-rooted no and theism means a fundamental yes to life. Theism has nothing to do with God, nor has atheism anything to do with the denial of God. Theism is saying yes to life with all its imperfections, as it is, saying yes to it with no conditions, with no strings attached. And atheism to me means saying no to life as it is and trying to make it better, trying to make it perfect.You say, “Why can’t I say yes to myself?” Because you have been told you are all wrong, you are nothing but a sinner. Everything that you do is wrong, everything that you think is wrong, everything that you are is wrong – how can you say yes to yourself? You have been given ideas, great ideals, shoulds: “You should be like this, like that…” And you go on comparing yourself with those stupid ideals. Of course, you fall very short and when you fall very short you start feeling a deep no to yourself. You want to destroy yourself, you cannot love yourself.You have been told to love others, but you have never been told to love yourself. And you can love others only if you have loved yourself in the first place: if you don’t love yourself, you cannot love anybody else in the world. Loving yourself, you learn the art of love. And if you can love yourself with all your imperfections, you will be able to love other human beings with all their imperfections. If you cannot love yourself with your imperfections, how are you going to love others with their imperfections? You will hate them!Parents hate their children, children hate their parents, wives hate their husbands, husbands hate their wives, for the simple reason that they can see the imperfections. Everybody is in search of a perfect person and you will not find a perfect person anywhere, except some fools who go on claiming that they are infallible. Pope John Paul the Polack, he is infallible! Popes are infallible. They represent God – how can they be fallible? In India, Satya Sai Baba claims to be infallible. Now, to me these are utter idiots! They have no sense of any manners, of even any etiquette; they don’t have any intelligence. Otherwise they could see – it is so simple. But it is a traditional thing.Jainas in India have claimed that Mahavira is all-knowing. Buddha laughed at the whole idea. He was an intelligent man, a really penetrating intelligence, but he never claimed that he was infallible. No intelligent person can do that. He laughed at the whole idea that Mahavira was infallible. We don’t know what Mahavira’s own statement about it was because according to the Jaina tradition he remained silent, he never said a single word. There were interpreters of his silence who were telling people what he meant. I cannot conceive that he would have ever meant that he was infallible. A man of such intelligence as Mahavira could not do that.Buddha says, “I have heard: Mahavira going for a morning walk steps on a dog’s tail and only when the dog barks does he come to know that there is a dog – because it is still dark in the morning. And this is the all-knowing man who knows past, present, future, and he does not know that he is stepping on the tail of a dog!”Buddha has said, “I know that Mahavira has many times stood begging in front of a house where nobody lives. The house was empty for years. Only when people say to him that ‘This house is empty, nobody lives here,’ will he then move to another house to beg.”And the followers claim that Mahavira knows past, present and future, that he knows everything, that he is omniscient, that he is omnipotent, that he is all-powerful. But he suffered throughout his life from stomach diseases, he died of stomach diseases – it may have been something like a stomach cancer, the word cancer was not known in those days. And he is thought to be omnipotent and he is thought to be omnipresent: all the qualities of God. But these are the claims of the followers. That I can understand: followers are stupid people, otherwise why should they follow?I don’t have any followers here. You are all my friends. I don’t want any followers because I don’t want to live surrounded by fools!But Satya Sai Baba declares that he is infallible, that he knows all, that he has never committed a mistake, that he cannot commit a mistake. Now these are all maniacs. Ego cannot be more mad.Perfection is not possible. You are imperfect and there is nothing wrong in being imperfect; this is the only way to be. Once you accept your imperfection you have accepted your humanity and in that acceptance the yes arises. And then you can love yourself and you can love others too because they are as imperfect as you are.You are still trying to live according to the ideas given to you by your parents. In that way, for thousands of years, all parents have poisoned their children; that poisoning still continues. And once a child is poisoned, from the very beginning he starts thinking it is his own idea. It gets so deep-rooted – it goes to the very guts – that you completely forget that it was implanted from the outside. And then you try to live it out. You cannot manage and it will mess up your whole life.One Indian friend has asked: “Osho, nothing moves without the will of God, not even a single blade of grass…” These are his actual words: “When you say that not a single blade of grass moves but by his will, why is there a metal detector and so many security arrangements here?” The questioner is Prakash Singh Madhuban.It is because of his will! If not a single blade of grass moves, how can the metal detector move? It is so simple! If not a single blade of grass moves, how can so many guards move? But he thinks he is asking a very wise question. He must be thinking he is asking something which is unanswerable.You know nothing of God nor of his will, but you go on repeating clichés. You have heard these things and you start repeating them like gramophone records. You don’t see the absurdity of it. If it is your understanding, the question cannot arise. The question is absolutely meaningless if it is your understanding. But it is not your understanding; somebody else has planted it in you. All parents are doing it, and I am not saying that they are doing it knowingly; they are as unconscious as you are. These ideas have been planted in them by others, their parents and so on and so forth. But you have to jump out of this vicious circle.Renata, your name is so beautiful – it means rebirth. Being here with me you have to go through a process of being reborn and the first step will be to drop all the ideas that have been imposed upon you. The roses are beautiful because they are not carrying the idea that they have to be as big as the lotus flowers. Otherwise they will be miserable, they will stop growing – they will shrink in shame, ashamed of themselves. They are beautiful, fragrant, for the simple reason that whatsoever they are, they are. The marigold flowers are not worried why they are not roses. Even the blades of grass are not at all ashamed of not being big trees like the cedars of Lebanon. They are perfectly happy as they are.A man came to a Zen monk and he asked, “Why are you always so blissful? Why am I not so blissful?”The master said, “Wait. When everybody else has left, then I will answer your question.”The man waited and waited because people were coming and going and there was not a single moment of aloneness. He was getting tired and impatient and many times he thought to leave because “When is this thing going to stop? People are still coming.”But by the evening when the sun was setting, everybody had left and he was alone with the master. He reminded him, “Now please tell me.”He said, “Look outside the window. You see this big tree?”He said, “Yes, I see it.”And he said, “You see that small bush by the side?”He said, “Yes, I see that too.”The master said, “I have never heard the bush saying to the big tree, ‘Why are you so big and I am so small?’ That’s why both are happy. The tree is big and the bush is small, but so what? Both are unique. They don’t compare themselves – and they are standing side by side. And for fifteen years I have been trying to find out why they don’t compare themselves. They are perfectly happy; both are happy.“You are unhappy because you are comparing, you are living in comparison. And I am happy because I have dropped all comparison. I have simply accepted myself as I am. That is my simple secret.”And you are constantly comparing. Somebody else is more beautiful than you, somebody else has more beautiful eyes than you, somebody else has more beautiful hair than you, somebody else is stronger than you, somebody else seems to be more intelligent than you, somebody else has something else and so on and so forth… There is no end to it! You will become more and more miserable.And you have been told, “Become like Jesus.” “Become like Buddha.” “Become like Krishna.” You will be miserable. Buddha never tried to become like Krishna, that’s why he was happy. Krishna never tried to become like anybody else, that’s why he was happy. Jesus never tried to become like Moses, that’s why he was happy – even on the cross he was happy. And you are constantly trying to be somebody else.These ideals have to be dropped; they have to be destroyed completely. And then, a deep and profound yes will arise from the depths of your being. It will fill you with tremendous fulfillment.And, to me, this is religion. This yes filling your whole being, overflowing you, is religion. Right now you are full of no’s, a thousand and one no’s. About everything there is a no and that’s what is making your life a hell. You have to be alert because you have to get rid of all this rubbish that was poured upon you by your parents, by your society, by your church. And it hurts if something is taken away because you have believed in it for a long time. It has become almost part of your blood, your bone, your marrow. It hurts, although it is just pus and nothing else; but to take it away hurts.One old woman took sannyas in America; she must have taken sannyas for wrong reasons. Many people take sannyas for the wrong reasons. They become aware of it only later on when there arises a clash between their idea of sannyas and my vision of sannyas.This woman was always sending small amounts of money to the ashram – just tokens of her love and respect. And she was writing beautiful letters, very poetic. The reason was that deep down she had become a sannyasin because she was reading my books on Jesus. The Mustard Seed was the book that moved her deeply. But it was not me, it was because of Jesus. She became convinced of Jesus’ truth and because I had helped her, she became a lover of me.Then just yesterday her letter arrived. She is very disturbed about what she should do now. Because in some tapes she has heard that I have said that in old days there were records, there are written records, about Jesus’ physical appearance saying that he was an ugly man, that his height was only four feet five inches and not only that, he was a hunchback and his face was disgusting. Now she is shocked. Now she says, “I want to go back to my old master Jesus. I don’t want to remain a sannyasin anymore.” Now, this was the time for her to get free of a conditioning. She missed the opportunity. Going back she will be the same as she has always been. A moment had come when a door opened, but she turned away.Many of you are here for wrong reasons and if you are here for wrong reasons you will be in trouble sooner or later. I am going to disturb you, disturb all your dreams, disturb all your ideals. I am going to put dynamite inside you! My whole work consists of sabotaging. Once I can destroy all your ideals that you have carried all along, once I can make you free of all the jargon that you have learned from others, once I am able to decondition you, then you will be able to say yes to yourself.Every tree says yes to itself; every animal, every bird says yes. Nobody is needed to teach it. The no is taught, yes is natural. Yes is part of Tao, no is a conditioning.You have felt rightly that, “I have the feeling that all my misery is rooted in this incapacity.” That is true. That is the beginning of a tremendous journey; you have felt the right direction. Now go on moving into it. It will take time and it will take effort and it will be an agony. Before the ecstasy can happen you will have to pass through many agonies. That is the price we have to pay. But once you have gathered enough courage to drop your whole past – Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist – once you are unconditioned, your life becomes a flow, a beautiful flow. And then the ocean is not far away. Every river reaches it with no maps, with no guides. Every river reaches it naturally, spontaneously. That is the way of Tao.The second question:Osho,I don't want to take sannyas because I believe in the philosophy of do-it-yourself. What have you to say about it?Why are you asking me? Do it yourself! What is the need to know my opinion? And if you don’t want to take sannyas, why the question at all in the first place? There must be some deep hidden desire in you to take sannyas. Otherwise, the question is irrelevant – it cannot arise at all. The very question shows that some longing has arisen in you to take the jump. But you are afraid to accept the longing, you are trying to rationalize that you can do it yourself, you are trying to repress a certain desire that must be becoming stronger and stronger every day.Sannyas simply means a quantum leap into the unknown. The mind lives in the known, it moves within the known. It goes in circles, round and round; it is repetitive. It cannot enter any communion with the new, with the unknown, with the unknowable. Sannyas is a jump. It is like a snake slipping out of its old skin. You must be getting tired of your old skin, you must be dragging it. And you must be seeing people here rejoicing in their new birth. And the longing must be arising in you too: Why not take the jump?But the courage is lacking. The desire is there, the courage is not there. But you want to deny the desire because nobody wants to accept that he is a coward. It is better to deny the desire itself; then you can avoid the idea of being a coward. Everybody wants at least to pretend to others – and to himself too, if possible – that he is a courageous man. If one wants to do something, one will do it: “But I don’t want to do it in the first place. That’s what is preventing me, otherwise nobody can prevent me.”But why are you asking? From where does the question arise? I have not asked you to become a sannyasin. I didn’t even know that you were here. You could have gone without making yourself known, without asking the question. And if you cannot gather enough courage, at least be honest enough to accept that you are a coward.The desire is there. Don’t repress the desire because the first act of courage is to accept your cowardice. Once you accept it, it starts dying. It can remain only if it is not accepted. Once it is brought into the light of acceptance it can’t exist for long; it becomes impossible for it to exist for long.You say, “…I believe in the philosophy of do-it-yourself.” How will you do it? What will you do? You don’t know anything about sannyas. It is an absolutely new concept. Nothing like it has ever existed in the whole history of humanity. Yes, there have been Hindu monks, Buddhist monks, Christian monks, Jaina monks, but they were all life-negative.My sannyas is life-affirmative. Nothing like this has ever flowered before on the earth. It is a totally new phenomenon. All the old ideas about sannyas were based on escapism, on renunciation. My sannyas has nothing to do with escape, it is against escape because to me God and life are synonymous. It has never been said that God and life are synonymous. God has always been put against life: you have to drop life to attain God. And I say to you, you have to live life as totally as possible, as intensely as possible, as passionately as possible if you want to know God at all because there is no other God than life.God to me is not a person. It is another name for life energy. This distant call of the cuckoo, this is God. Your silence, this is God. The birds chirping, this is God. God is not “somewhere,” God is everywhere. In fact, God is not the right word, but all our languages are addicted to nouns – they always change verbs into nouns.My effort here is to do just the opposite: to change every noun into a verb. There is no God as a person, but there is godliness – a quality, a certain flavor, a certain experiencing: alive, flowing, not confined within boundaries.You don’t know what it is. How are you going to do it? Yes, I have heard about the philosophy of doing-it-yourself…The main trend of the fifties was to do-it-yourself.Around Easter time, an advertisement appeared in The New York Times: “Do Easter at home for only five thousand dollars!”Mr. Jones sent the five thousand dollars and received a parcel with: a box of nails, two wooden beams, one measuring three meters and the other measuring one meter and eighty centimeters and a blonde Jew, thirty-three years old.What will you do by yourself? You don’t know even the ABC of it. You will need to become part of a buddhafield. You will need to become part of a place where many, many people are growing. Alone in a desert you cannot bloom; you will need to become part of a garden.This is the garden of a master where many trees are growing, where many trees are coming to a flowering, to fruition. The seed in you will start having a tremendous confidence in itself that “If it can happen to other seeds, if this miracle is possible, then it is possible for me too.”It is possible only in a certain commune. That’s why all the awakened ones have always created communes, for the simple reason so that you can see what is possible and you can see people in all kinds of stages: the beginners, the people who have gone a little ahead, the people who have gone far, the people who are almost reaching the climax and the people who have blossomed.When the seed sees all this it becomes confident. Otherwise there persists a self-doubt. “Who knows whether I have the potential or not?”To be a sannyasin simply means to fall into a kind of synchronicity. Musicians are aware of it. You can do a small experiment. In an empty room, close the room completely. In one corner of the room, an absolutely empty room, put one sitar and you sit exactly in the opposite corner and start playing on another sitar. And you will be surprised that as you start playing on your sitar, the other sitar, which is just resting against the wall in a corner – and there is nobody to play it – starts falling into a certain synchronicity. Its strings start vibrating; it starts creating certain sounds. This is a well-known fact. And if the musician is really great he can almost create music on the other sitar also, which he has not even touched. But what happens to the other sitar? The vibration that is filling the whole room is caught by it.When a commune gathers around a master, a certain vibration is there – very tangible to those who are sensitive, aware, loving, surrendered, committed; who are not just outsiders, observers; who are not just standing by and trying to see what is happening but who are courageous enough to become part of it. Then your heart starts falling in tune with the heart of the master. And where thousands of hearts are functioning in the same rhythm, beating in the same rhythm, you cannot resist the temptation. That’s the only way to grow toward the unknown. Sannyas is a mysterious journey.And, in your ordinary, unconscious state you will not be able to do it by yourself.Four drunken Italians stumbled into a funeral parlor. After bumbling around for a half hour, one of them fell over a piano.“Here’s the coffin,” he advised his friends.One of them peered at the piano.“Do you recognize him?” the first one asked.“No,” admitted the other drunk, “but he sure has a good set of teeth!”You are an Italian… Forget all about doing it by yourself!Two Italians were going home after a night full of wine to discover that the last bus to Rome had left. For a few moments they staggered around the big hall in which all the buses were parked and then one of them said, “Why don’t-a you get-a inside and-a steal a bus. I’ll keep-a an eye on-a the street to see if-a the police is-a coming.”The first one agreed and disappeared in the hall. Soon an awful screeching, bumping and crashing was heard. This lasted for half an hour, when the doors swung open and a bus drove out.“What the hell-a took you so long-a?” exclaimed the one who had been waiting outside.“Well,” replied the other, “the bus-a to Roma was all-a the way in the back!”The third question:Osho,Why did you never get married?Just because I am not mad!Jesus was standing in front of a full-length mirror admiring his complexion and clear eyes. He brushed his long hair, oiled it, and arranged it in a braid. Then he plucked his eyebrows and combed his blonde mustache.Mary was watching him. “My son,” she sighed “you are so handsome…you should really get married!”“Me! Married?” cried Jesus. “I would rather be nailed to a cross!”The fourth question:Osho,Your jokes make me afraid and confused. Please tell me one of Buddha's sutras about God.PS. I'm leaving for Italy tomorrow. Thank you.I can understand – jokes are dangerous. That’s why no master before me has ever touched them. But I love danger. Jokes have a tremendous beauty if you can allow them to enter your very innermost core. No sutras can reach there because when you are hearing a sutra you start falling asleep. It is very difficult to keep oneself awake hearing sutras for the simple reason that sutras are serious, dry, like the desert. How long can you look at the desert? Sooner or later you will start yawning because it is the same desert going up to the very horizon – on all sides it is all sand and sand and sand and the scene is exactly the same.The sutras are exactly the same; they are desertlike. They create sleep: they function like lullabies. If you suffer from sleeplessness, reading a few sutras of Buddha or Patanjali will be very helpful. Just read a few sutras – you are bound to fall asleep. When all tranquilizers fail, sutras work.That’s what the hypnotists go on doing: they simply repeat a certain sutra. Anything repeated again and again creates such boredom that you have to escape from it. And the easiest escape is into sleep.Mulla Nasruddin suffered very much from sleeplessness. All efforts failed – all the tranquilizers, the sleeping pills. Nothing worked. His sons were getting very worried. Finally they found a hypnotist who said, “Don’t worry, I will come tonight.” And he came and he started simply repeating: “You are falling asleep…”Nasruddin was lying down on the bed with closed eyes, the lights were out and the hypnotist was repeating again and again, “You are falling asleep… Your eyelids are becoming heavier, heavier, heavier… You are falling asleep, falling asleep, falling asleep… A deep sleep is taking over…”Nasruddin started snoring. The hypnotist tiptoed out of the room.The sons were very happy. They handed him double his fees, thanked him very much. They went in to see. Nasruddin opened one of his eyes and said, “Has that idiot left yet or not? He would have killed me, hence I had to pretend! That snoring was just false. I was making it so that he would leave me!”Sutras are boring. That’s why only old people who are already dead go to religious discourses. You can see them in all the churches and temples.When people come to visit this ashram they are surprised to see so many young people. It is unbelievable because young people are not supposed to be in such places. Only old people, dead, rotten, leading some kind of posthumous existence, are supposed to be in such places.So many young people – what are these young people doing here? They are not here for the sutras, I am here for the sutras, they are not here for the sutras. So we have made a compromise: they have to listen to a few sutras and I have to tell a few jokes. They will be here for the jokes, I am here for the sutras. If I stop telling jokes, they will disappear. If I have to tell only jokes, I will not be needed. I can leave a big collection of jokes and Teertha can read the jokes; there will be no need for me to be here.If you want me to be here you will have to hear a few sutras and if I want you to be here, I have to tell a few jokes too. This is understood, this is a contract.Jokes are tremendously important in a way. Jokes are not a simple phenomenon; they are really mysterious, their mechanism is mysterious. You don’t know how a joke works, how it goes deep into your depths, how it brings laughter to you, how it brings wakefulness to you. The mechanism is mysterious.A joke functions almost like a sexual orgasm. It is not accidental that many jokes are concerned with sex. Jokes as such are basically sexual for the simple reason that the joke creates a build-up of energy in you, a great curiosity about what is going to happen because a joke is a joke only when something unexpected happens, when it takes such a sudden turn that logically you could not have conceived it. It was inconceivable. And it takes the turn so quickly and so suddenly that it does not give you time enough to think about it. Because there is no time to think…the mind needs time. The joke goes on toward the south and then suddenly turns toward the north: your mind goes on moving toward the south, but the joke has taken a turn toward the north so suddenly that the mind halts. In that very halt there is an experience of silence, of meditation.The same happens in sexual orgasm: a certain energy is built up in you, a certain tension is built up in you. You go on moving upward, upward, upward and then comes a sudden relaxation, a sudden release. It is so sudden – it happens in a single moment – the mind stops, the mind disappears for a moment. It is not conceivable for the mind. The mind needs time.If you understand the joke you will miss the whole point. If you can understand where it is going, what the logical end of it will be, then it will not be a joke for you. Whatsoever you understand from the very beginning is not going to be the end; the end is going to be absolutely unpredictable.That’s the beauty of a joke. It shakes you, shocks you, it wakes you up. It is impossible to remain asleep when a beautiful joke is being told.Buddha goes on telling his disciples, “Wake up!” What is the need? I simply tell a joke and they wake up! And that is far more existential.An aircraft bound for Florida with two hundred and forty passengers on board ran into some engine problems. The plane was sure to crash so the pilot alerted all the crew members about this sad state of affairs and told them all to get hold of a parachute each and jump off the plane.A young steward asked the captain, “What about the passengers, sir?”“Fuck the passengers!” the captain replied.Said the steward, “What! Do we have time for that?”You say, “Your jokes make me afraid…” Because they must be shattering many things in you. You must be thinking religion is serious. It is not – at least my vision of religion is not serious at all. My religion is rooted in playfulness, in nonseriousness. Sincere, of course, but serious, never. My religion is laughter, love. It is not renunciation, it is rejoicing.I am not concerned with God at all and you are asking me for one of Buddha’s sutras about God. In fact, Buddha never believed in God. He has no sutra about God. Buddha is absolutely atheistic in that sense: he never believed in God. Buddha is not so childish as to believe in God the Father who created the world and who lives in heaven. These are all fictions, fairy tales.Every month St. Peter and Lucifer meet to divide the newly arrived souls between them.“What is your name?” St. Peter asks.“Karl Marx,” replies a white-bearded soul.“Ah! You are an atheist. Therefore you will be going to hell.”The next month, to St. Peter’s great amazement, Lucifer is late. This had never happened before. After a few hours Lucifer arrives in a horrible state – one of his horns is broken, his tail is burned, his complexion is pale.“What is the matter with you?” St. Peter asks.“Oh my God! That Marx, you know? He has created fucking hell! He began by complaining that it was too hot and then that there was not enough air and then that the place was unhealthy. To make a long story short, after a few strikes, protests and demonstrations, I had to allow air conditioning, massages in the breaks between torture sessions, thermostats to keep the heating system under control! Peter, I am at a loss. Help me! Could you take care of him for the next month to give me some peace?”“What! Marx in heaven? Have you gone crazy or what?”“Do it for my sake, Peter. Remember, we have been friends for eternity!”“But I just cannot!” replies St. Peter. “Marx amongst all the angels and saints. Can you imagine it?”“One month only, Peter, please.”“Well, okay. Just because you are my friend I will keep him – but for one month only!”Next month, St. Peter and Lucifer are both punctual. Lucifer eagerly asks, “So, Peter, how are things going?”“Oh, fine thanks, Lucifer.”“Fine? What about Marx?”“Oh, that Marx – nice chap!”“You mean he did not raise any protest?”“Oh never. We had many pleasant discussions together. He is a cultured man.”“Indeed? But what does God say?”“Oh, come on, Lucifer, you know God doesn’t exist!”Buddha has no sutras about God. He was the first mature religious person in the whole world. He talks in terms of maturity, not in terms of childishness. And you say, “I am leaving for Italy tomorrow.”Then it will be good for you to carry this joke with you:Two village boys from Sicily go to visit their cousin in New York. On the third day of being shown around downtown New York they somehow get separated from the cousin. After looking for him for a few hours they finally end up in a police station.“Please-a, sir, can-a you find-a our cousin?”“What’s his name?” the police officer asks.“Gino.”“Gino who?”“Don’t-a know-a.”“Where does he live?”“In New York-a.”“What does he look like?”“A man-a.”“Where did you lose him?”“Don’t-a know-a.”“Is there anything special about his features? A flat nose? One eye? Something like that?”The two boys think hard but sadly shake their heads. Then the face of one brightens slowly and he says “Ah, yes-a sir, he has-a two assholes!”“Two assholes!” exclaims the policeman “Are you sure? How do you know?”“Well-a,” replies the boy, “every time we go to eat-a spaghetti or dance-a at the disco, his friends say-a, ‘Look! There’s Gino with-a the two-a assholes!’”Go to Italy, but come back soon because the whole of Italy has come here! All the juicy people have disappeared from Italy; they are here.Just the other day I was reading a newspaper report from Italy about so many young people, young men and women, having disappeared from Italy that the government has become concerned about what is happening to them. They need not be concerned, they need not go anywhere to look for them, they can come here – they are all here! Either they have come or they are on the way, but they are all going to end up here. What will you be doing there? Come back soon – as soon as possible!Italy will look very non-Italian to you. We have made a compact Italy here and far more juicy. Slowly, slowly my jokes will help you to come to your senses, they will help you to come out of your confusion. There is nothing more healthy than a good laugh, there is nothing more sane than a good laugh. Laughter is very vital.I would like my sannyasins to be laughing sannyasins. I would like the world to know my people as the most laughing, dancing, singing people. I don’t want any sad, serious-looking people here. I don’t want any long faces here. Yes, when you arrive, you come with a long face, but then I have to hit you and sooner or later you lose your mask – because that is only a mask.No child is born with a long face. Every child is born with laughter, with a great joy which is ready to explode. We destroy his joy. My effort here is to release that joy again, to bring your childhood back to you.The fifth question:Osho,I think I knowthat if I knewhow much you givethe agony of the ecstasywould kill me.Dharma Chetana, it is too late! You have been killed already, but the recognition comes always too late, when the work is finished. I do my surgery in such a way that you become aware only when you start missing your appendix, your tonsils, and your head, and everything. When you are just a hollow bamboo!Now Dharma Chetana is a hollow bamboo. Now she is ready. Now the whole can sing any song through her. The only way to be reborn is to be crucified.The Eastern scriptures say the master is death and they are right. The master is a death, but that is only a half statement. The other half is that the master is also a resurrection.The sixth question:Osho,Where is my heart?It is the same question. I have taken it out! Now you will never find it. Everything has to be taken out because all that you are carrying inside – your mind, your heart – is just junk. You call it antique furniture, maybe. I call it simply junk. I am not interested in antiques at all, no; my whole interest is in the absolutely new.Mukta wanted to bring an antique Rolls Royce for me. I said, “Mukta, I am not interested in antiques at all!”She said, “It is very beautiful! It is a 1939 model, with gold,” etcetera.I said, “Forget all about it! I am interested only in the latest.”Now Sheela is bringing a Lincoln Continental for me. I told her, “Bring a 1981 model.”She said, “Where will I find a 1981 model? It is 1980!”I said, “Try. By the time you find it, it will be 1981!”And the last question:Osho,I am very impatient, I want to know God, but I don't want to waste my time in search of him. Can you show me a shortcut?A young man once came to a venerable master and asked, “How long will it take to reach enlightenment?”The master said, “Ten years.”The young man blurted, “So long?”The master said, “No, I was mistaken. It will take twenty years.”The young man asked, “Why do you keep adding to it?”And the master answered, “Come to think of it, in your case it will probably be thirty!”There are no shortcuts. And if you are impatient you will never find. Patience is the only way and if you are absolutely patient you can find right now. This is the ultimate paradox of religious inquiry, of the search for truth, for God, for nirvana: if you are impatient you will have to wait for eternity. That venerable master must have been a very polite man; he said only thirty years. But to tell you the truth, if you are impatient you will have to wait forever and forever. If you are patient, totally patient, then it is possible even now – this very moment, here and now!Don’t ask for any shortcut. There has never been any shortcut; there cannot be any shortcut to truth. You cannot have it cheap. And patience means love because only love can be patient. Love can wait – love knows how to wait. It can wait forever and because it can wait forever it becomes capable of receiving the gift right now.Two students were talking to each other. One of them bragged about all the women he got to go to bed with him.“How do you get so many women to do it? What is your secret?” asked the other student.“Well, this is how I do it. All I do is paint a white circle on my dashboard. The girl will usually ask about it. Then we’ll start talking. I’ll start referring to the color white and all the things associated with it – virginity, purity, chastity. Then the conversation will expand. We’ll talk about the purity of the saints and Tantra, Yoga, etcetera. It all depends on how good you can talk. Just use the white circle and go on from there. You won’t have too much trouble getting them to do it.”The friend followed his advice and painted a white circle on his dashboard, then went and picked up his date. When she got into the car she noticed the white circle on the dashboard.“That’s really an interesting circle on your dashboard,” she said.“It sure, is,” he replied. “Would you like to screw?”Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Why is it that only humans repress, manipulate, kill, try to conquer the natural flow in nature, the Tao? Why are we so stupid?Man is not a being, man is a becoming. This is one of the most fundamental things to be understood. The trees, the animals, they are all beings. Man is different: he is a becoming, he is a process. And with the process the problem arises: you can fall below the animals, you can rise above the gods. A dog cannot fall below doghood, nor can he become a buddha; both are impossible. He is neither stupid nor a genius; he has no growth. The way he is when born is the way he will live and die. Between his birth and death there is not going to be any evolution.Man is different. That is man’s privilege, his prerogative, but there also lies great danger. Man is not born fully complete; he is not born entire – birth is only the beginning of a process. Now, the process can take any form: it can become deformed, it can take a wrong route, it can go astray. Man begins his life as freedom but freedom has its price; you can’t have it for free. No other animal has any freedom except man.Hence for centuries the mystics have said that man is a bridge between two eternities: the eternity of the unconscious and the eternity of the conscious. Man is always moving between these two polarities. He is like a tightrope walker. Each moment is full of danger, but full of possibilities too. No possibility comes alone; it has its own danger. You can miss – you can fall from the rope into the abyss.Man has been called a ladder by the mystics. Now, the ladder can do two things: you can use it to go upward and the same ladder can be used to go downward. You use the same ladder for both purposes, just your direction changes. When you are moving upward your direction is one way; when you are moving downward your direction is just the opposite. But with the same ladder the result will be totally different. Man is a ladder between heaven and hell.That’s why it is only human beings who repress, who manipulate, who kill, who try to conquer the natural flow in nature, who are stupid – because they can be buddhas. Because man has intelligence, that’s why he can be stupid. Stupidity simply means you have not used your intelligence; it does not mean absence of intelligence. If there is no presence of intelligence you cannot call man stupid. You cannot call a rock stupid; a rock is a rock – no question of stupidity.But you can call man stupid because with man there is hope, a ray of great light. With man, a door opens toward the beyond. He can transcend himself and he is not transcending – that’s his stupidity. He can grow and he is not growing, he is clinging to all kinds of immaturity – that is his stupidity. He goes on and on living in the past, which is no more – that is his stupidity. Or he starts projecting in the future, which is not yet – that is his stupidity.He should live in the present with deep passion, with great love, with intensity, with awareness and that will become his intelligence. It is the same energy: upside down it is stupidity; put it right, rearrange it and it becomes intelligence.Intelligence and stupidity are not separate energies. The same energy functioning in harmony is intelligence, functioning in contradictions is stupidity. Man can be stupid – don’t think that it is unfortunate. It looks on the surface that it is unfortunate, but hidden behind it is great glory, great splendor which can be discovered.But the society, the so-called religions, the state, the crowd, they all want you to be stupid. Nobody wants you to be intelligent. They all condition you to remain stupid your whole life, for the simple reason that stupid people are obedient. Intelligent people start thinking on their own; they start becoming individuals. They start having their own life, their own lifestyle, their own way of seeing, of being, of growing. They are no longer part of the crowd – they cannot be. They have to leave the crowd behind, only then can they grow. And the crowd feels offended. The crowd does not want anybody to be more than the average person – it is against the average person’s ego. The crowd, the collectivity, has a great involvement: the involvement is that anybody becoming more intelligent, more individual, more aware, will not be part of the mob psychology any longer.You cannot force Buddha to follow the stupid people. And the stupid people are many, the majority, ninety-nine point nine percent. They have a great power with them – the power of violence – and they show it whenever it is needed. They showed it to Jesus, they showed it to Socrates, they showed it to Mansoor… They would like to show it to me.The man who threw a knife to kill me just few days ago was simply a representative of the ninety-nine point nine percent people. He was not a single individual. The whole crowd psychology is behind him, he has the support of the crowd. The crowd also thinks in the same way; there is no difference in it. He is a leader, he is fulfilling the desires of many. They would like to remove me from the scene – I am becoming a disturbing factor to them. I am going against their taboos, I am going against their inhibitions, I am going against their past. They call it their culture, their heritage, their religion.Before he threw the knife, the man shouted, “You are talking against our religion, our culture! We cannot tolerate it!” He is simply a mouthpiece. He is trying to show that the crowd can be violent if you try to be an individual. It will not tolerate your existence even. All the vested interests would like everybody to be stupid.You will be surprised to know, in fact, that your schools, colleges and universities don’t exist to help you to become intelligent – no, not at all. I have been associated for many years with universities as a student and then as a professor. I know the very inner structure of your educational system: it is not concerned with creating intelligence in people. Of course it wants to create efficiency, but efficiency is not intelligence, efficiency is mechanical. A computer can be very efficient, but a computer is not intelligent.Never think that intelligence and efficiency are synonymous; intelligence is a totally different phenomenon. Efficiency is not intelligence, it is mechanical expertise. The universities are concerned to create efficiency so that you can be better clerks and better collectors and better station masters and better postmasters, etcetera. But they are not concerned to create intelligence, in fact they are all against intelligence. The whole structure of your educational system all over the world is to make you more and more capable of memorizing things because memory is a biocomputer.Intelligence is a totally different phenomenon. Intelligence arises out of meditation, intelligence arises out of rebellion. Intelligence does not arise out of memory. But your examinations are only concerned with your memory. Whosoever has better memory is thought to be more intelligent. But it happens many times that stupid people have beautiful memories and intelligent people are not so good as far as memory is concerned.Edison was not good as far as memory is concerned. He discovered one thousand scientific gadgets; nobody else had discovered so many things. Just the quantity of his discoveries is enormous, unbelievable. You may not be aware that you are using Edison’s discoveries every day: the gramophone record and the light bulb. These things that you are using come from one single person, Edison. But as far as memory is concerned, his memory was very lousy, very sloppy, so much so that once he forgot his own name, which is really very difficult. It is almost impossible to forget your own name. If you can forget your own name, you can forget anything! This seems to be the last thing. He managed to do the last thing.In the First World War, rationing came into existence for the first time, and he was standing in a queue to take his ration card. Slowly, slowly he came closer to the window. Then the last person in front of him moved and they called his name: “Thomas Alva Edison!” And he looked around as if they are calling somebody else; he looked in the queue.One man recognized his face because many times he had seen his pictures in the newspapers. He said, “As far as I remember, you seem to be Thomas Alva Edison. Why you are looking here and there?”He said, “You are right. I had completely forgotten! Many, many thanks that you reminded me. Yes, I am Thomas Alva Edison.”His wife used to keep everything in order because his whole room was in constant chaos: thousands of papers, research papers, and whenever he would want to find a particular thing it would take days. He will go on forgetting everything. He may have already discovered something and he may start discovering it again. And his wife will remind him, “You have done it. It is already in the market!”He used to keep loose papers and would go on writing whatsoever thought would come to his mind. Then those loose papers would be lost here and there. His wife told him, “You better keep a notebook.”He said, “That’s beautiful idea! Why has it never happened to me?” But then he lost his whole notebook! He said, “Look, I followed your suggestion. With loose papers one thing was good: once in a while I used to lose few a papers, but not all. Now all of the papers are lost!”Albert Einstein was not a man of memory. He failed in his matriculation simply because he could not memorize anything. This greatest mathematician of all the ages and for ages to come, was incapable of counting small amounts of money. He would have to count again and again.Once he was traveling in a bus. He gave the conductor some money; the remaining money was returned to him. He counted it once, twice, thrice, and each time the result was different, so he started counting a fourth time.The conductor was looking and he said, “What is the matter with you? Don’t you know figures? Thrice you have counted, now you are counting for the fourth time! Don’t you know figures?”He said, “Yes, I am a little lousy with figures!”This man who has worked out the greatest figures possible was incapable of counting small amounts of money. He would go into his bathroom and would not come out for hours because he would forget that he had to come out.One of my friends, Doctor Ram Manohar Lohia, went to see him. He was telling me, “I had to wait six hours because he was in the bathroom! And his wife started apologizing again and again and she said, ‘He is in the bathroom, he is in the bathroom.’ I said, ‘But what is he doing in the bathroom?’ The wife said, ‘Nobody knows but if you disturb him he becomes very angry – he starts throwing things! But he always forgets; whenever he goes in he forgets to come out. Now we have to wait for whenever he comes out. When he feels hungry or thirsty or something, then he will remember.’”Doctor Lohia asked, “But what does he go on doing there?”The wife said, “Yes, I have also been curious my whole life what he goes on doing. So in the beginning I used to peep through the keyhole – what is he doing? He sits in his bathtub and goes on playing with soap bubbles! And when I asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ he said, ‘Don’t disturb me, never disturb me, because it is by playing with soap bubbles that I have discovered the Theory of Relativity and the theory that the universe is expanding just like a soap bubble. It goes on expanding and one day it will burst – just like a soap bubble!’”Down the ages you will find thousands of geniuses with very bad memories and thousands of people who had tremendous memories with no intelligence at all, because memory and intelligence come from different sources. Memory is part of the mind, intelligence is part of no-mind. Intelligence is part of your consciousness and memory is part of your brain. The brain can be trained – that’s what universities go on doing. All your examinations are tests for your memory, not for your intelligence. But universities give you the wrong impression – as if memory is intelligence. It is not.This whole educational system exists to destroy intelligence and to divert you from intelligence toward memory. Memory is useful, utilitarian. Intelligence is dangerous; it has no utility for the status quo, it has no utility for the vested interests. Intelligent people have always proved to be difficult people just because of their intelligence. They cannot bow down to any stupid thing. And our society is full of superstitions, stupidities – all kinds of nonsense prevails in the name of religion, in the name of politics, in the name of literature, art.Each child is distracted, is diverted. Hence so much stupidity. It is really a miracle how few people have escaped from this prison – a Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu, a Jesus, a Pythagoras – very few people. It is almost impossible to escape from this prison because the prison is all around and it begins from the very beginning. From your very childhood you are conditioned to be a prisoner: a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan – these are all prisons. And when you are prisoners of churches, nations, races, then naturally there is going to be violence.No animal is as violent as man. Animals kill but they kill only when they are hungry, otherwise not. Man is the only animal who enjoys killing for no reason at all, as if killing in itself is a blissful activity.One day, a lion and a hare entered a restaurant. The manager was shocked. Nobody could believe their eyes. A great silence fell over the restaurant. Many people were there eating, talking, gossiping; all became absolutely silent. What is happening? The manager rushed to the new customers. Somehow he managed to stammer to the hare, “What would you like, sir?”The hare asked for coffee. The manager asked, “And what would your friend like to have?”The hare laughed and he said, “Do you think if he was hungry I would be here? He is not hungry; otherwise he would have taken his breakfast – I would be gone! We can be together only when he is not hungry.”In a zoo in Moscow, they have kept a lion and a sheep in one cage to show the philosophy of peaceful coexistence. Everybody goes to see the cage. It is a miracle! The sheep and the lion sitting side by side – sometimes the sheep is fast asleep, just so close to the lion, her head resting on the lion’s belly. This is something!A very curious young boy asked the zoo keeper, “How do you manage? How have you trained them?”The zoo keeper was retiring from the job on that very day, so he told the truth. He said, “There is no miracle in it. All that we have to do is to change the sheep every day – a new sheep every day, that’s all. There is no miracle. And when the lion is no longer hungry there is a peaceful coexistence.”But a lion won’t kill if he is not hungry. It is only man who kills for no reason at all – for stupid ideas. One can understand if somebody is hungry, one can understand, but one cannot understand Hiroshima and Nagasaki – destroying one hundred thousand people within three minutes, a sheer joy of destruction.This is happening because we have not allowed man’s intelligence to flower. And whenever it has happened in any society that intelligence was allowed a little freedom, that society becomes weaker than other societies. In India the country has remained a slave for two thousand years for many reasons. One of the reasons was the great revolution that was brought by Krishna, Patanjali, Saraha, Mahavira, Buddha. These people brought such a great revolution, such a radical change in the consciousness of this country that many people were released from the bondage of stupidity; a great intelligence was released. The result was that the intelligent people stopped killing, they became nonviolent; they refused to be recruited in the army. Buddhists and Jainas refused to be recruited into the army, the brahmins refused to be recruited into the army. Now, this was the cream and the cream refused to fight. Then very stupid countries and very ordinary people – Hunas, Turks, Moghuls, who were far backward in every possible way – ran over the country. And because the most intelligent part of the younger Indian generation was no longer interested in killing and violence, there was no resistance, no fight. They conquered the country. A big country was conquered by very small countries. For two thousand years this country remained in slavery for the simple reason…The same thing happened in Athens. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, these were the people who released great intelligence and a climate was created of freedom, of free thinking. And the whole Greek civilization disappeared. It was destroyed by stupid people who were surrounding the civilization. It was one of the most beautiful phenomena that was happening on the earth.Now the same thing is happening again in America. If America and Russia are ever in conflict, there is every possibility America will be defeated for the simple reason that American youth is far more intelligent than the Russian youth. American youth has started thinking; Russian youth is absolutely conditioned – they function like machines. In these two world wars and in many small wars it was noted down that American young soldiers are very disinterested in fighting. Otherwise, how you can explain the phenomenon of Vietnam? America with all its sophisticated arms could not defeat a poor country with no scientific sophistication at all.It was found that thirty to forty percent of American soldiers never used their weapons. They would go to the battlefield every day but they would not kill. It is beautiful, it is something to be appreciated, but dangerous too because thirty to forty percent is a big percentage and soon it will be fifty to sixty percent.If Russia and America are ever in conflict, if the clash ever happens, there is every possibility that America will be the first to lose. The difference will not be much, maybe ten to fifteen minutes difference, because now the question is not of human beings fighting. The question is of releasing atomic energy, hydrogen bombs and missiles and they are all controlled by computers. If the Russians attack America, then it will take ten minutes for the American computers to react and launch against Russia. And the same will happen if America attacks Russia: it will take ten minutes for Russian computers to react and launch against America. The difference will be only of ten to fifteen minutes; both will be destroyed. But if it ever happens, then that difference of fifteen minutes will be predictable. America will be the first to go for the simple reason that great intelligence is being released. Always higher cultures have been defeated by lower cultures, hence no culture can afford to release intelligence.My own suggestion is, unless we create a world government, intelligence cannot be allowed. And the time has come for a world government. National governments are no longer needed: they are things of the past, they are part of our stupid past. Nations are no longer needed, just a world government. And if there is a world government it will have a totally different quality, for the simple reason that armies will have to be reduced because there will be no question of fighting with anybody.Now seventy percent of money, wealth, income goes to the army – seventy percent; only thirty percent is left for other purposes. That means seventy percent of our energy is to kill, to be violent, to be destructive. A world government is an absolute necessity to save humanity. And the quality of the world government will be totally different because it won’t need great armies; just small police forces will be enough. It will have all the functions – the post office, the railway, the airplanes, etcetera – but they are not destructive; they serve people.And once armies disappear from the world, great intelligence will be released because it is armies that are destroying intelligence. They recruit the healthiest people and destroy their minds, because a real soldier is possible only if he becomes absolutely mechanical.Man kills for no reason. Man tries to repress rather than to understand, manipulate rather than to relate, because to relate with somebody needs great understanding. Manipulation needs no understanding. Repression is easy, very easy – any fool can do it.That’s why if you go to the monasteries you will find all kinds of repression and you will find all kinds of fools gathered together there. I have never come across intelligent monks and nuns; if they are intelligent they would not be monks and nuns any longer. They will renounce that nonsense, they will come out of their so-called religious prisons. But repression needs no wisdom; it simply needs a powerful ego, so you go on suppressing everything into the unconscious. But whatsoever you suppress will have to be suppressed again and again and still it will never be eliminated. It will become more and more powerful as you grow older because you will become weaker. The suppresser will become weaker and the suppressed will remain fresh and young because it has never been used.The real problem arises in old age when suppression starts exploding and creates all kinds of uglinesses. It is five thousand years of suppression that is creating all our neurosis, all our perversions. Suppress sex and you will become more sexual; your whole life will be colored with sex. You will think always in terms of sexuality and nothing else. Suppress sex and the ugly institution of prostitution will arise, is bound to arise. The more suppressive a society is, the more prostitutes will be found there; the proportion is always the same. You can count your nuns and monks and you can know by counting them how many male and female prostitutes will be in the country. It will be exactly the same number because nature keeps a balance. And perversions…because sexual energy will find its ways, its own ways. Either it will create neurosis or hypocrisy; both are ill states. The poor will become neurotic and the rich will become hypocrites.It is told that when Moses in his rage smashed the tablets of the Ten Commandments, everybody rushed to grab a piece.Of course the rich and the politicians were the first. They got all the good pieces on which was inscribed, “Commit adultery,” “lie,” “steal.” The poor and all the rest got only the pieces that said, “Thou shalt not,” “Thou shalt not.”Repression creates cunningness. You lose authenticity, you lose naturalness, spontaneity, you lose truth. You start lying to others, you start lying to yourself. You start finding ways to lie and to go on lying. And a single lie will need thousand other lies to protect it, to support it.Two mediaeval knights are leaving on a crusade. Since they are old friends, the one asks the other, “Explain something to me. You are always complaining that your marriage is finished, that your wife is a bore and that she has become as ugly as a witch. Is that right?”“That’s right,” answers the other.“So then tell me,” says the first, “why did you lock her in a chastity belt?”“Because on my way back,” he explains, “I am going to tell her that I lost the key!”Either lying, hypocrisy, deception, or madness…The safari had been in the remote African jungle for months, capturing animals for the zoo. Smedley’s sexual frustration had risen to a point where he decided to try sex with a huge, ferocious female gorilla.His friend helped chain her down and put a bucket over her head and Smedley started making love right away, when suddenly the gorilla broke the chains and wrapped her arms around Smedley.The others grabbed her arms to rescue him, as Smedley moaned incoherently. When, with three men on each arm, they finally freed him, he shouted, “No. The bucket, you fools! Take off the bucket! I want to kiss her!”In madness you can do anything!Repression means a method of creating conscience instead of consciousness. Consciousness is non-repressive; it depends on understanding, it depends on meditativeness, awareness. Conscience is repressive: it simply goes on giving you orders, “Do this. Don’t do that.” It does not change you but it poisons your life.Friedrich Nietzsche is right when he says, “Religions have not been able to transform man but only to poison his joys.” I perfectly agree with this man about this – religions have really poisoned all your joys. If you are eating, then there are religions which condemn everything that you eat… And great guilt arises about sex, about food, about clothes, about everything.Jainism even teaches… Particularly its monks and nuns don’t take any baths; they are not allowed to take a bath because to take a bath means you are trying to make your body look beautiful. That is sex, nothing else. You may never have thought about it that taking a bath has something to do with sex, but perversions know no limits. Jaina monks and nuns are not allowed to brush their teeth because that means you are trying to make yourself beautiful. There is no need – the body is dirty. There is no need to give it an appearance of beauty, freshness, fragrance – no need. It has to be hated: it is disgusting, it is nauseating.But then I have come across Jaina monks and Jaina nuns who will take a sponge bath, but they have to lie about it. They will keep their toothpaste hidden in their bags – they have to hide it; nobody should know about it. They used to come to see me when I used to travel around the country and I would immediately know in whose bag there was toothpaste because their mouth smelled so foul if they didn’t use any toothpaste or any kind of cleaning their teeth. Then to talk with them was almost a torture. So I would immediately know if some nun… Particularly nuns because women after all are women; even if they are Jaina nuns it makes no difference. They are more body-oriented and nothing is wrong about it; it is perfectly good, it is perfectly healthy. So I would immediately know – if the foul smell was not coming I would immediately know – and I would tell them that “I know that your bag has toothpaste in it!”And they would be surprised. They would say, “How do you come to know about it? Nobody knows about it! Can you see inside our bags?”I said, “Yes! I can see inside you; what about your bag?”They would say, “You are the first person who has immediately discovered it.”I said, “There is nothing much in it. Don’t think that there is some miracle or anything. Just I am so tortured by Jaina monks and nuns that whenever somebody from your company comes and is not smelling bad, I immediately know that there is something in the bag. You must be taking a sponge bath.”Now, even to take a sponge bath seems to be doing a crime. Cleaning your teeth looks like you are getting ready for hell. It has poisoned your life, it has not transformed your life.Repression cannot transform. Either it makes you hypocrites… If you are a little intelligent, just even a little intelligent, you will be a hypocrite. If you are utterly stupid, you will go insane.“How was your boat trip to Europe?” asks Pedro to his friend.“Fantastic! Imagine, on the first night I met a girl, one of the most beautiful I’d ever seen. We chitchatted for a while and it was love at first sight. We were soon in each other’s arms. It was only the next morning as I held her in my arms that I found she was the wife of one of my best friends. It was such a shock that we both felt tremendously guilty, we both cried and cried and cried.”“That’s really something! But how was the rest of the trip?”“Well, you know, it was just fucking and crying, fucking and crying, fucking and crying!”That’s what is going to happen.Repression is one the greatest calamities that has happened to humanity. And it is because of repression that manipulation comes in. Because you cannot be true with yourself, you cannot be naked with others. You lose all truth, all respect for truth. You lose all authenticity and you start being deceptive. Manipulation is a deceptive way of exploiting the other. You lose all respect for humanity because you have lost respect for yourself. How can you respect yourself if you are lying, if you are not authentic, if you are not sincere? And if you don’t respect yourself, you cannot respect anybody else in the world. When you lose respect for others you manipulate, you start using them as means.Respect means each individual is an end unto himself; disrespect means nobody is an end and you can use everybody as a means for your own purposes, for your own ends. The husband uses the wife as a means, the wife uses the husband as a means; this is manipulation. And because you use each other as means… Even parents use their children as means and children use their parents as means. Religious people are using God as a means, what to say about others? Everybody is using everybody else as a means. Then you are constantly afraid: somebody may take your means.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The Venerable Master said:When he has clearly thought about these three he perceives only a void, but when he contemplates the void, he realizes that the void is also void and has become a nothingness. The void having vanished into nothingness, he realizes that the nothingness of nothing is also nothing, and when the nethermost nothingness is reached, there is most truly to be found a deep and unchanging stillness.In this profound stillness how can desires be begotten? When desires are no longer begotten, then there is essential and unchanging stillness.Truth is essentially unchanging.All things in heaven and earth are in essence unchanging.The East has respected the master tremendously. The West is absolutely unaware of the phenomenon of the masters. It knows the teachers, it is perfectly aware about the teachers, but not about the masters. People even write about Jesus as a great teacher – Western scholars write about Buddha as a great teacher – not knowing the difference. The difference is immense; the difference is so immense that it is unbridgeable. The master is a totally different world.The teacher is part of the ordinary, day-to-day existence. He knows more than you know: the difference is of quantity, not of quality. You can know more by just a little more effort. The teacher is just a little ahead of you as far as learning, knowledge, information, is concerned, but his being is the same as yours.The master may not know more than you, he may not know even as much as you know, but he is more – he has more being. The difference is of quality: he exists on a different plane. He has entered a totally different dimension that you are completely oblivious of. He knows only one thing, that is his own inner being. And that knowing cannot be called knowledge for the simple reason because knowledge needs three things: the knower, the known, and between the two exists the knowledge. The relationship between knower and the known: that is knowledge. But when you know yourself – the knower is the known, the knower is the knowledge – there is no distinction at all. There is no subject and no object. There is unity, not division.The master is one who has become united in the fundamental sense of ultimate consciousness. He is simply conscious. This consciousness gives him a totally different world view; with this consciousness everything else changes. He sees things in a new light, his eyes are unclouded. He has clarity, he is transparent, he is a pure mirror, crystal clear – not even a thought moves in his consciousness. Hence there is no longer any veil, no longer any obstruction.The teacher is so full of thoughts that he is just the opposite to the master. Never call Buddha a teacher or Jesus a teacher or Lao Tzu a teacher – they are masters. Moreover, they don’t teach at all – why call them teachers? They don’t impart any new knowledge to the world. Albert Einstein can be called a great teacher, Newton can be called a great teacher. Darwin can be called a great teacher, Marx, Freud – these people can be called great teachers: they have taught many things. What has Lao Tzu taught? What has Buddha taught? What has Zarathustra taught? Nothing at all! But they have imparted a new vision, a new style of life. They have touched people’s hearts and they have transformed those hearts. They don’t give you information, they give you transformation. What they say is not important, what they are is important. What they say is only a device; their silence is important.If you want to understand Buddha, Lao Tzu, Ko Hsuan, Kabir, Nanak, you will have to learn how to read between the lines. You will have to learn how to understand silence and the music of silence. You will have to be silent. It is a totally different kind of learning – in fact, it is unlearning. Whatsoever you know you will have to drop. You will have to drop all your beliefs, ideologies, philosophies. All that has been given to you by your teachers from the kindergarten to the university level. You will have to get rid of it, you will have to transcend it. You will have to transcend all your teachers, only then will you be able to understand a master. A master is against all teachers.The East has not respected teachers; its total respect goes to the masters. The teachers are utilitarian; they are experts. If something goes wrong in your bathroom you call the plumber. He knows more than you as far as plumbing is concerned, but that is no reason to pay him great respect and call him “venerable.” Something goes wrong with your body, you call the doctor. He is another kind of plumber: he fixes your body. If you want to learn mathematics you go to a teacher.You go to a master only when you are tired of all this utilitarian existence. When you have come to see that there is something more, when you have felt a deep urge, a great longing, to know that which is nonutilitarian, which has intrinsic value, which can neither be sold nor purchased, which has no price but immense value, when you have come to feel the existence of the mysterious, of the miraculous, then only you are capable of contacting a master.In fact, the ancient Egyptian scriptures say: “When the disciple is ready the master appears himself.” When the disciple is ready? When he is tired of the utilitarian world. In the world everything has a utility; but God has no utility, truth has no utility, love has no utility, bliss has no utility, beauty has no utility. What is the utility of a roseflower? An atom bomb has utility, a sword has utility. What is the utility of a beautiful sunset? There is no utility in it. Only when you start feeling the longing for the nonutilitarian are you capable of being with a master; otherwise you will go on moving from one teacher to another teacher.To be with a master needs tremendous preparation. And the greatest thing required is the longing for the unknown, the longing for that which is not of this world. The longing seems to be almost mad to those who are concerned with money, power, prestige. They will think you have gone crazy if you become interested in meditation, if you become interested in silence, if you become interested in a master. But the East has paid tremendous respect to the masters.Ko Hsuan starts each sutra with these beautiful words:The Venerable Master said…He does not mention the name of the master. In fact, names are of no use as far as a master is concerned because a single master represents all the masters of the past, of the present, and of the future too because the taste of a master is the same. Whether you come close to a Buddha, or to a Mahavira, or to a Moses, or to a Mohammed, it makes no difference. You will have the same taste, the same ecstasy, the same perfume. The same joy will pervade you; the same dance will start happening in your heart.Buddha has said again and again that you can taste the sea from anywhere: you will always find it salty. So are the masters – names are irrelevant.Ko Hsuan does not mention the name of the master – names are utilitarian. A master represents the ultimate, the nameless. He is the spokesman of the nameless experience – let him also be nameless. That is his message. The Venerable Master said…Remember a few things before we enter into the sutra. Why does the East respect the master and not the teacher? Why the master and not the scholar? Why the master and not the pundit? Because the East has known that the pundit is only a parrot: he repeats what others have known; he has not experienced it himself. And because he has not experienced it himself, it has no validity. He may be able to argue well, he may be able to convince you, he may be able to masquerade many proofs for what he is saying, but what he is saying is still borrowed; it has no roots in his own being. He is only talking to you from his memory, not from his consciousness.And truth is not in the scriptures. Truth is your very center of being, it is your essential core. You can become very clever with words – it is not difficult either – but those words are impotent, those words are empty, those words really don’t have any meaning. Meaning comes through experience.When Jesus says something it has meaning. You can repeat the same words; it cannot have the same meaning because your experience is not of that level, of that plane. You will put your own meaning into it, you will pour your own experience into it. You will use Jesus’ words as containers, but the content will be yours. The bottle will be Jesus’, but the wine will be yours.And what have you got? You know nothing of importance. All that you know is simply rubbish – maybe useful in the world, maybe even necessarily needed in the world for a livelihood, but you don’t know what life is. You know how to earn money and you know only how to waste life.There was an old professor of DarjeelingWho traveled from London to Ealing.It said on the door,“Please don’t spit on the floor,”So he carefully spat on the ceiling.“That philosopher really suffers for his beliefs,” said Mulla Nasruddin one day to me.“Why, what does he believe?” I asked him.“That he can wear a size 8 shoe on a size 11 foot!”All your beliefs are like that. You are wearing clothes which were perfectly good for a buddha but are not good for you. You are wearing shoes which were perfectly good for Lao Tzu but are not good for you. You are living in houses made by others for a totally different purpose, which is not your purpose. Your whole life is a long, long misery for the simple reason that if you have a size 11 foot and you are wearing size 8 shoes, whatsoever you believe, your belief is not going to help; it will create misery for you.Look at people’s lives – no joy, no song, no celebration. And these are Christians: they believe in Christ. And these are Hindus: they believe in Krishna. And these are Buddhists: they believe in Buddha. Something very fundamental has gone wrong. They may say they believe in Buddha, but only the words can be of Buddha. Who is going to put the meaning in those words? You will put your own meaning – and unless your experience changes, your meaning is going to remain very ordinary.A man and his son are driving in a taxi with a great scholar in Paris near Place de la Madeleine. They pass through a street full of prostitutes standing on the sidewalk. The taxi is almost stopped by the traffic.“Daddy, Daddy, what are all these women doing standing there?”“Well…hmm…these women must he waiting for their husbands. You see, it is six o’clock and offices are closing.”“Don’t listen to your father! These are whores!” says the scholar who is a great believer of straightforwardness with children.“Daddy, what are whores?”“Well,…hmm…you see…it means they have more than one husband.”“You mean like movie actresses?”“Yes, but more – lots, hundreds, thousands of husbands!”“Gee! But all these thousands of husbands… Then they must have lots of children too!”“It is quite rare, but it happens, of course.”“And these children, Daddy, what do they become?”“They become…scholars!”The East has never paid any respect to the scholars. They are intellectual laborers, they are not real intelligentsia – the West has always mistaken them for real intelligentsia. They are intellectuals, but they are not intelligent people. Sometimes you will find the so-called intellectuals more stupid than farmers, gardeners, fishermen, and carpenters, for the simple reason that they live close to nature, to life, to existence. They have a far truer experience, far closer, intimate contact with reality than your so-called professors, pundits and scholars. They live surrounded with words – big words, bombastic words – but they live in prisons of words. You can be very easily deceived by them because they talk in the same way as the masters. They are pseudo, they are pretenders. Beware of it and beware of their stupidity.An Englishman is walking up a mountain when he sees a famous professor of philosophy passing in a car, driving backward up the hill.“Hey, professor!” the surprised Englishman calls out. “What are you doing?”“Well,” the professor answers, “I have to deliver a package up the mountain and I was told it was impossible to turn around up there.”After this both continued their trip up the hill. Fifteen minutes later the Englishman sees the car coming down the hill backward again.“Hey, professor, stop!” he says, “What is the matter?”“Oh!” the professor replies smiling. “I was wrong – I could turn anyway!”The master is one who lives the truth. Not that he knows about it, not that he has heard about it, not that he philosophizes about it, but he lives it, he knows it – he has become truth itself. His being is his teaching; everything else is just a device to bring awakening to the sleeping ones. If he uses words it is not to convey the truth, he uses words like alarm clocks to wake you. The teacher uses words to convey truth. And truth can never be conveyed by words. The master also uses words, but never to convey the truth. He knows perfectly well truth cannot be conveyed; it is untransferable. It cannot be communicated by any means, but you can be awakened to it.The real thing is not to tell you the truth; the real thing is to make you aware. The moment you are aware you know the truth because truth is already within you. It is not something that comes from the outside; it is something that is asleep within you and has to be awakened.The master uses words and because he uses words, scholars go on repeating the same words for centuries, thinking that they are important words, very important words. They must be containing truth because Buddha used them, Ko Hsuan used them, Bodhidharma used them, Rinzai used them, Bahauddin used them. Such great masters have used them – those words must contain something of immense value. They contain nothing. They were used for a totally different purpose. The purpose was to awaken the sleeping ones.Brigitte Bardot was given a parrot as a gift and she put it in her bedroom. Every night she would bring a new lover to her bed and from his cage the parrot would encourage all her lovemaking with words like, “Go on! Go on! You are coming!”After a few days Brigitte Bardot got rather annoyed with him and when one morning, while she was walking around naked, the parrot shouted, “Come here, beloved, I want to make love to you!” she got infuriated and beat the parrot up.While smoothing his feathers the parrot sadly said, “But you did not treat the other cocks like this!”The pundit is a parrot. He thinks Buddha influenced millions of people by his words. He thinks that Krishna transformed thousands of people with the Bhagavadgita and the words that it contains. Likewise that Mohammed has inspired thousands of souls for centuries by the Koran and the words that it contains – these words must be of great potential. So he goes on repeating those words. But those words contain nothing. He is simply imitating a device not knowing the exact purpose of it.A corporal is instructing his platoon. He calls a newly-arrived soldier and asks him, “You, Gino! What is the flag for you?”“The flag,” answers the soldier, “is a piece of cloth of different colors.”“What! What are you saying? You idiot! The flag is everything. The flag is your mother, remember, your mother!”Then he turns to the next soldier and asks, “Tell me what is a flag?”“Gino’s mother,” replies the soldier.Beware of the scholars; they are the most stupid people around. But they talk beautifully, and if you are not alert you can be very easily deceived by them. They recite the Koran, they recite the Bhagavadgita, they quote the Vedas, the Upanishads, they comment and they interpret, and in a very logical way, in a convincing way – it will appeal to your mind. But, in fact, Buddha never wanted to appeal to your mind, neither Krishna wanted to appeal to your mind. They wanted to help you to go beyond the mind. They were not to convince your mind because if you are convinced about a certain idea you will remain in the mind. They were trying to unhinge you from the mind.Can you see the totally different purpose? The purpose of a master is to push you beyond the boundaries of the mind, and the purpose of the scholar is to convince you intellectually about the rightness, about the validity of a certain ideology, philosophy. He makes your mind stronger, he gives you more mind. The master takes away your mind, the master destroys your mind. The teacher nourishes your mind. So, many times the teacher will look more appealing to you, more convincing to you.You can miss the master very easily because he will seem a dangerous person to be around. A teacher seems to be very fulfilling; he enhances your ego. It is not accidental that the West has respected the teacher because the West has believed for thousands of years that the ego has to be strengthened, that a strong ego is needed; without a strong ego a man has no personality. It is true: without a strong ego a man has no personality; but the ego is false and so is the personality.The word personality comes from a Greek word persona; persona means a mask. In ancient days Greek actors used masks. Those personas, masks, we are all carrying. A strong ego certainly gives you a strong personality in the original sense of the word, but the personality is not individuality and the ego is not your soul – just the contrary.The master destroys your personality so that your individuality can be discovered. He dismantles your personality, he takes away all your masks, so that you can know your original face. His work is difficult and only very courageous people can be with him because it is surgical. Your mask has become almost part of your existence; to take it away now needs surgery. It is not easy to take it away, it is painful. Only a master can take it away and slowly, slowly, chunk by chunk, he goes on taking away your mask. Finally, when the mask has completely disappeared, you discover your reality, your original face.The teacher gives you much thought; the master only gives you a meditativeness. The teacher gives you much to dream about, to desire about; the master hammers on all your dreams and destroys them. The master is against your sleep; the teacher is a sedative, a tranquilizer. The master is not a solace, is not a consolation, is not a tranquilizer. The master hurts, wounds, but he transforms.A man finds himself in purgatory. The angel-in-charge welcomes him in.“Not your turn today,” says the angel. “You still have more time to pass on earth. Come with me.”The angel takes him to a huge room full of small bottles full of oil. “These show how much life you have left,” says the angel. His bottle is almost empty.“Can I see my wife’s and children’s bottles?” he asks.“Sure,” says the angel, pointing to the three bottles next to his. The man cannot believe his eyes. For the children, the quantity seems normal, but his wife seems to have an extraordinary large quantity in her bottle.Left alone and thinking, as the angel is working with newcomers, he delicately sticks his finger in his wife’s bottle, takes a little oil and puts it in his own one. He keeps on doing this until the two bottles are more or less even. He wants to go on, but is suddenly awakened by a big slap and his wife’s voice saying, “You dirty old man, always wandering fingers, even when I sleep!”Man is deep asleep, dreaming, desiring, of hell, of heaven, of a thousand-and-one things. The function of the master is to hit you so hard that you cannot avoid waking up.Ko Hsuan says:The Venerable Master said:When he has clearly thought about these three he perceives only a void, but when he contemplates the void, he realizes that the void is also void and has become nothingness.This is a very significant sutra, but the first few words have to be put right. The translation is done by a scholar and that too by a Western scholar. He says: When he has clearly thought…Now, the original cannot mean that he has “clearly thought” because clarity and thought cannot exist together. That’s impossible; their coexistence is impossible. If there is clarity there is no thought; if there is thinking there is no clarity. It is like saying, “The sky was full of clouds and very clear. The sky was full of clouds and it was very sunny.” It is impossible. Either it is sunny and the sky is clear, then there are no clouds… If there are clouds, and many clouds, then the sun will be hiding behind the clouds and there can be no clear sky. You cannot see the sky because of the clouds.Clarity is a by-product of meditativeness, not of thought. But this is what is going to happen when scholars do these things. In their own way they are doing a great service, without knowing any different. And one cannot expect that they will be able to know – they have not experienced clarity. They have thought about it, but to think about clarity is one thing; to know clarity is a totally different thing.I know clarity, but in clarity there is no thought at all. And I have known thoughts: when there are thoughts there is no clarity. Hence, read this sentence in a little different way: When he has clearly meditated these three things he perceives only a void…In the last sutra we talked about the three things: sexuality – in India it is called kama; it is the source of all desires. Remember it: sexuality is not only the source of sex, it is the source of all desires. Hence you can change your desires, you can forget about sex completely, but if desires persist it is still sexuality. And you can watch it…There are people who are obsessed with money. You can see one thing: they are no longer interested in sex; their whole interest has moved into money. But now money has become their sex object. When they touch money they touch it as if they are touching their beloved. I have seen people touching one hundred rupee notes with such tenderness that it is unbelievable.I used to know one person whose only joy was money, even somebody else’s money. Just as if you are interested in beautiful women, it does not matter whose wife it is. If a beautiful woman passes by you become immediately interested; a great desire arises in you. Civilization prevents you; the police is there, the law is there, so you don’t do anything, you don’t act – that is one thing – but the thought starts fantasizing. The mind starts spinning, weaving dreams.The same was true about this man. He was a relative of mine. Somebody else’s money… If he sees that you have many notes in your pocket he will just take the money out, will count it, with such tenderness – and it is not his money either! He will give it back to you, but as he gives, you can see the sadness arising in his eyes, you can see the unwillingness.He was always asking for money, and he had enough money. He was always borrowing money from others.I used to ask him, “You have money – why do you go on borrowing?” And slowly, slowly he became very honest with me and he said, “I cannot use my own money in any way. It hurts to bring the money out of my own pocket – it hurts. I feel almost paralyzed! I can borrow it from somebody.”And he never used to give the money back. It was well known all over the city that once he takes money from you he will never give it back – he cannot. Everybody used to feel pity for him. He had ten bungalows, but he himself used to live in a very small room, in one of his bungalows’ servant quarters. He could have afforded a beautiful car, but he used to move on a bicycle so ancient and old that I have never seen anything older than that bicycle.And I told him, “At least you can purchase a new bicycle!”He said, “But this bicycle has served me for so long. Moreover, it is a gift from my father. Now my father is dead and this always reminds me of my father. And one thing is very good about this bicycle – nobody else can ride on it!”It was really difficult to ride on this bicycle; only he was an expert at riding it. It had only the most absolutely essential things on it – no chain cover, no mudguards, no horn, nothing, no brakes – and it used to make a noise that would be heard at least half a mile away. He would put it anywhere. He said, “Nobody ever steals it. Who will steal it?” – the whole city knew whose bicycle it is – “You will be caught immediately. And wherever you will move the whole neighborhood will know whose bicycle it is.”He would go into the movie house, but he would not put the bicycle on the stand because there you have to pay ten paise or twenty paise or something. He would put it anywhere outside the movie house and he would always find his bicycle in its place, he never lost it. To the very last day of his life he was using his bicycle.He lived a poor man’s life, a very poor man’s life – the life of a beggar. And he collected so much money; he had no son, no daughter. It almost always happens that miserly people don’t have children; there must be some psychological reason in it. In India the most miserly and rich people always have to adopt children. Poor people have many children, too many, in fact; they need birth control. And the rich people, the very rich, the miserly people, don’t have children. They are so miserly that something deep happens even to their chemistry. Their whole sexuality becomes obsessed with money.Hence, remember, Ko Hsuan calls sexuality the first poison. It does not mean only sex, it means all desires.A Scotsman arrives at the tollgate of a bridge, gives a penny to the attendant and walks on.“Hey, young man!” shouts the attendant. “The toll is two pennies!”“I know, I know,” replies the young man in a tired voice, “but I will only go halfway and then I will jump!”Coroner: “What were your husband’s last words, Mrs. Boccafucci?”Mrs. Boccafucci: “Emilio said, ‘I don’t see how they can make a profit on this Chianti at a dollar a gallon.’”Last words! Last words are always very important; they are the essence of your whole life. There are people who even at the very end of their life are thinking of money.When God created Switzerland he asked a Swiss, “What do you want?”Without hesitation the Swiss replied, “I want a lot of milk!”And so it was.After a few days God, curious, asked the Swiss, “Is your milk good?”“The best, my Lord,” replied the Swiss. “Try some!”God tasted it and found it really good. Then he asked the Swiss, “Do you want something else?”Again, without hesitation, the Swiss replied, “Yes, My Lord. Four francs for the milk you drank!”Even if you come across God, if you are obsessed with money you won’t see God at all; you will do what you have been doing your whole life. You will not change just by seeing God – nothing can change you unless you drop the poison yourself. And this happens only when a person becomes really meditative, when all thoughts disappear and he has a clarity to see, when he becomes a seer.The first poison is sexuality. And when you are thinking in terms of sexuality, whatsoever form your sexuality has taken – it may have become money obsession, it may have become power obsession, it does not matter – when you are thinking in terms of sexuality, everything deep inside you becomes sexual. Your whole life functions as a transforming mechanism for everything, to create more and more sexuality. Whatsoever you see, you see your own sexuality projected – you can’t see anything else. You lose all clarity. You become surrounded by your own inner poison; it goes on rising like smoke around you and you can see only through the smoke. The smoke distorts everything that you see.A black army private and a white sergeant were getting ready to go on leave, when, at the last minute, orders came that the private’s leave was canceled. The black man said to the white, “Sergeant, would you please tell my girlfriend what happened so she won’t think I ran off with another lady? She will believe you because you are my sergeant.”The sergeant agreed and took the address. When he arrived in town he looked up the house number and it turned out to be a whorehouse in the red light district of town. He went up to the house and knocked on the door.A large, black madam opened the door. She looked at the sergeant and said, “I am awfully sorry, sergeant, but we do not serve white men here, only black men.”The sergeant answered, “You don’t understand, madam! You see, I have got this black private…”The madam smiled and said, “Well, ain’t you the fancy one”The second poison, anger, arises whenever your sexuality is prevented. Anything that comes as an obstruction to your desires creates anger. You cannot drop anger unless desires disappear.Many people have asked me how to drop anger, and they don’t understand that they are talking of dropping a symptom. Anger is only a symptom. It simply says that somewhere your desire has been obstructed: something is coming between you, your desire, and the object of your desire – hence the anger. Anger means, “I will destroy the obstruction!” You cannot drop anger unless your sexuality disappears.It is not accidental that husbands and wives continuously quarrel and are angry with each other, for the simple reason…the sexuality. They are each other’s sexual object, and wherever there is sexuality there is anger. Anger is like smoke. Logicians say, “Wherever there is smoke there is fire.” You can say, “Wherever there is anger there is sexuality.” When anger disappears, that means sexuality has disappeared.The disappearance of anger happens only, is possible only, when the root is no longer there. You cannot drop your anger; you will have to go to the very root. Trying to drop your anger will only create new kinds of anger: you will repress it from one side, it will come from another side.It is because of this well-known fact that for centuries no country has allowed its soldiers to have free sexuality because if soldiers are allowed to have freedom about their sexuality, if their sex is not obstructed, then they lose destructiveness, then they lose anger, then they are no longer angry.Their sex has to be obstructed in many ways. They have to be deprived of their wives, they have to be kept away from their wives. Not only that: they have to be allowed to see all kinds of pornographic films, all kinds of pornographic magazines; they have to be allowed to come in contact with actresses. When two countries are at war, actresses go to meet and visit the soldiers to encourage them. And what is their encouragement? The encouragement is this: when an actress comes, a Sophia Loren comes, all the soldiers become sexually aroused. Of course, they cannot do anything about it; that aroused energy turns into anger, it becomes rage. Then they start destroying the enemy, then they are madly into destruction. If they are allowed to have their wives or girlfriends with them on the front, then they will lose interest in war.That is one of the reasons why the Americans now go on losing all their wars: their soldiers are the least sexually repressed people; they are not going to win any war. Sexual repression is a must – it creates anger. And when there is so much anger and there is no other outlet, then the only possible outlet is to destroy the enemy.And have you watched? It always happens that whenever an army conquers a country: the first victims are the women of that country; they are raped immediately. Cannot you see the relationship? Were the soldiers fighting for the women? Why do soldiers, immediately the moment they enter a city as conquerors, start raping around as if they were just waiting for the opportunity? There was no opportunity available; now it is available. The first thing is: rape the women. And the second thing is: rob people of their money. The first comes out of anger and the second comes out of greed, but the cause of both lies in the first. Repressed sex will create anger and greed.You will be surprised to know that any religion that has been teaching its followers some kind of repression has always helped its followers to become rich. In India, Jainas have become very rich; they are the most repressive people. And something of significance has to be understood about their psychology. Their religion says: “Repress sex.” Brahmacharya, celibacy is their goal. And the second thing it says is: “Don’t be violent.” So anger is not allowed. Sex is not allowed, anger is not allowed. Now where is the energy to go? Now only the third possibility is left – greed. So the Jainas have become the greediest people in this country.They are a small community, a very small community. In such a big, vast country they are nothing – but still they are very powerful because they have all the money. You will not come across a single Jaina beggar; nothing like it exists. They are not poor people – they cannot be poor. Their religion has made it absolutely certain for them that they will be rich. Sex has to be repressed and anger has to be repressed. Now only one outlet is left – greed. Become greedy.Do you know? The English word love comes from a Sanskrit root lobh. Lobh means greed; it is greed for the other’s body. So whenever a person looks sexually at somebody else you can see the greed in his eyes: he wants to possess the other’s body. That’s why every civilization allows only a certain time limit to look; more than that is thought to be offensive. Somehow a subtle agreement has happened, a deep contract: three seconds are allowed. If you look at a woman for three seconds, no offense will be taken. It will be thought just casual. But if you look for longer, then she will become annoyed. If you go on looking at her, then she will be angry; then you are behaving in an uncivilized way. You are looking at her body with greed to possess, to exploit, to use as a means. And of course, nobody wants to be reduced to a means, to a thing, to a possession.The English word greed also comes from a Sanskrit word, griddha; griddha means the vulture. The greedy person has a vulture-like quality, as if he wants to eat the other. And that kind of expression has come into many languages, particularly in French.I have heard…A ship was wrecked, and a Frenchwoman swam to an island. She was absolutely naked; all her clothes had gone into the sea. But the beach was beautiful, and she was lying on the beach naked, taking a sunbath, thinking “What to do next?” – wondering whether anybody lives on this island or not. There seemed to be no sign of anybody living…And then suddenly she heard a noise; somebody was coming, a very big man, almost like a huge gorilla. A very small tribe lived there. The tribe was of cannibals, hence it was very small because a cannibal tribe cannot grow – they start eating each other. And the cannibal was very happy seeing new food –she was looking so delicious!He came, looked at her and said, “I would like to eat you!”And the Frenchwoman said, “Then what you are waiting for?”The cannibal was puzzled. This was for the first time that somebody has said, “Why you are waiting? For what? Start!” – because in French “to eat” means “I want to make love to you.”Language gives great indications. In fact, when you look at a woman with greedy eyes you want to eat her – or a woman looks at a man… Ordinarily they don’t look because they have been taught for centuries not to look at the man; that has become their feminine grace. When somebody says to a woman, “I love you,” she looks downward – just to be certain whether he really means it or is just talking nonsense! She does not believe in words, she believes in the body, she believes in the physiology – and the body never lies.When one has come to deep meditation there is a clarity. In this clarity all the three poisons disappear without leaving a trace behind. And then one perceives only a void.The first experience of meditation is that of a void, but remember it is the first experience, the first satori: one experiences a void. But remember, the experience is still there; that’s why it is still the beginning, not the end. You experience the void, but the void experienced itself becomes something; it is not nothing.That’s why you will come across many Zen stories…The disciple comes to the master and says, “I have experienced nothing,” and the master hits him and says, “Go back and meditate again! You missed!”“But,” he says, “I have experienced nothing! And that’s what you were saying – that to experience nothing is what meditation is all about. And I have experienced it!”But the master still persists: “Go and meditate again – you missed.” Because if nothingness becomes also an experience, then it is something. You can experience only something. You have experienced nothingness, but once experienced it becomes an object and there is a division: the knower and the known. Hence it is the first satori.Ko Hsuan’s sutra is tremendously beautiful. He says: …he perceives only a void, but when he contemplates the void – but when he goes deeper into meditation – he realizes that the void is also void and has become a nothingness.As he goes deeper, the second satori opens up. Going deeper, he disappears as an experiencer. First the object disappeared and the void was there; but because of the old habit the void became the object. Now the experiencer has also gone. Now there is only nothingness – nobody to experience, nothing to be experienced. This is the second satori.The void having vanished into nothingness, he realizes that this nothingness of nothing is also nothing…This is the last possibility of still getting hooked into an experience. You can start rejoicing: “I have experienced nothing,” then you remain hooked with the first satori. You can start rejoicing: “I have experienced that there is no experience and no experiencer. I have experienced that both are void.” It is better than the first, deeper than the first, but somehow the experiencer has still saved itself in a subtle way. It has moved a little deeper – now it says, “I have experienced that there is no experience and no experiencer.” You will be hooked in the second satori.The third satori happens when:…he realizes that the nothingness of nothing is also nothing, and when the nethermost nothingness is reached…And this is the ultimate nothingness; then he does not claim at all. Now if you ask him, “What have you experienced?” he will smile. He cannot say, “I have experienced nothingness.” This is samadhi – the third satori, the ultimate flowering. Now there is nothing left, neither as an object nor as a subject nor as a transcendental subject which transcends both. Nothing is left. Buddha has called it anatta, no-self – a state of total nothingness, absolute nothingness. Hence, what can be said about it?Whenever anybody asked Buddha about the ultimate experience he will say, “Don’t ask absurd questions, ask practical questions. Ask how to reach it, don’t ask what has happened. It cannot be conveyed.”Lao Tzu says, “Truth said becomes a falsehood. Truth unsaid remains true but when uttered, becomes false.”The Upanishads say, “Those who say ‘We know,’ know not.”Socrates in his last stage of life said, “I know only one thing, that I know nothing.” But Ko Hsuan will say even that is not right: that is the second satori because he is still saying, “I know only one thing, that I know nothing.” Still the statement is there, still the knower is there. According to Ko Hsuan, at least, the statement is wrong. Socrates attained the ultimate samadhi, but Socrates is a Greek, he is not a Chinese – he speaks the way Greeks would have understood. He cannot speak in paradoxes, he speaks logically. Hence he says, “I know only one thing, that I know nothing.”Ko Hsuan will not even say that; Buddha will not say even that; Lao Tzu will not even say that.…when this nethermost nothingness is reached, there is most truly to be found a deep and unchanging stillness.Now for the first time a deep, unchanging stillness prevails. Eternity has opened its doors to you. Now there is no more falling back. You have gone beyond the beyond. You have transcended even the transcendental.In this profound stillness how can desires be begotten? When desires are no longer begotten, then there is essential and unchanging stillness.Truth is essentially unchanging.All things in heaven and earth are in essence unchanging.So whatsoever changes is only the appearance, what in India the mystics have called maya. It is only appearance.Forms change; the essential truth remains the same. Waves change; the ocean remains the same forever. Once you have seen this, you are no longer in any misery because you are no longer in any desire, no longer in any dreams. Once you have experienced this, you have become part of the organic whole. You have disappeared; you have become the very ocean. You are no longer a wave, you are no longer a dewdrop, you are oceanic.To experience this oceanic vastness is the experience of Tao. And the secret is in meditation. One has to pass through three stages: the first satori, the experience of the void; the second satori, the experience that the void is void; and the third satori – now nothing can be said anymore. Now all is silent and still, absolutely silent and still.The master is one who has reached this third, one who has transcended the transcendental, one who has gone beyond the beyond. Then he has the being of the whole. To be in tune with him is to be in tune with existence, with Tao, with truth. To be in tune with him is to be in tune with bliss, with beauty, with benediction.Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Could you say something about innocence and ignorance?The difference between the two is immense; it is as vast as possible. It is the difference between darkness and light, the difference between death and life, the difference between unconsciousness and consciousness, the difference between hell and heaven.Ignorance is darkness. It is a state of total negativity; it is a state of knowledge – the lowest state of knowledge, the zero state of knowledge. But it is not different from the knowledgeable mind; they belong to the same category. The ignorant person and the knowledgeable person are not qualitatively different, only quantitatively different. The difference is that of degrees: the knowledgeable person knows more, the ignorant person knows less. And you can be knowledgeable in comparison to one person and ignorant in comparison to another. Hence it is a question of relativity.Even the most ignorant person may be knowledgeable in comparison to somebody else, or even the most knowledgeable person may be ignorant except in his own expertise. The mathematician is ignorant as far as physics is concerned, the physicist is ignorant as far as chemistry is concerned, the chemist is ignorant as far as mathematics is concerned and so on, so forth. All experts are knowledgeable only in one direction and in all other directions they are utterly ignorant.That’s why a very strange phenomenon is well known: that the people who are very logical, very argumentative, rational in their particular field, prove to be very gullible in other fields. You may find a great scientist believing in Satya Sai Baba. It looks absurd, but it is not so absurd. Deep down that great scientist knows nothing of religion. He is as ignorant or even more ignorant than an ordinary person. The ordinary person knows much more about religion than the great scientist. The great scientist has poured his whole energy into one concentrated field, excluding everything else.You can deceive a scientist very easily; it will not be so easy to deceive a farmer. The farmer is not a great logician but he knows many things. He is not an expert in any specialized field, but his general knowledge is far bigger, vaster than the expert. Many great scientists fall victim to all kinds of superstitions.I have heard the story of a Nobel Prize winning scientist who was hanging a horseshoe behind a chair in his study. Another scientist had come to visit him and he could not believe his eyes, because it is believed by only the ignorant masses that keeping a horseshoe hanging in your room is very good. It protects you; it is a kind of supernatural protection. The visiting friend asked the scientist, “I cannot believe my eyes! You are a Nobel Prize winning scientist; do you still believe in this nonsense, in this superstition that a horseshoe is protective?”The Nobel laureate laughed. He said, “No, not at all – this is all nonsense. I never believe in such stupidity!”The friend was even more puzzled. “Then why you are hanging this ugly horseshoe behind your chair?”The scientist said, “But the person who has given it to me said whether you believe in it or not, it protects you all the same!”It is defined that science is an effort to know more and more about less and less. That’s exactly what specialization is. If you follow this logic, then the ultimate science will be to know all about nothing; that will be the logical conclusion. If science is knowing more and more about less and less, then where it will end? It will end in knowing all about nothing.Scientists are very gullible people, and the priests and the so-called saints exploit this opportunity very much. And then they brag, “Look, such a great scientist is my follower!” In fact, it is not the scientist who is his follower, it is the remaining part in him which is not a scientist, and which is far bigger than the scientist. Only a small fragment of his being has become scientific – maybe just one percent of his being – ninety-nine percent is as stupid or even more than the ordinary people, because the ordinary people don’t know more and more about less and less; they know something about everything. You cannot exploit them so easily.Ignorance simply means that you are missing knowlegeability. A little education and your ignorance can become knowledge. Just a little conditioning, schooling, and your ignorance can be changed into knowledge. There is no difference between ignorance and knowledge; they are interchangeable.But innocence is a totally different phenomenon. It has nothing to do with knowledge and nothing to do with ignorance either. It is a state of total freedom – from both ignorance and knowledge. It is a state of wonder. It is a very positive state of tremendous awe. When you are full of wonder and awe; when your heart starts throbbing with each beautiful moment that passes by – with the roses, with the marigolds, with the lotuses, with the stars, with the sun, with the moon, with people, with rivers, mountains.When you can experience and feel the mystery of life, when you are so sensitive, so vulnerable, so open that the miraculous can penetrate to the very core of your being, then you are innocent.The knowledgeable cannot be innocent. His wonder dies because of his idea that he knows. All his answers are borrowed. All that he knows he really does not know, but he carries all kinds of answers, ready-made answers. Because of those ready-made answers nothing surprises him, nothing at all. He can go on amid this beautiful existence without feeling any joy, any surprise, any wonder, any thrill, any excitement, any ecstasy. He is almost deaf. He cannot hear the music of the birds singing in the morning, he cannot hear the music of the wind passing through the pine trees. He cannot see the life of the trees, of the grass. He cannot see the beauty of a bird on the wing in the silent infinite sky. He walks without ever experiencing the splendor of the stars. He remains blind. He knows no poetry. His approach toward life is completely blocked by his acquired knowledge, by his accumulated answers. He has a ready-made answer for everything. Before a question arises, the answer is already there; even before the question, the answer is already there. The knowledgeable person never listens to the question. He never tries to go deep into the question itself. He hears the question and a process of many answers is triggered in him and he starts answering.But the man of innocence has no answers. He listens to life in silence. He listens, he sees, he tastes, he smells, he touches. He is very alive. The knowledgeable person is dead, completely closed. He lives in his own grave, that’s why he drags. He has to carry such a burden.The man of innocence dances; he does not even walk. He is very light. And each small thing fills him with the presence of the mysterious. A butterfly and all its colors, a rainbow in the sky, is enough to throw him into deep meditativeness. He knows no answer, he can only watch the rainbow. He has nothing to say, he can only see – his seeing is clear – he can only hear.I used to know a very knowledgeable man when I was a child. He used to stay with my family once in a while. He was a great scholar; interested in all kinds of details. For example he knew the names of all possible trees. He used to take me for a morning walk and he would tell me the name of each tree. I have never come across a man who knows the names of all the trees, small shrubs, bushes, all kinds of plants; not only the names – their history, from where they come, what country is their original place.But one thing I became aware of: he never looked at the trees; he could not. Seeing a rose he would immediately say, “This rose has come from Iran. The Indian word for rose is gulab. The word rose is of Persian origin. That means the flower has come from Persia; it is not of Indian origin. There is no Sanskrit word for gulab – naturally, the flower never existed in India in the Vedic age. It must have come later on. Who brought it first? How did it come?” And he would go on and on; he wouldn’t look at the rose. And he was thinking that he was teaching me.I told him, “You are destroying something tremendously beautiful in me. Please stop all this nonsense!”He said, “What do you mean? Is this nonsense? I have acquired it through my whole life!”I said, “You have wasted your life because you don’t allow me to see any tree, any plant, any flower. If this is going to be so then I am not coming with you tomorrow. You go alone and you can say to yourself whatsoever you want to say. I am not going to be a part of this stupid dialogue. I am perfectly happy with the rose, I don’t want to know from where it has come. Who cares? I am not interested in its origins. I am not interested in the word. What does it matter whether it has come from Persia or not? The rose is not interested so why should I be interested? The rose is enjoying the morning sun, dancing in the morning breeze – and you are talking about Persia and language and grammar and how the word has come into use and when it started for the first time in Indian literature, when it entered Indian books for the first time. If you want me to accompany you, then you have to keep completely silent.”And he certainly wanted me to accompany him because he was not acquainted with the territory of my town: the roads, streets and ways that lead you out of the town. And he wanted to go every day toward a new direction.I said, “If you want to keep my company then you have to be silent; if you don’t want my company then you can keep your knowledge. Then whatsoever you want to do you can do – neither I care about it nor the roses care about it.”He was very shocked. He told my father, “Your son seems to be against knowledge and this is not a good sign. He should be interested in knowledge. This is the time when one should learn.”My father said, “He is a little difficult child and I knew before that some difficulty would arise when you are taking him for a morning walk.”And he said, “He has given me an ultimatum: either I have to keep quiet or he is not going to come with me.”My father told him, “When he says something he means it! You decide.”He knew all the names of all the birds and he was trying to show his knowledge. I said, “Stop all this exhibitionism!”But he said, “Whenever I go to other places and I talk to other people, they all appreciate how much I know.”I said, “They are just as stupid as you are! But I am not stupid. I am not interested in the names of the birds. I want to enjoy their beauty, of course. I want to see them on the wing, in the wind, moving toward the sun. What tremendous joy! What freedom! If I had wings I would have followed them. But I cannot follow you – you will destroy me.”It was very difficult for him to keep silent, but he had to keep silent because there was nobody else to take him, nobody else who was so acquainted with the territory around the town. I was acquainted with every inch of the whole territory because I was always roaming around, missing from school. I knew all the hillocks and I had followed the river as far away as possible. I had gone to all the surrounding mountains. I was the best guide for him. Even in the night I could have taken any direction, to anywhere. But I said, “You have to keep the promise: keep completely silent.”After two days he said, “This is too much! Many times I want to say something to you because you are ignorant!”I said, “Leave me as I am. I may look ignorant to you; I am not ignorant because I am not hankering for knowledge. If I am hankering for knowledge then I am ignorant. I am not hankering for knowledge; I don’t care a bit about knowledge. I am perfectly happy with my innocence and I want to leave it intact.”Innocence is a positive state of wonder, of awe. No society allows innocence because the society needs knowledge, it depends on knowledge. And I can understand that knowledgeable people will be needed; the whole technology, science, everything depends on them. So it is okay to be knowledgeable when you are working, but leave it there. Don’t carry it around twenty-four hours. People are carrying for twenty-four hours things which should not be carried for twenty-four hours.When you are a doctor, be a doctor. But when you leave your hospital, forget all about medicine, forget all about what you know, forget all about your MDs and FRCS and everything. Just be innocent so that you can again be in that tremendously beautiful state of childlikeness.Jesus says, “Blessed are those who are like small children for theirs is the Kingdom of God.”Never for a moment get confused between innocence and ignorance. Many times they appear to be the same but they are not the same; they can never be the same. Innocence is a state of meditativeness. When you are silent, aware, open, in contact with the whole, in tune with Tao, then you are innocent.Lao Tzu is innocent, Buddha is innocent, Krishna is innocent, Jesus is innocent. These are not knowledgeable people. Of course what they have said out of their knowing we have changed into knowledge; what they have said out of their wonder, we have reduced it to philosophy, theology. That is our work. We have destroyed all that was beautiful in it. We have given it a certain shape, a certain pattern and structure. We have interpreted it, commented upon it, dropped many things out of it. And this always happens.Just the other day I received a note from Arup, that “Sarjano is translating your books into Italian, but he changes many things. He drops a few things, he adds a few things from his own knowledge.”Of course he is trying to do some good work, his intention is good. He wants to make it more logical, more intellectual, more sophisticated. And I am the type of man who is a little bit wild! He wants to trim me here and there. Look at my beard – if Sarjano is allowed he will trim it like Nikolai Lenin, but then it will not be my beard. He is trying to make it more appealing. There is no doubt about his intentions, but these are the intentions which have always destroyed.When he was told my message that he has to do exactly as it is: “Don’t try to improve upon it. Leave it as it is. Raw, wild, illogical, paradoxical, contradictory, repetitive, whatsoever it is, leave it as it is!” it was so difficult for him. He said, “Then I will not translate. I would rather like cleaning work.”You see how the mind works? He is not ready to listen to me, he would rather like to do cleaning work. Otherwise he has to be allowed to interpolate, to change, to color things according to his idea.Now, whatsoever you will do will be wrong because what I am saying is from a totally different plane and what you will be doing will be a totally different effort – it won’t belong to my plane, it won’t belong to my dimension. It may be scholarly, but I am not a scholar. It may be knowledgeable, but I am not a knowledgeable person.Knowledgeable people have their own ways. Just small things they will do…For example, I had said that Saraha is the founder of Tibetan Buddhism; no scholar will say this so decisively. Only a madman can say this so decisively because you have to give proof. You have to give footnotes and you have to make a big appendix in which you have to give proof. I never give any proof, I never give any footnotes, I never give you any sources from where… I know only one source – the Akashic records!So just to make it more appealing, more digestible, he had changed it just a little, not much, to “Saraha can be said to be the founder of Tibetan Buddhism”. Now using “can be said” is a scholarly way, a legal way, but it destroys the whole beauty of it. It destroys its whole certainty, its decisiveness, its hammer-like quality. And hammers are not supposed to be digestible!Sarjano, it is not a spaghetti! He is a good cook and makes beautiful spaghetti. I don’t know anything about spaghetti, but I know Saraha is the founder of Tibetan Buddhism. And I will not give any proof about it – I don’t believe in proof, I simply know. I know Saraha; it is a personal friendship with Saraha. Even if the historians prove something else, I won’t listen. I won’t pay any attention to them because I know Saraha.Just the other day I was reading a beautiful report of the Protestant Church in Germany – again they have published a report about me! Now, it seems the man who has written the report on me and my work has become very confused, has also fallen in some kind of love with me. Now he is wavering. He cannot refute me totally – seems to be a man of some sensibility – he cannot say that I am utterly wrong, so he has found a middle way. He supports me on everything except Jesus. And he says about Jesus that whatsoever I am saying looks appealing, but it does not come from Christian sources.Who cares about Christian sources? Burn them all! I am interested in Christ, I am not interested in Christian sources. I know Christ directly. And when I say I know Christ or Buddha or Saraha directly, I simply mean that I know that state of being. I know Christ can only say this because from such a state of samadhi no other statement is possible. This is something inner which needs no proof; it is intuitive. My certainty arises within me. Whether Jesus said it or not is not the question at all. When I quote Jesus… He says I interpret Jesus beautifully but my interpretations are very alien to Christian theology. They are bound to be: Christ himself is very alien to Christian theology – what can I do about it?If Christ comes back, he will not be able to recognize Christian theologians. He will not be able at all to understand what this fuss is all about. He was a simple man making simple statements, very direct, immediate. And these people are creating great sophistication around it. For two thousand years they have been going round and round.But the man who has written it – he is a PhD, a DD, and the most important expert in the whole of Germany on Protestant theology, but the way he has written the report… He has fallen in love with me. Although he is supposed to refute me, he goes on supporting me in many ways. Of course there is one thing he has to do to keep his salary intact and his profession, otherwise he will be thrown out of the church immediately, so he says everything is okay except what I say about Jesus. And the reason he gives is that it does not seem to come from Christian sources.But Jesus never came from Christian sources! There were no Christian sources when Jesus was here. He was in contact with strange people; those people were not Christians. He was in contact with Essenes; they were great mystics. He traveled all over Asia, he traveled to India, to Tibet, to become acquainted with the Eastern approach.Buddha was still very much alive in the air – it was just five hundred years earlier that Buddha had died. And Buddha had said that, “My religion will remain alive for five hundred years.” It was still alive; the last flames were dying. He must have felt the warmth. Jesus must have contacted Buddhist mystics.He went to Egypt in search of secret mysteries. That’s why Christian sources completely miss many years of his life. They talk about him when he was twelve years old and then suddenly they start talking about when he was thirty years old. And what happened in between? Between the ages of twelve and thirty there is a long distance, and in a life which lasted only thirty-three years it is almost the whole life. Christian sources give no reference to it, but there are other sources.In Ladakh there are two-thousand-year-old Buddhist scriptures which talk about the visit of Jesus Christ. And they describe the man far more accurately because the people who wrote those things were mystics themselves.But this has always happened. Innocence will always be interpreted by knowledgeable people and will be destroyed – and with all good wishes, with all good intentions they will do a great harm. They have always done that.Remember, I am not telling you to remain ignorant; I am telling you to get rid of both ignorance and knowledge. They are not different – two sides of the same coin. Throw the whole coin, and then you are innocent.The second question:Osho,What is ambition? To live without ambition seems frightening, like starting a new life up from the beginning.Ambition is the greatest poison there is. It brings all the other poisons: greed, violence, competitiveness, struggle, a constant state of war with everybody else. It does not allow you any space for love to grow and your real being flowers only with love. Ambition is against love. Anything that is against love is against you and your real life, your real destiny. And nothing kills love more than ambitiousness.Ambition means you want to be ahead of others. Ambition depends on creating an inferiority complex in you. It creates an ill state of affairs; it depends on that. Unless an inferiority complex starts existing in you, unless you are full of it, ambition cannot function.So each child has to be wounded in such a way that he starts feeling a deep inferiority: that others are superior and he has to surpass them, otherwise he is nobody. Each child is taught to create a name in the world, fame in the world. Each child is told, “The way you are is not right. You have to prove your mettle, you have to become ‘somebody’ – as if you are not anybody yet!”You are born with a certain flavor of your own, with a uniqueness, with an individuality. Nobody else is like you – nobody else has ever been like you – and nobody else will ever be like you. But this truth is never told to you. You are told, “Become somebody,” as if you are nothing. So you have to become, you have to compete to become. And of course then the struggle starts because everybody is told to become somebody, everybody is told to become the president or the prime minister. Now, how many people can be presidents and prime ministers? Then naturally there arises a cut-throat competition. Everybody is against everybody else. Life becomes a war, a constant war. In this state there is no possibility of peace, love, silence, joy, celebration. All is lost.John Lennon, in one of his creative moods, was sitting alone in his room strumming his guitar. While doing this he saw a beetle scuttle across the floor.“Hello, little beetle,” said John, “I named my group after you.”The beetle stopped, turned around and said, “You called your group Eric?”That was his name. You think only man is competitive? Even beetles are!This competitiveness in individuals becomes competitiveness on many planes, on many levels. Societies compete with each other, nations compete with each other. Everybody is trying that “I am superior to you” and naturally nobody will allow that “You are superior to me” – it hurts.Hence so many wars. In three thousand years there have been five thousand wars. If somebody comes from some other planet and looks at us and our history, he will think that this earth is a madhouse. Five thousand wars in three thousand years! What we have been doing except fighting? Seventy percent of our energies go into war; we could have transformed the whole earth into a paradise and we have made a hell of it.But there is competitiveness about everything.The NATO forces were on maneuvers in Europe and each country had a separate camp in close proximity to each other.One day the British camp received a message from the American camp which read: “Please send three dozen condoms, as we have run out of stock. Size: twelve inches long by three inches thick.”The message was taken to the Commanding Officer who did not know what to do with it, so he sent for the Intelligence Officer. “Matter of prestige, old man,” said the Commanding officer. “Have to do something!”The Intelligence Officer returned within the hour. “All taken care of, sir. The motor workshop is making something out of old inner tubes and the silk-screen department is going to do the final touches.”“What are the final touches?” asked the Commanding officer.“Well, sir,” said the Intelligence officer, “on the package will be printed: ‘Condoms, Made in England, Size – Medium.’”This stupidity, about everything! But we are brought up in this way; our whole educational system depends on this foundation – and we think we are creating intelligence. If this stupidity is the foundation of our educational system, how can we create intelligence out of it? We can destroy intelligence, but we cannot create intelligence out of it.An intelligent person is one who comes to see that there is no need to compete at all. “I am myself, you are yourself. I need not be you, you need not be me.” A rose is a rose is a rose; it need not be a lotus. The lotus need not become anxious, worried about becoming a roseflower.The whole of nature is in deep peace for the simple reason that competition has not poisoned it. There is no competition at all. The biggest cedar of Lebanon has no ego like “I am bigger than others.” Just a small rosebush has no inferiority complex that “I am so small.” Nothing of superiority, nothing of inferiority, but each is unique. This stupidity has entered only human consciousness – human consciousness is being conditioned for it.You ask me, “What is ambition?” It is a feverish state, it is an insane state. It is not healthy. You say, “To live without ambition seems frightening…” Of course because you have lived with ambition for so long, it has become your very lifestyle. You have become identified with it; you don’t know any other way of living. To drop it feels as if you are dying.And in fact that’s what has to be done by a sannyasin: he has to die in many ways before he can be reborn. And this is a must: that you should die as an ambitious person, you should die as an ambitious mind completely, totally. Not even a trace of ambition should be left in you because even if a small trace is there, it will start growing again. It is like a root: it will again sprout, again leaves will grow, again there will be foliage. It has to be completely thrown out of your being.Yes, it feels difficult, very arduous, almost impossible in the beginning because we don’t know any other way to live.People ask me, “If we drop competitiveness, if we drop ambitiousness, then how we will grow?” and trees are growing and animals are growing, and the whole existence is moving and growing – just you cannot grow without ambitiousness.And what has happened with ambitiousness? Have you grown? Something wrong has grown in you; something like cancer in your being has grown. Yes, that cancer will not grow anymore. If you drop all ambition, then a totally new process sets in: your natural growth takes over. Then you are not competing with others. You are simply evolving each moment within yourself, not comparing. If you are playing music and it is beautiful in this moment, the next moment it will be more beautiful because out of this moment the next moment is going to be born – from where else will it come? – next moment you will have a deeper music arising, and so on, so forth. You need not be competitive with other musicians. In fact, if you are competitive with other musicians your inner music will never grow. You may learn more tricks, strategies, techniques to defeat them, to go ahead of them by right or wrong means – because competitiveness is so blind it does not bother at all what is right and what is wrong.Competitiveness believes that whatsoever succeeds is right and whatsoever fails is wrong. That is the only criterion for an ambitious mind: the end makes the means right. For a noncompetitive mind there is no question about thinking of others; you simply continue growing on your own. Your roots go deeper into Tao, into nature. Not that other trees have reached deeper so you also have to reach – you reach deeper for your own nourishment, you reach deeper for your own enrichment, you reach deeper because your branches can go higher. The deeper the roots go, the higher the branches reach. But it has nothing to do with others; the others are accepted as they are. Nobody takes any note of others.It is certainly starting a new life up from the very beginning. That’s why Christ says, “Unless you are born again you shall not enter my Kingdom of God.” A rebirth is needed.A championship is held to see who has the largest prick in the world. The theater is filled with people and the gays are screaming with excitement. Up in front sit the judges.First a Russian comes on stage. He is enormous and the applause is loud. The judges measure him and there is more applause.Next a black man comes on stage. He is huge and loud applause sounds through the theater.Then an Italian and a Japanese come forward. Both are measured and receive standing ovations.The excitement of the crowd is mounting when a dwarf suddenly appears on stage. Everyone whistles and yells for him to leave. But the dwarf raises one arm in the air and asks for silence. Then when all is quiet, he opens his fly and takes out a turtle, shouting, “Just a minute folks, this is just a crab!”The third question:Osho,What do you mean by “live in danger”? Should man not be careful for the future? Please explain it.To live in danger simply means not to cling to the past because the past gives you a certain kind of security – because it is familiar and well-known. Maybe it is all misery, all anguish, but still because it is known and you have lived through it for so long, you are well acquainted with it. You know the ups and downs and you have become accustomed to it. In fact, you have become adjusted to it and now there are no more surprises in it. It gives you a certain comfortable, convenient, cozy feeling. It may be dirty, it may be enclosed like a prison, but still it feels like your home because you have lived so long in it. Even prison cells become people’s homes.I used to visit prisons; a governor of one of the states in India was my friend so he allowed me to visit all the prisons in that state. I used to go to the prisons and I was surprised to see that people were perfectly happy. In fact, they started becoming worried when their time for release was coming closer because the outside world looked so alien. Somebody has lived for fifteen years in the prison; now, for fifteen years he had no worries about food, shelter, no problems of any kind. He was taken care of. Now he will have to look for a job again, whether he will get it or not is uncertain. Outside the gate is unknown. Once he is outside the gate he will be thrown into an unknown world. Fifteen years is a long time.I asked many prisoners, “Why do you come back again and again? Have you not learned the lesson that you should not do such things again?”They said, “In fact, we have learned the lesson. Inside there is so much security and outside so much insecurity – unemployment, poverty, starvation and all kinds of problems. And once you have been released from prison, your problems increase because nobody wants a thief as a servant. People ask, ‘Why you have been sent to jail?’ People ask, ‘Bring certificates, character certificates.’ From where can we get character certificates? For fifteen years we have been in jail! We can get a character certificate from the jailer that ‘This man behaved well, did nothing wrong,’ but that will be from a jailer and that is enough proof that nobody is going to give us employment, nobody is going to trust us. Outside the prison there are only vast unknown faces, so the only alternative is to do something again so that we are sent back to the jail.”Our whole system of punishment is stupid; it is utterly nonpsychological. Any person who goes to the prison once is bound to come back again and again and again. He creates friendship there, his friends are there, his room is there, his place is there. Even in prisoners a certain hierarchy arises: there are people who are important and there are people who are not so important and there are people who are just nobodies. And it is a small compact world. There are heroes: people talk about, “This man has murdered seven people and you have murdered only one, just one? And you brag so much? And somebody has been stealing for years, and you did your first theft and were caught? What kind of thief are you?” There are master thieves; people start learning from the knowledgeable people, and when they come out they use their knowledge.When I say to live in danger, I mean always remain prepared to move into the unknown. It does not mean that you should not be careful for the future, but the best care that you can take about the future is to first get rid of the past. It is the past that does not allow you to take care of the future. It is the past that goes on repeating itself mechanically and you cannot improve upon your future. If you drop the past completely, your future will be totally different and you will start growing. That is the first care you should take.The second care that can be taken is to live in the present as totally as possible because it is out of the present that the future grows. And you never bother about the present; you think only of the future. You constantly think of the future. Either you think of the past or you think of the future, and both are foolish. Live in the present. That’s what I mean when I say live dangerously.I have come across a story. Somebody like you must have invented it because there is no reference about it anywhere – neither in Christian sources nor in non-Christian sources.Two women are crying and weeping under Jesus’ cross. One says to the other, “I would give everything to be able to take the nail out of his hand!”After a few minutes, the other replies, “Yes, me too. I would give everything to be able to take the nail out of his hand!”Jesus looks down and mumbles to himself, “Damn! Those two bitches want me to fall off the cross!”You become even adjusted to your cross. You don’t even want to fall off your cross. Being on your cross even becomes cozy, comfortable – it is your cross. You start worshipping it, you start bragging about it.Just watch people, listen to their stories. They are all bragging about their miseries. They go on magnifying their miseries, exaggerating their miseries, as if they are not satisfied with the small miseries that they are suffering; they want bigger ones. They have become adjusted to their cross.I am telling you: leave your cross behind. Jesus says, “Carry your cross on your own shoulders.” I say drop it, why carry it? Forget all about it! And how can you dance if you are carrying a cross on your shoulders? No wonder Christians say Jesus never laughed. How can you laugh when you are carrying a cross on your shoulders? You can only weep, you cannot laugh.When I say live dangerously, I say don’t become adjusted to that which is dead because if you become adjusted to that which is dead, you will be dead. Remain alive, moving, growing, flowing, going into the unknown every moment, facing the unknown whatsoever it brings. There is no other way to grow, and even if sometimes it is painful – and it is painful sometimes, it is rough sometimes, it is very rough sometimes, but out of this pain is born great ecstasy. That is the price we pay for the ecstasy.The fourth question:Osho,After yesterday's discourse a couple of women came up to me and asked if we could get together and tell jokes. I had to say no, that I only joke with one person and that I am not joking around. What to do?That’s a beautiful use of the word joke; it reminded me of a joke.A young man is driving with his girlfriend on a lonely road and one tire gets punctured. So they jacked and jacked and jacked – and then went out to change the tire.You are using “joke” in the same sense as “they jacked and jacked and jacked” – inside the car! It is good finding new meanings to old words, but you seem to be a little old-fashioned.If you joke only with one person then for how long can you keep joking? You will get bored. And think of the other person too: he or she will also get bored. A little bit of joking around is not bad! It keeps the water flowing. And joking is not a one-way affair. When you joke with somebody, somebody jokes with you; you can’t go on joking alone. Or do you think you can do that? That you simply lie down and “I will joke alone.” You will look very silly. The other has to joke also. So instead of just listening to each other’s old jokes it is better to joke around a little so you both will learn a few new jokes. Then come back to the girlfriend or boyfriend and joke in a new way and they will be thrilled! And by that time they must have joked somewhere else, so they will bring some new jokes. And remember, each person jokes in his own way.Don’t be so old-fashioned – and not in my commune!It was Easter time and the rooster was curious, hearing all the people talking about Easter eggs.When the day came he walked into the house to take a look at the famous eggs. To his shock, he saw blue eggs, yellow eggs, green eggs, and a red egg.Without stopping to think, he went back outside and beat up the peacock!Now don’t be that kind of traditional rooster! It is good to have all kinds of eggs, all colors, multicolors. Then life is more like a rainbow. Otherwise it becomes a drag and dull.And joking with one person has created monotony – people call it “monogamy.” And then slowly, slowly they stop joking because what is the point? The same jokes again and again… And the women are very sensitive; the moment you want to joke with them they say they have a headache, or the child is growing teeth and the whole day they have been tired, or the cook has left, or the servant has not turned up, or there has been no electricity in the house the whole day. There are a thousand-and-one problems. Simply the woman is saying, “Please, no more of these jokes. Enough is enough!” She knows you, that you will again joke the same old joke.A stranger walks into the local pub. The bartender welcomes him and says, “Well, sir, a pint of beer? Or do you prefer a whisky? You are my guest – it is on the house.”“No, thank you,” replies the stranger. “I don’t drink alcohol. I tried it once and it makes me feel dizzy.”“Well then, I am sure you will enjoy one of my best cigars,” the cheerful bartender says, offering him the cigar.“No, thank you. I don’t smoke. I tried it once and it makes me feel sick.”The bartender, still smiling, continues, “Well, come on then, let us play some poker!”“No, thank you. I don’t play poker. I tried it once and lost my money,” is the stranger’s dry reply.At this moment a young man walks into the bar and sits next to the stranger. The stranger turns to the bartender and says, “May I introduce you to my son?”“Hello,” says the bartender, “I presume that you are his only child are you not?”Become a little more contemporary. You are living at least two thousand years back. And don’t think this is the way you will ever get into paradise – paradise has completely changed meanwhile; it is utterly modern. You will look like a fool there, you will look so out-of-date. You will not fit. If you cannot fit here with my commune, which is simply representative of paradise on the earth… We are just trying to rehearse for paradise!Four women arrive in paradise; three of them are English and one is Italian. Saint Peter asks the first one, “Have you been an honest woman?”“Oh yes, sir,” she replies. “I have been honest all my life.”So Saint Peter tells an angel, “Take this woman into the pink room!”The same thing happens to the other two women: they are both sent to the pink room.Then Saint Peter asks the Italian one, “And you, have you been honest?”“I never did-a any harm-a to anyone, Peter!” she replies. “I could-a say I was-a honest. I loved love, I loved love more than anything-a else!”Says Saint Peter to the angel, “Take this one to my room!”Enough for today.

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

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/tao-the-golden-gate-vol-2-06/

The first question:Osho,Tao is greater than the mind. Then why do we keep choosing the mind instead of flowing with the Tao?It is precisely because of that. Tao is so vast that one is afraid to lose one’s identity in it. We are like dewdrops and Tao is like an ocean. The dewdrop is afraid, very frightened to get closer to the ocean – one step in the ocean and he will be lost forever. He wants to cling to his identity; howsoever small, howsoever tiny, howsoever mediocre, but it is his identity, it is his personality. He is only because he is separate from the ocean.That’s the way of the ego: the ego can exist only in separation. Separation creates misery because you become uprooted from the whole, but one is ready to suffer misery rather than to die and disappear into absolute bliss. People only talk about bliss, nobody really wants to be blissful. They talk about bliss as if they can remain the same and bliss can be added to them as they are. They want bliss also to be a kind of new possession so that their ego can feel more enhanced, more defined, more precious, more enriched.But as the ego becomes more defined you become smaller. As you become smaller you become miserable because you start feeling suffocated, you start feeling closed from all sides. Your prison cell becomes smaller and smaller – even to exist in it becomes impossible. But people are ready to suffer all kinds of misery, they are ready to sacrifice everything for the ego.That’s why we cling to the mind. The mind is nothing but the process of the ego, the functioning of the ego. The mind is the boundary between you and the whole. It is a wall, not a bridge – no-mind is the bridge. Hence the emphasis of all the awakened ones to move from the mind to no-mind. The ego can exist only if you remain in constant fight; a continuous struggle is needed because it is a false entity. You have to maintain it. It is not something spontaneous, it is not something natural that can exist on its own. It needs competitiveness, it needs conflict; it needs all kinds of jealousies, possessiveness, hatred, war. It can exist only with all that is wrong.The ego represents the unhealthy state of our being. It is assertive. To relax is against the ego, to be non-ambitious is against the ego. Just a moment of relaxation is enough and you will have the taste of Tao, because it is always there, it is never really lost. You go on creating walls, but all walls crumble in a split second. Hence, wherever it happens, in whatsoever situation it happens, you become frightened of that situation.People have become afraid of love for the simple reason that love is the most potential force in existence – when the window in Tao opens on its own accord. Love means the wall disappears, the wall is no more and the bridge arises. Of course it happens only between two persons, but even to let it happen between two persons gives you such joy, such orgasmic glow, such tremendous experience of the splendor of life that the ego is afraid.The ego has created false substitutes for love. The ego is perfectly ready for marriage, but not for love. Marriage is a legal institution, a social institution produced by the cunning mind, by the cunning priests, by the vested interests. Love is natural. Love is dangerous for the ego. If love is allowed you will start tasting little bits of Tao, but that taste will create in you a longing to have more of it. It is so sweet, it is so exquisite, it is so beautiful! Then you will be ready to sacrifice all nonsense that goes with the ego. You will be ready to disappear into the whole.It is love that will give you the courage to take the ultimate jump – first with a single person… But once the experience is there you cannot step back, you will have to go ahead; you cannot go back. First it is with a single person, but you cannot stop the process now. It is so ecstatic that if it is so beautiful with one single person, how much will it be with the whole.A buddha is one who is in an orgasmic relationship with the whole. Tao is the ultimate orgasm, not between two individuals but between the part and the whole, between the dewdrop and the ocean. The dewdrop has to disappear, but it loses nothing.All our fears are unfounded; they are rooted in ignorance, but the ego exploits the ignorance. Hence all societies have distorted the natural flow of love, because it can open the floodgates and then it will be uncontrollable. It is better to give people a false substitute. Marriage is that substitute and therefore for five thousand years, man has lived with marriage and misery.You are not allowed to experience beauty. Your minds are from the very beginning distorted, channeled toward utilitarian ends. You are taught mathematics, you are taught geography, history. Now, history is all bunk, utterly useless. Why go on reading about the ancient idiots? For what purpose? It is better to forget all about them. Why bother about Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadir Shah, Alexander, Napoleon? For what? What have these people given to human consciousness? They are like poisons; they have stopped human progress and human evolution in every possible way.And in your history books you will not find names of Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Ko Hsuan – not even in the footnotes. And these are the people who are the real foundations of human consciousness, these are the people who are the real hope. But you will not find their names even mentioned. On the contrary, historians will always create doubt in you as to whether Jesus ever existed, whether Krishna is a historical person or just a myth, whether Mahavira was a reality or just a fiction; did Buddha really walk on the earth or is he a projection of our dreams, of our desires?Sigmund Freud said that these people are wish fulfillments. He said that we want that there should have been people like these, but they have not really existed. And even if they have existed, they have not existed the way we have described them. That was the cause of the rift between Freud and his disciple Carl Gustav Jung. The rift was of tremendous significance. Freud is very pragmatic; Jung is far more poetic. Jung has tremendous trust in mythology and has no trust in history. And I absolutely agree with Jung about this.All the mythologies of the world are closer to the truth than your so-called histories. But we teach our children history, not mythology. We teach them arithmetic, not poetry. And the way we teach a little bit of poetry – we teach it in such a way that they become so fed up and bored with it that once the student leaves the university he will never read Shakespeare again, he will never look at Milton’s works again. The very names of Shakespeare, Milton, Kalidas, Bhavbhuti will create a kind of nausea in him. The professors have tortured him so much with these names that he is finished with poetry forever. His interest has not been encouraged, he has not become more poetic; he has lost all interest in poetry. He has not been supported to be creative, he has not been helped to learn how to poetize.The scholars are so clever in destroying all that is beautiful by their commentaries, interpretations, by their so-called learning. They make everything so heavy that even poetry with them becomes nonpoetic.I myself never attended any poetry class in the university. I was called again and again by the head of the department, saying that “You attend other classes, why you don’t come to the poetry classes?”I said, “Because I want to keep my interest in poetry alive. I love poetry, that’s why. And I know perfectly well that your professors are absolutely unpoetic; they have never known any poetry in their lives. I know them perfectly well. The man who teaches poetry in the university goes for a morning walk with me every day. I have never seen him looking at the trees, listening to the birds, seeing the beautiful sunrise.”And in the university where I was, the sunrise and the sunset were something tremendously beautiful. The university was on a small hillock surrounded by small hills all around. I have traveled all over this country and I have never come across and seen such beautiful sunsets and sunrises anywhere. For some unknown mysterious reason, Sagar University seems to have a certain situation where clouds become so colorful at the time of sunrise and sunset that even a blind man will become aware that something tremendously beautiful is happening.But I have never seen the professor who teaches poetry in the university look at the sunset, or even stop for a single moment. And whenever he sees me watching the sunset or the sunrise or the trees or the birds, he asks me, “Why you are sitting here? You have come for a morning walk – do your exercise!”I told him, “This is not exercise for me. You are doing exercise; with me it is a love affair.”And when it rains he never came. And whenever it rains I will go and knock at his door and tell him, “Come on!”He will say, “But it is raining!”I said, “That’s the most beautiful time to go for a walk because the streets are absolutely empty. And to go for a walk without any umbrella while it is raining is so beautiful, so poetic!”He thinks I am mad, but a man who has never gone in the rains under the trees cannot understand poetry. I told to the head of the department: “This man is not poetic; he destroys everything. He is so scholarly. And poetry is such an unscholarly phenomenon that there is no meeting ground between the two.”Universities destroy people’s interest and love for poetry. They destroy your whole idea of how life should be; they make it more and more a commodity. They teach you how to earn more, but they don’t teach you how to live deeply, how to live totally. And these are the ways from where you can get glimpses of Tao. These are the ways from where small doors and windows open into the ultimate. You are told the value of money but not the value of a roseflower. You are told the value of being a prime minister or a president but not the value of being a poet, a painter, a singer, a dancer. Those things are thought to be for crazy people. And they are the ways from where one slips slowly into Tao.Tao is certainly greater than the mind – Tao is greater than everything. Tao is God, Tao is the whole. But we are very afraid of losing ourselves and we keep on feeding our egos in a thousand and one ways.We are doing two things in our life: closing all windows and doors to the sun, to the moon, to the stars, to the wind, to the rain, to the birds, to the trees, to love, to beauty, to truth. We are closing all the windows, we are creating a grave around ourselves with no doors and no windows. We are becoming Leibniz monads, windowless capsules. Our life is encapsulated. That is one part that we go on doing. And the second part is to go on making the walls thicker and thicker. That is done by competition, ambition: having more and more. Whether you need it or not is not the point at all. Do you think the richest people in the world need more money now? They have more than they can use, far more. But the desire for more does not stop because it is not a question that they need money; the question is to go on making the walls of the ego thicker and thicker. They are continuously in competition with each other. Competition creates conflict. Conflict keeps your ego alive.A beatnik was boppin’ down the sidewalk just a-poppin’ his fingers and feeling good, when a Jaguar pulled up at the intersection.“Hey, daddy cool, wanna drag race?” said the beatnik.“Sure,” laughed the sports car driver, amused.The light turned green and off they shot, the beatnik in the lead, running like hell. The driver was amazed! He looked at his speedometer: twenty, thirty, not until forty miles per hour did he finally overtake the beatnik.Then he looked in his rearview mirror and noticed that the beatnik had suddenly disappeared. Concerned, he went back to find him lying in the ditch all bruised and battered.“Hey,” said the man, “you were doing great. I could not believe it – what happened?”“Like man,” groaned the beatnik, “I mean, you ever had a sneaker blow out on you at forty-five miles an hour?”One has to decide one thing once forever: whether one wants to live the life of the ego, which is more like death than like life, or one wants to live the life of Tao, which is death in a sense and resurrection in another sense. It is both a crucifixion and a resurrection. The dewdrop disappears, but it becomes the ocean. It loses nothing, it only gains.Sannyas means that you have decided to live the life of Tao, that you will not cling to the mind, that you will let it go, that you will not nourish it anymore, that you will not support it in any possible way, that you will go on finding how you have been supporting it and withdrawing your support. When all supports are withdrawn it falls on its own accord. And the moment the ego falls and disappears is the greatest moment in life. That’s the moment of enlightenment, the moment of awakening, the moment when you become a Christ or a Buddha or a Krishna.The second question:Osho,Are you absolutely against the intellect? Should one never use one's head at all?I am not absolutely against the intellect. It has its uses but they are very limited and you have to understand the limitations. If you are working as a scientist you will have to use your intellect. It is a beautiful mechanism, but it is beautiful only if it remains a slave and does not become the master. If it becomes the master and overpowers you then it is dangerous. The mind as a slave to consciousness is a beautiful servant. The mind as a master of consciousness is a very dangerous master.The whole question is of emphasis. I am not absolutely against intellect – I use intellect myself, how I can be against it? Right now, talking to you, I am using it. But I am the master; it is not my master. If I want to use it, I use it. If I don’t want to use it, it has no power over me. But your intellect, your mind, your thinking process continues whether you want or not. It does not bother about you – as if you are nobody at all – it goes on and on; even when you are asleep it goes on working. It does not listen to you at all. It has remained in power for so long that it has forgotten completely that it is only a servant.When you go for a walk you use your legs. But when you are sitting there is no need to go on moving your legs. People ask me, “Osho, for two hours continuously you go on sitting in the same posture. You don’t even move your legs once.” Why should I move? I am not walking! I know that for you, even if you are sitting on your chair, you are not really sitting. You are moving your legs, changing your position, posture, doing a thousand and one things, tossing and turning – a great restlessness.The same is true about your mind. If I am talking to you, I am using the mind. The moment I stop talking, my mind stops too, immediately! If I am not talking to you, my mind has no need to go on working, it simply goes into silence. That’s how it should be. It should be natural. While asleep I don’t dream; there is no need. You dream only because so much work was left undone in the day that the mind has to do it. It is overtime work – you have not been able to finish in the day.And how can you finish anything? You are doing a thousand and one things simultaneously. Nothing is ever finished; everything remains incomplete – and remains incomplete forever. You will die, but nothing will be complete. Your work will not be complete even in a single direction because you are running in all directions, you have become many fragments, you are not integrated. The mind is dragging you into one thing, the heart is dragging you into another, the body wants you to go somewhere else, and you are always at a loss whom to listen to. And the mind is also not one, you have many minds – you are multi-psychic. There is a crowd of minds in you. There is no unity, no harmony. You are not an orchestra – nothing is in tune. Everything is going on its own; nobody listens to anybody else – you simply create noise not music.The intellect is good if it functions as a servant of the whole. Nothing is bad if it is in its right place and everything is wrong if it is in the wrong place. Your head is perfectly good if it is on your shoulders. If it is somewhere else then it is wrong.Working as a scientist, the intellect is needed. Working in the marketplace, the intellect is needed. Communicating with words, talking to people, the intellect is needed. But it is a very limited use. There are far greater things where the intellect is not needed at all. And where it is not needed it goes on functioning there, too; that’s the problem. You should be capable…a meditator becomes capable, he becomes very fluid, flexible, he does not become idiotic. He uses his intellect, but he uses his intuition too – he knows that their functions are different. He uses his head and he uses his heart too.I used to stay in Kolkata in the house of a High Court judge. His wife told me, “You are the only person my husband has any respect for. If you say something he will listen, otherwise he won’t listen to anybody. I have tried my best but I have failed. That’s why I am telling this to you.”I said, “What is the problem?”She said, “The problem is becoming bigger and bigger every day. He remains a judge for twenty-four hours a day. Even in the bed with me he is a judge – as if he expects me also to say ‘Your Honor.’ With the children also he behaves as if they are criminals. With everybody! We are tired. He never gets down! He carries this role continuously; he never forgets. It has gone into his head.”And she was right – I knew her husband.It is good to be a judge when you are in the court, but by the time you leave the court… It is only a function to be a judge, you are a functionary; you don’t become a judge – that is not your being! But we get confused. It becomes your being.He carries it home, then he starts behaving the same way with the wife, with the children, with everybody. The wife was afraid of him, the children were afraid of him. The moment he entered the house there was fear everywhere. Just a moment before, the children were happily playing, enjoying. They would suddenly stop, the wife would become serious. The house would immediately turn into a court.This is the state of millions of people: they remain the same, they carry their office home.Your intellect is needed, your head has its own function. Existence never gives you anything without any reason. The head has its own beauty, but it should be in its place. There are far greater things which are beyond the reach of the head, and when you are moving into those realms you should put the head aside. You should be capable of that. That is flexibility, that is intelligence. And remember never to get confused between intellect and intelligence.Intellect is only a part of intelligence. Intelligence is a far bigger phenomenon: it contains much more than intellect because life is not only intellectual, life is intuitive, too. Intelligence contains intuition.You will be surprised to know that many great discoveries have been done not by intellect but by intuition. In fact, all the great discoveries have been done by intuition.Something far deeper exists in you. You should not forget it. Intellect is only the periphery, the circumference, it is not the center of your being; the center of your being is intuition.The word intuition is worth understanding. Intellect needs tuition, it has to be taught. Hence the schools, colleges, universities, they all give you tuition. Intuition needs no tuition, it is your inner world; it is something given by existence as a gift – you bring it with you.When you put your intellect aside, your head aside, then something deeper inside you starts functioning which is incomprehensible from the periphery. Your center starts functioning, and your center is always in tune with Tao. Your circumference is your ego, your center is in tune with Tao. Your center is not yours, it is not mine; the center is universal. Circumferences are personal – your circumference is your circumference, my circumference is my circumference – but my center and your center are not two things; at the center we all meet and are one.That’s why religion comes to realize the oneness of existence – because it depends on intuition. Science goes on dividing, splitting. It reaches the minutest particle, called the electron. The world becomes a multiplicity, it is no longer a universe. In fact, scientists should stop using the word universe, they should start using a new word, multiverse. Universe has a religious tone – universe means one. Religion reaches one; that is the experience of the center. But the center can function only when you move from the circumference to the center. It needs a quantum leap.You say, “Should one never use one’s head at all?” I have not said that. I am talking against the head only because my work is religious.There was a nymphomaniac whom nobody could satisfy. Men from all over the world did their best, yet failed. When Machista came, the two went into a room for five hours…but when he finally came out he was totally exhausted, an absolute wreck. He had to admit failure.Tarzan too made an attempt. He was brought all the way from the jungle to try. Lots of people waited outside for hours, thinking that he would surely make it, but when he came out he just muttered, “That woman is a wonder! Nobody can do it!” and disappeared.More and more ambitious men came with high hopes – still, it did not happen. Then one day this little Jewish tailor, whose shop was on the street corner, passed by. He was curious to know what it was all about, and even though most of the crowd thought such matters were not for him, they told him. To their great surprise he said immediately, “I will do it!” So just for a laugh, they let him go in.Fifteen minutes later he and the lady came out, hand in hand, beaming, smiling from ear to ear. There was no need to say anything. It was a success.“What’s the trick, how did you do it?” everyone wanted to know.“Well, there are situations when you have got to use your head,” he said nonchalantly.Get it?The third question:Osho,Is Tao a synthesis of the paths of love and awareness?Tao is not a synthesis in the sense we understand the word. It is not synthesis in the sense Assagioli uses the word psychosynthesis.The ordinary meaning of the word synthesis is making two opposites meet, creating a certain meeting ground between two opposites. It is not synthesis in that sense. It makes no effort to create that kind of unity. But it is a synthesis in a very different meaning, in a higher sense, in a totally different dimension. It is transcendence of the paths of love and awareness, it is transcendence of the opposites. And whenever the opposites are transcended, synthesis happens on its own accord. But you have to understand the difference.Assagioli’s synthesis is very poor; it has no depth, it cannot have – it is a mind effort. It is far poorer than Sigmund Freud’s analysis for the simple reason that the mind is very efficient in analyzing things; the mind is incapable of synthesizing things. That’s why, although Assagioli is trying to do something far more important than Sigmund Freud…but he fails. If you study both, Sigmund Freud looks like a genius. Assagioli looks just a pigmy by his side.And, let me emphasize again, he is trying to do something far bigger, far more important than Sigmund Freud, but Freud succeeds because he is doing the right kind of work that the mind is capable of doing. Assagioli is trying to do the same thing as Tao but through the mind. The mind is not capable of synthesizing. Tao does it from a totally different dimension: it goes beyond the mind, it goes into no-mind. And when you reach no-mind, synthesis happens – not that you have to do anything about it.Assagioli’s synthesis is man-made, man-manufactured. Hence it is more like a hotchpotch, somehow trying to make two opposites meet, but they are unwilling to meet; forcing them to meet, but basically because they are opposites, they cannot meet. And he is using the mind which cannot create synthesis, which is capable only of analysis.Tao uses meditation, not the mind. It is not interested in synthesis at all. It simply moves beyond the mind, and then synthesis comes like a shadow. You can see it happening here.For example… Take a more contemporary example. Just a few years ago, Mahatma Gandhi tried a great experiment of synthesizing all the religions. He utterly failed. It was bound to happen because he was trying to manufacture synthesis, and synthesis cannot be manufactured. He was trying to do it through the mind. He knew nothing of meditation, he never tried meditation. In the name of religion, all that he knew was prayer – and prayer is of the mind; it is not meditation, it is talking to God. Just as you talk with others you can talk to a God, who may be just imaginary, who is in fact imaginary because there is no person there.Prayer is a dialogue, a dialogue between you and an imaginary God. Meditation is silence – no dialogue, no monologue either.Gandhi knew nothing of meditation, but he tried hard to create a certain facade of synthesis. What you can do through the intellect?Basically he was a Hindu and he remained a Hindu all his life, to the very end. He calls the Bhagavadgita his mother, but he never calls the Koran his father – not even an uncle. Although he talks about the teaching being the same, the way he manages it is absolutely political – clever, cunning, but not authentic. It is a mind effort, it cannot be authentic. He does it well. What he does is that whatsoever he finds in the Koran, in the Bible, in the Dhammapada, which is in agreement with the Gita, he immediately picks it up and says, “Look! All the religions teach the same thing.”But there are many things which go against the Gita in the Bible, which go against the Gita in the Koran, in the Dhammapada. He does not take any note of them, he ignores them; he knows he will not be able to manage, to cope with them, so his synthesis is bogus. In fact, he reads the Gita everywhere; wherever he can find the Gita echoed, he immediately says, “Look! They are saying the same thing.”But what about the differences? What about the totally opposite standpoints? For example, the Koran does not believe in nonviolence. Mohammed never believed in nonviolence; he himself always carried a sword and he fought many wars. And Gandhi believes in nonviolence. But the Koran is a big book; you can find a few pieces from here, from there which can support love, compassion, kindness, sympathy, and you can use them as if Mohammed is supporting nonviolence.Mahavira supports nonviolence, Buddha supports nonviolence; but even Krishna in the Gita does not support nonviolence. Then Gandhi does a political trick again. He says the war in which the Gita was spoken for the first time, the great war called Mahabharata, in which Arjuna became aware of the fact that millions of people will die and the whole thing seemed to be useless – just for the power, for treasures, for kingdom, to kill so many people… A great desire to renounce the world arose in him. He wanted to renounce, and he said, “It is better that I should go to the mountains and become a sannyasin,” but Krishna persuaded him to fight because “That is your duty. God wants you to fight. Surrender to God’s will; don’t bring your own will in, don’t bring your mind in. Be in a let-go and let God function through you.”Arjuna argues in many ways, but finally Krishna wins him over, convinces him of the necessity of war, because, he says, “This is the war of right against wrong, of religion against irreligion, of light against darkness, of divine forces against evil forces.”Now, Gandhi played a trick. He said that the war is only a metaphor, it never happened in reality, it is not historical. It is really the inner war in man between the forces of evil and the forces of God, it is the inner war between darkness and light. And Krishna is saying to Arjuna, “Don’t escape from the inner war – fight it and win over the darkness.”Now this is a very cunning strategy. Nobody before Gandhi has ever said that the war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas was just a metaphor. For five thousand years, thousands of commentaries have been written on the Gita; nobody has said that it is a metaphor, it has always been known as a reality. But Gandhi has to call it a metaphor, otherwise he will not be able to synthesize religions. And Jainism and Buddhism are two of the most important religions – they have to be incorporated.Jesus also creates many troubles for Gandhi, because Jesus goes into the temple of Jerusalem, becomes very angry, takes a whip, hits the money changers, overturns their boards, throws them out of the temple. Now, a nonviolent person cannot be so angry. If Gandhi was asked, he would say, “Go on a fast. Sit in front of the money changers and do a fast unto death unless they stop money changing in the temple. That will be the nonviolent way to transform their hearts.” But taking a whip in your hand and hitting them and overturning their boards and throwing them out of the temple does not seem to be very nonviolent.Gandhi never talks about it. He drops the whole matter. He only talks about beatitudes: “Blessed are the meek for theirs is the Kingdom of God.” But Jesus does not seem to be so meek. This man is meek who is turning money changers’ boards and throwing them out of the temple? Is he meek? Can you call him meek? He is a warrior. He cannot tolerate such nonsense in the temple. He said, “You have polluted the house of my father. Get out from here!”Gandhi chooses only pieces and then makes a hotchpotch which he calls a synthesis of all religions. It never happened. Neither the Mohammedans were convinced by him, nor the Hindus. He could not even convince Hindus – he was a Hindu – and he was murdered by a Hindu. He could not convince Hindus. He could not convince Jainas either, because they have continuously believed that Krishna is not a good man.In Jaina mythology, Krishna is thrown into the seventh hell for the simple reason that he distracted Arjuna, who was going to renounce war. He forced him, persuaded him, convinced him, seduced him by beautiful logic – silenced him somehow – to fight. And millions of people died. Who is responsible for all this violence, for all this blood? Krishna is responsible – more responsible than Arjuna. Jainas have never forgiven him; after Gandhi not even a single Jaina has written a book in which Krishna is forgiven or accepted. What to say of Krishna? Jainas don’t even agree with Buddhists and their nonviolence, Buddhists don’t agree with the nonviolence of the Jainas. They are both nonviolent, but their nonviolences are different.Jainas say, “Don’t kill. Don’t eat meat.” Buddha has said, “Don’t kill, but you can eat meat if the animal has died of his own accord – then nothing is wrong in eating the meat of the animal.”Now that is a big problem between Jainas and the Buddhists. And I think that Jainas are right in a way. Logically Buddha is right, that killing is bad – “Don’t kill animals. They have life, as much life as you have and they want to live as long as you want to live. Don’t kill them. But when an animal has died, why waste his meat? It can be used as food. Its skin can be used, its meat can be used, its bones can be used. They should be used. Why waste them?” He seems to be very pragmatic; he was a pragmatic man.But Jainas are also right. They say once you allow meat eating, then who is going to decide whether the animal has died on his own or not?And that’s exactly what has happened: in China, in Japan, in Korea, in Burma, in the whole of Asia, Buddhists eat meat. So many animals don’t die every day on their own accord! From where do all the five-star hotels in the whole of Asia get their meat? And if this meat comes from the natural death of the animals, then why do so many butchers and butcheries exist in Buddhist countries? For what reason? Every hotel in a Buddhist country has a signboard saying, “Here only that meat is served which comes from a naturally dead animal – one who has died a natural death.”Man is so tricky that he will find a way; if you give him just a little loophole he will find a way out. No loophole should be given, that was Mahavira’s emphasis.Gandhi could not convince anybody, but here you are seeing a synthesis happening on its own accord. And I am not interested in synthesizing anything. I never talk about synthesizing religions – but it is happening. Here you will find people belonging to all the different religions. Nobody bothers who is a Jew, who is a Mohammedan, who is a Hindu, who is a Jaina, who is a Buddhist, who is a Parsi; nobody takes any note of it.A synthesis is happening. It is not being manufactured; it is happening through meditation not through mentation. This is true synthesis. It is happening through transcendence. When you meditate you go beyond the mind. When you go beyond the mind you are no longer a Christian, no longer a Hindu, no longer a Jaina, no longer a Jew. You are simply a consciousness, a pure consciousness, a mirrorlike clarity. That clarity is true synthesis.You ask, “Is Tao a synthesis of the paths of love and awareness?”In a sense, no; in a sense, yes.The fourth question:Osho,I am deeply interested in your works, but still I am afraid of taking sannyas – why?Bavasimhan, Sir, you have never been here – the question has come by post – what do you know about my works? You have never participated in what is going on here; you don’t have any direct experience. And what is happening here is not an abstract philosophy, it is a very concrete experience. Hence you must be interested in my words, not in my works. You must be reading my words – and my words don’t contain me, or my work. They only contain an invitation to come here, to be here. They are just invitations, nothing else. They cannot carry my truth to you. You have to be here to be with me, to live with me. And you have not come here yet.I have received many questions from Bavasimhan, many times. This is the first time I am answering him. But all his questions have come by the post – he lives somewhere in Chennai; it is not that far away.But it must be fear that is preventing you – the fear of being here, the fear that if you are here there is every possibility that you may take the jump into sannyas. It is almost impossible to be here and not to become a sannyasin. Sannyas is bound to happen unless you are absolutely dead, insensitive, dull; unless you have such a mediocre mind that you cannot understand; unless you are so prejudiced already that you have arrived at all the conclusions; unless you are so knowledgeable that you think there is nothing more left to know and learn. That fear is preventing you from coming here.And in this question the fear has come up. It is good that you have recognized it because in other questions you have been trying to avoid it – not only trying to avoid it, you have been trying to rationalize it. In one question you wrote, “What is the need of an outer sannyas? I am already an inner sannyasin.” Then what is the need of writing an outer letter to me? Just go on writing inner letters, that’s enough. Then what is the need for reading my books? They are very outer things. These are cunning rationalizations.In another question, Bavasimhan, you had written that you want to take sannyas, but from my own hands. And you wrote that, “I have heard that Indians are now being given sannyas by some of your disciples. I can take sannyas only from you.”I have been giving sannyas for ten years. You never wrote that before. Hearing that Indians are now receiving sannyas from some disciples, you must have thought, “This is a good strategy, a good protection – to make a condition.” Come here. I will give you sannyas! Don’t be worried about that.Now you ask – and this is more authentic, that’s why I’m answering – “I am deeply interested in your works,” – read “words” – “but still I am afraid of taking sannyas – why?”Because words are words, and sannyas means a real transformation. And you must be clever with words. Seeing your many letters and questions, it is very apparent that you are well acquainted with philosophical terminology, with abstract ideas, with esoteric jargon.Angelo and his buddy Frank were strolling along a Pittsburgh street. After a long silence Angelo said, “Eh, what is eatin’ you?”“Aah, somethin’ has been botherin’ me for days,” said Frank. “Maybe it ain’t none of my business, but you and me have been buddies for years and I just gotta tell ya.”“Go ‘head, spill it!” said Angelo.“Last Saturday night I was in a whorehouse and who do I see there but your wife, Betty. I hate to say it, Angelo, but Betty is a prostitute!”“Nah! Betty ain’t no prostitute!” answered Angelo. “She’s just a substitute. She’s only there on weekends!”People who are clever with words get lost in a jungle of words. You seem to be very clever with words.That’s why people go on reading the Gita, the Vedas, the Bible, the Koran – because now Mohammed is not there so there is no danger; Jesus is not there, so there is no danger of meeting him; Krishna is not there, so you can play around with words at your ease, to your heart’s content – you can manage to put any meaning in them that you want. But I am still here. You cannot go on playing with my words. If you become interested in my words, a desire is bound to arise to come here. And then the fear – the fear that if you are really getting interested in words, who knows, you may get interested in the person himself. And then there is no going back.It is easy to play with words; it does not disturb your sleep, it does not disturb your unconsciousness, it does not disturb your dreams. But being with a master is a disturbance, a great disturbance.A drunk staggered into a fairground and went to the rifle range. “Give me ten shots,” he belched.“That will be twenty pence,” said the attendant, smirking.The drunk fired and each shot was a perfect bull’s-eye.The attendant was amazed and gave the man his prize – a large tortoise.Sometime later the drunk returned again, fired ten shots, each one a bull’s-eye.“You can have any prize you choose,” said the surprised attendant.“I will have another one of those crunchy meat pies!” said the drunk.It is very easy with words – you can befool yourself. But here I am going to hit you hard, I am going to break your skull. And then, naturally, dreams escape. I make windows in people’s skulls, and all dreams escape.All the inmates of an asylum are going for a swim in their new swimming pool.“Okay,” says the nurse, “enough for today! Tomorrow we meet again, same time, same place, and then we will do it again with water in the swimming pool!”You are afraid of the water but in the empty swimming pool, alone with the words, you can enjoy.Come to your senses! Everybody feels afraid of sannyas because sannyas means commitment, sannyas means a love affair. Sannyas is not of the head, it is of the heart. It is getting into deep waters, and you have become accustomed of sitting on the shore dreaming, thinking, brooding.Two drunkards are driving along a road at high speed, when suddenly one shouts to the other, “Careful, there is a dangerous curve ahead.”“Why are you shouting at me?” the other replies. “I thought you were driving!”I mean business. I am not a philosopher – just the opposite – I am absolutely existential. Hence my emphasis on sannyas, because I know unless you are committed, unless you are involved, unless you risk something, you cannot grow.You can accumulate words – as many as you like; it is very easy to have great words. And you live, Bavasimhan, in Chennai. Adyar is very close by – just a few minutes’ drive on the outskirts of Chennai. You can go there. Adyar has the most beautiful esoteric library in the whole world because it is the headquarters of the Theosophists – the world headquarters. It contains all kinds of nonsense. You will never find anywhere else with so much nonsense accumulated together in one place.When I was in Chennai the Adyar people invited me to come, at least for few minutes. I said, “I will come.”I went there. They showed me around – it is a beautiful place – they showed their beautiful library. And they asked me, “What do you think of our library?”I said, “This is rare. I have seen many libraries, but no library contains so much nonsense.”They were shocked. They said, “What…?”I said, “Yes. Theosophy is the most stupid thing that has happened in this century.”Bavasimhan, you can go to Adyar – in fact, you must be going – you can find all the old scriptures collected there, you can read beautiful things and you can remain the same. No change is expected of you. But coming here is a totally different thing. I am a no-nonsense man.The little boy was pissing in the middle of the plaza when a good-humored guard passed by and said, “Don’t pee there, little boy, or I will come by and cut your willie off!”The little boy ran very fast and when he got to the other side of the plaza, he saw a little girl his age, also pissing. He looked at the girl and exclaimed, “Oh my God! This guard really means business!”That’s why you are afraid – I really mean business. Come and see, come and have a taste of it. Don’t miss this opportunity. Words will always be available to you, but to be in communion with a living master is a rare opportunity; it happens only once in a while. Don’t just go on writing stupid questions from Chennai, come here. When people can come from Mexico…Chennai is not very far off, not more than one hour’s flight.The fear is because you have become aware through the words that there is something more to words which is happening here. You are not afraid of me, you are not afraid of sannyas, you are afraid of your own longing – that you may take the jump. You are afraid of your own potential which is hankering to grow, which needs a certain opportunity, which needs a certain climate, which needs a certain energy field. That field is ready now, here. Come, drink out of it and your thirst will be quenched forever. But you will have to pay the price.Sannyas is simply the price. I know that just by wearing orange clothes you cannot become enlightened, but it is a device. Just wearing orange clothes you will be known as a madman. That’s what I want you all to be known all over the world: my mad people.God is only for those who are mad enough, only for those who are mad for God. Just as people are mad for money and mad for power, unless you are mad for God there is no hope for you. You are afraid because here something can happen. And you know that there is a great desire and longing in you for that happening. The seed is there, and you know it needs only the right climate and right soil. And once you have the right soil the seed will start growing.You are afraid of the unknown. Sannyas is a pilgrimage toward the unknown. It is a voyage into the uncharted. God is the unknown – not only the unknown but the unknowable.Come! Jalaluddin Rumi says, “Come, come, come…” Again and again I say, “Come,” because I may not be here for long.The fifth question:Osho,Do you always tell the truth?Reverend Banana, yes sir, I always tell the truth, even if I have to lie a little.The sixth question:Osho,I would like to meet a woman who does not flirt, giggle, gossip, smoke, drink, pet or kiss and marry her. Is it possible?Michael Potato-Singh, Sir, just one question: Why? For what?The seventh and the last question:Osho,Have you really been waiting for me? I have come now. I want to ask you: Can your hugging, kissing sannyasins ever enter heaven?Michael Tomato, I am happy that you have come. Welcome home. So now the whole trinity is here: Banana, Potato, Tomato. This looks far more delicious than God the father, Jesus the son, and the Holy Ghost. The writings of all three persons are exactly the same. So it is more like a trimurti, the three faces of one God, rather than a trinity, rather than three persons. It is not three persons but one person with three faces. Moreover, the writing is not that of a man but that of a woman, which makes it even more mysterious.Just this morning I asked Vivek to bring one banana, one tomato, one potato, so I can determine the sex – whether they are men or women. I tried every possible way: Patanjali Yoga, all kinds of yoga postures, standing on my head – which I have not done for twenty-five years. I looked from every possible angle – I even tried a little whirling. But when I started whirling I became even more confused: the banana started looking like a potato, the potato started looking like a tomato, the tomato started looking like a banana… Then I remembered, maybe it is a hangover. Last night Arup’s boyfriend, Niranjan, has come back with some good beer for me, so I had drunk too much.When nothing worked and I could not decide whether these people are men or women, I became so tired with all this great spiritual effort that I told them to fuck off. At that very moment Vivek came out from the bathroom, shocked. She said to me, “Osho, that is no way to talk to such innocent people like bananas, potatoes and tomatoes. Just tell them to scat and they will fuck off!”Michael Tomato, you are asking “Can your kissing and hugging sannyasins ever enter heaven?” I think you don’t know anything up-to-date about heaven. You must be having very old ideas. Yes, in the old days it was difficult, but God always remains up-to-date. He is always contemporary. Who else can be more contemporary than God? In fact, now your so-called saints cannot enter heaven, only my sannyasins.The Pope arrives in New York and wants to meet the Archbishop. He is told the Archbishop is spending the day at the beach, so the Pope, curious, decides to go and meet him there.He is met by an extremely handsome, muscular man with a beautiful tan, wearing a red bathing suit, who, with a big smile, asks the Pope, “What is the news from Rome?”While the Pope is too astonished to reply, the Archbishop turns to a beautiful young lady wearing a white bikini and calls to her, “Mary, come and see who’s here!”The Pope, in consternation, asks, “Who… Who… Who is that lady?”“Oh,” replied the Archbishop, “she is the Mother Superior of the Sacred Heart Convent!”Things are changing, Mr. Tomato. Your old idea of heaven just exists in your scriptures, in your head. It has disappeared from existence. I am preparing my people in the latest possible way. They will be the first to enter.Three nuns die and they meet at the main gate of heaven.Saint Peter comes out and says, “So girls! Before you come in I must ask you one question: What did you use your pussy for when you were in the world?”“Only for pissing!” answers the first one.“Good, and what about you?” he asks the second one.“Just for pissing,” answers the second nun.“Good,” he says and he turns to the third one.“Well…” she starts and then hesitates. “Ahem, well… You know… I met this nice young priest and… He was so nice that… Well, I couldn’t resist, so I gave him my pussy!”“Okay,” says Saint Peter to the last one, “you can come in. But you two, I’m sorry, you’re not allowed!”The two nuns, very offended, ask, “Why?” and Saint Peter answers, “Heaven is not a piss house!”Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The Venerable Master said:The unfoldment of man’s mind leads him to this unchanging truth.In unchanging stillness, unchanging purity and rest are found.He who attains purity and stillness enters into the immutable Tao.Having entered into the immutable Tao he is named the possessor of Tao.Although he is named the possessor of Tao he knows that he does not possess it.Only when he can transmute all living things can he be truly named the possessor of Tao.He who is able to understand this can lead others to sacred Tao.Ko Hsuan’s sutras always begin with this immensely significant statement:The Venerable Master said…But it seems the translation is literally true, but not true to the spirit of the sutras. All the Buddhist sutras start in the same way – only with a little difference, but a difference that makes a great difference. The Buddhist sutras begin with: “I have heard the master say…” And you can see the difference. The master may have said it for a different reason, the master may have meant something totally different. The master exists on a different plane; he speaks from the peak, the ultimate peak of consciousness. And the disciple hears from the darkest valley of his existence. By the time the words reach the disciple they are bound to be distorted, they are bound to take many colors which will be imposed and projected by the disciple.Hence, my feeling is that Ko Hsuan cannot commit this mistake. It must be that the translator has missed the point; the point is very subtle. It seems to the ordinary mind to simply make no difference whether one says, “I have heard the master say,” or “The venerable master said.” But when you say, “The venerable master said,” you are making an absolutely certain statement as if you can report it authentically. It is not possible: you can report only what you have heard.Now, here you are listening to me, nearabout three thousand sannyasins. Each sannyasin will listen according to his own conditioning, according to his own state of mind, according to his own prejudices, concepts, ideologies, philosophies, according to his own background. If you don’t have any background, if you have transcended all concepts, ideologies, philosophies, religions, if you are no longer in the mind, then you can hear exactly what is said. But then there is no need to hear it; then you yourself know it. Then Ko Hsuan will not say, “The venerable master said,” he can simply state the sutras. Then it will be his own experience. He is very close to the peak and finally he reached the peak, but these notes were made before he himself became an enlightened master. These notes are of a disciple and you should remember it.Whenever you quote me, always remember that you have heard. You cannot be certain whether it was said exactly the way you have heard or not.In Italy, on the bus next to the driver there is the following note: “Do not talk to the driver.”In Germany there is: “It is forbidden to talk to the driver.”In England: “It is not polite to talk to the driver.”In Scotland: “What will you gain in talking to the driver?”The moment a master says something it comes from his innermost core. When you hear it, it is heard on your circumference. By the time it reaches your innermost core – if it reaches at all, if you are fortunate enough to allow it to sink into the very core of your being – then too the meaning will not remain the same. It cannot be; it is not in the nature of things. It would have changed: it may have become distorted, it may have lost something, your mind may have added something to it.The scientists have very recently discovered… Up until now it was thought that our mind and our senses exist only to allow us to be bridged to the existence that surrounds us. But the latest research is that the senses and the mind have double functions. One function is to connect us with existence, but even far more important than that is the second function: not to allow that which can disturb us. They function as screening agents of our mind, of our attitudes, of our life styles, of our conditionings. Only two percent reality is allowed to enter; ninety-eight percent reality is prevented outside, on the gate, because if all that is available is allowed in, you will go berserk, you will not be able to cope with it.Only in absolute meditativeness is one capable to relax totally, to allow everything in, to be vulnerable without any conditions, to be available to existence with no strings attached.I would like to change this statement. I would like to make it exactly as Buddhist sutras begin. They are written by Buddha’s closest disciple, Ananda. He lived with Buddha for forty-two years; not even for a single moment did he leave Buddha. Day in, day out, year in, year out he was with Buddha like a shadow. Even a shadow sometimes leaves you, but he would not leave Buddha at all. He heard everything that Buddha had said and when he was asked to report it after Buddha’s death, he said, “I have heard the Buddha say.” Each sutra starts with that “I have heard…” There is a great insight in it.Ko Hsuan cannot do this: he cannot say, “The venerable master said.” He can only say, “I have heard…” The translator must have changed it to make it look more certain, to make it more categorical, more emphatic, more clear-cut, more mathematical. But the enlightened masters are mysterious; their words are mysterious, not mathematical. They can have a thousand and one meanings and everyone hears them according to his own capacity.The egoist will hear the same words but will not hear the same meaning. The egoless person will also hear the same words, but those words will connote a totally different meaning; they will resound in him with a totally different melody. When it rains, it rains on the mountains, it rains in the valleys, it rains everywhere; but the mountains remain as dry as ever – they are already too full. But when it rains into the valleys, the valleys become lakes. They are empty: they can absorb, they can contain. The valleys are feminine; the mountains are too masculine. The mountains are too egoistic; the valleys are humble.When the master speaks there are many categories of listeners. The first category is that of the curious person, who has come just out of curiosity; he will only hear something very ordinary, something very unessential, something even meaningless, and that will become most important for him. He is there for a wrong reason. He will collect all kinds of data, but they will all belong to the surface.Then there is the student who has come to gather more knowledge, more information. He will hear a little better than the first person, the curious one, but his interest is still in information. He is not ready to be transformed, to be converted; he is not ready to go that far. He has a certain limit beyond which he won’t move a single inch. He will leave with a little more accumulated knowledge, thinking that he now knows more. He knows nothing; he has simply become more informed – and information is not knowledge. Transformation is the only real knowledge; information is pseudo.Then there is the disciple who listens in a deeper way than the first two categories. He listens not to gather knowledge; he wants to be changed, but he has a certain idea of what change means. He wants to go into the beyond, but he has a certain direction, a conclusion which he has already decided. He comes with a decision, an a priori conclusion that this is what conversion is. He is not completely open – he is open on one side only, open only in one direction.There are people here who write to me that “We would like you to speak more on great lovers of God like Meera, Chaitanya, Kabir, because when you speak on them our hearts are moved, our eyes start showering tears of joy, of bliss; we are thrilled to the very core of our being. But when you talk about Buddhist sutras they look dry and logical, they seem to be more appealing to the intelligence than to the world of feelings.” Now, they are open only on one side.When I speak on Meera, Kabir, Rumi, then there are people who are lovers of Buddha and they start writing letters to me, that “These are beautiful words, but not as profound as the Buddhist sutras. Each sutra has such depth! You can go on digging but you never come to the bottom rock.” They are also open only on one side.These are disciples. One is open to love, another is open to awareness, but they are not totally open. They will hear, but they will hear with this a priori conclusion. They will hear in a far better way than the student, they will learn deeply, but it will be a partial learning. They will know more than the student, but it cannot be a total knowing.Then there is the fourth kind, the devotee, who is open from all the sides, who has come with no a priori conclusion, who has come just to be with the master in all the seasons, in all the climates. He makes no conditions, he has no conditions. He will hear more totally, his hearing will be multidimensional, but still he will not hear exactly what the master is saying. He will hear better than all the others, but still he is not on the same plane as the master.Then there is the fifth category, the nameless category of listener for whom there is no need to even hear… Then there is no need to speak even, no need to hear. One sits with the master and that’s enough. Whether he speaks or not is not the point, just being with the master is enough, just to be with him is enough. And there is some movement between the two centers – invisible, intangible. Something transpires which is unspeakable, inexpressible. Only this fifth type person is capable of reporting, but he will be very conscious in reporting. He will always say, “I have heard…”And my feeling is Ko Hsuan cannot say, “The venerable master said.” He can only say, “I have heard the venerable master say.”A veterinarian came to a small Italian farm to give artificial insemination to some cows.“Lady,” he says, “have you everything ready? A towel, soap, a bucket of hot water?”“Of course, everything is here, and on this hook you can hang your trousers,” replied the woman.The teacher asks the class to mention an object round and hairy. A boy raises his hand and says, “The coconut!”“Very good!” says the teacher.Then Pierino raises his hand and says, “Billiard’s balls!”“No, Pierino,” replies the teacher. “Billiard balls are smooth not hairy.”“No, it is not true – I saw them!” cries Pierino. “Look!” and turning to the boy next to him says, “Billiard, show your balls to the teacher!”A young officer joining his first regiment is being interviewed by the colonel. The usual conversation concerning family connections is in progress.“So your name is Fortescue,” says the colonel. “Tell me, young man, was your grandfather Fortescue of the sixty-eighth Leicestershire Rifles?”“Yes, sir, actually,” replies the young officer.“Splendid! So your father’s a Fortescue – might I guess Major Fortescue of the ninth Cumberland Infantry Regiment?”“Why, yes, sir!”“Are you married?” asks the colonel.“Yes, sir. But my wife is joining me later – she is in bed with cramps.”“Not Cramps of the thirty-third?”A little boy and his father are listening to a speaker.“Comrades!” starts the speaker.“What does ‘comrade’ mean, Daddy?” asks the little boy.“‘Comrade’ indicates all those who think and act alike,” answers the father.“Our government…” continues the speaker, and again the little boy asks, “What is ‘government,’ Daddy?”“The ‘government’ is those who are responsible for the well-being of everybody and makes decisions accordingly. At home, for instance, your mum is the government.”“…and the people…” goes on the speaker.“What is ‘people’?” asks again the boy.“The ‘people’ are we who are in need of organization and defense. At home, your baby sister is the people.”That night the father is awakened by the little boy who whispers, “Listen, comrade, tell the government the people are full of shit up to here!”Man lives in a state of immaturity; he is childish. He goes on growing physiologically but not psychologically. What to say about his spiritual growth – even his psychological growth is retarded, very retarded.Only in the First World War, for the first time in human history, did we become aware that the average man’s mental age is not more than thirteen years, because for the first time, people in the army were psychologically tested. It was a shock all over the world. People who think about humanity and its progress were really in a great shock: just thirteen years is the average psychological age?The person may be seventy years old or eighty years old and his age, his psychological age, is only thirteen. What about his soul? Nothing can be said about his spiritual growth because only when the body and the mind grow together in synchronicity, when the chronological age and the psychological age go together simultaneously, only then is there a possibility of spiritual growth, never before it.People are immature, people are childish. And they talk about God and they talk about nirvana, enlightenment, and they talk about Tao, dharma, they talk about truth – they talk about great things without being at all aware that their psychological age is that of a child. All they need is toys to play with. And that’s what they have done with their religion: their churches, their temples, their mosques are nothing but big toys. Their popes, their shankaracharyas, their ayatollahs are nothing but people who go on giving them new games to play with. All they need is some new game so they can remain engaged and occupied.The scientists also go on giving them new gadgets, sometimes absolutely useless gadgets, but people are ready to purchase anything to fill their inner emptiness. And there is great emptiness because of the gap. Thirteen years psychological age and seventy years physiological age – the gap is big. How to fill that gap? How to bridge that gap? On the surface they look very grown up, but just scratch them a little bit and you will find a child inside, and immediately they go through a tantrum.You see people when they are in anger, and you will not see any difference between them and children. You see people when they are fighting – the husband fighting with the wife, the wife fighting with the husband, throwing pillows and things – you simply watch. You may be doing the same thing yourself, then watch. Once in a while just watch – what are you doing? Is this act that of a grown-up person? You may be growing old, but you are not growing up, and growing old has no value: growing old simply means you are coming closer to death.Growing up is a totally different phenomenon: it means you are coming closer to immortality, to deathlessness. Growing old means coming closer to your grave and growing up means coming closer to godliness, to Tao, to eternity. They are not synonymous; not only are they not synonymous, they are diametrically opposite to each other.And when there is a deep rhythm between your body-mind complex, then your soul can start growing for the first time. Your body and mind being in tune becomes the soil in which your soul starts moving upward for the first time. Otherwise you will hang around the body-mind phenomenon; you will never go beyond it.It is not an accident that the psychologists don’t believe in the soul – for the simple reason that they have no glimpse of the soul. Sigmund Freud himself was very childish in his behavior, utterly childish, very afraid, just like a small child. He was afraid of ghosts, he was afraid of death, darkness – not even the word death was allowed to be uttered in his presence. Twice it had happened in his life that somebody started talking about death and he fainted. Just the talk about death and he fainted! Now, this man becomes a prophet of the twentieth century.The twentieth century has been dominated by three prophets. One is Friedrich Nietzsche, who was utterly mad. Adolf Hitler and his Nazism and all the fascist ideologies in the world are offshoots of that madman.The other prophet was Karl Marx, who was absolutely atheist. He never believed in any consciousness, he never believed in any possibility of the growth of consciousness, because he had no glimpse of it. He called it an epiphenomenon – it is nothing but a by-product of matter. Just like a clock functions mechanically, the same is the way that man functions: he is only a machine. He reduced man into a machine.He himself lived a very mechanical life, an utterly mechanical life. There was no joy in his life, no laughter, no song in his heart. He never came to know any experience of meditativeness; he lived just on the periphery. But he became a prophet. Communism, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, Tito and Fidel Castro – these are his by-products. Joseph Stalin could kill millions of people for the simple reason because “Man is a machine. What is wrong…?” If you kill a bicycle or if you kill a clock or if you kill an electric fan there is no harm; nobody can blame you, that you are a murderer. He could kill millions of people. I think nobody before him has been able to kill so many people without even a prick of the conscience. There was no question of any conscience – there is no consciousness, there is no conscience either. Man is a by-product of matter, so when you kill somebody, matter disappears into matter.And the third prophet of this century is Sigmund Freud, who himself is pathological, and he has projected his pathology into his philosophy.Now, these three people have become your background. You may be aware of it, you may not be aware of it, but behind you these three are always standing. These three persons are responsible in many ways for the deterioration of human consciousness in this age. Because of these three persons, buddhas have almost disappeared. People like Lao Tzu are not possible anymore even in China; Communism won’t allow them. Taoist monasteries have been destroyed, converted into schools and hospitals. Taoist meditators have been forced to work in the fields or in the factories. Even old mystics, seventy or eighty years old, have been forced to do ordinary work just because the government cannot allow anybody to live without work; you have the right to get bread only if you work. Buddhists have disappeared.In Russia, Jesus is no longer possible. And the same thing is going to happen almost everywhere sooner or later.With this background, whatsoever I say will be interpreted inside you without you ever becoming aware because you are not that watchful; you are almost in a state of drunkenness. Each ideology intoxicates. The really conscious person gets rid of all ideologies, only then does he go beyond intoxication.One day a guy decided he was an alcoholic. So he went to the doctor and the doctor said to him, “The treatment has to be based on self-control. You go home and try not to drink. If by chance you cannot hold yourself, next day you come to my office and inform me. This is fundamental.”“Okay,” said the guy.After some days the guy comes to the doctor’s office already very drunk.“Doc, I came here to inform you that yesterday I got very drunk.”“But you are drunk now!” said the doctor.“Yes,” said the drunkard, “but I will inform you of this tomorrow!”The drunkard has his own logic and to him it seems to be perfectly right.Two drunks were walking along a railway line. One said to the other, “I hope these stairs come to an end soon!”The other replied, “Ya! The height of the handrail is killing my back!”A Texan travels to Las Vegas to let off some steam Texas style. He starts off at the flashiest casino he can find and soon starts winning at blackjack.After a while he heads for the roulette table where he resumes his winning streak. Soon a crowd gathers to watch him rake it in while knocking back double bourbons.Eventually he wins so much money that he and the crowd move off to a penthouse suite to continue the party.The next day he wakes up with a splitting hangover, lying next to a gorgeous negress who has a serene smile on her face.“Holy cow!” he exclaims to himself. “That was some party!”He gently tucks a couple of hundred dollar bills under the pillow and tiptoes out of the room. As he crosses the living room, he stops short as he sees two more gorgeous girls wearing little else than the same serene smile.“Son of a gun!” he says as he drops a few more bills down beside them.As one of the bills flutters down it brushes a cheek of the last girl. She slowly opens her eyes and says, “You don’t have to tip the bridesmaids!”You go on doing things… You will get married, you will move into a profession, you will become educated, you will become Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan – you will do a thousand and one things absolutely in a state of unconsciousness. If by chance you come across a master, you will hear him from your unconsciousness.Hence, before I begin this last sutra I would like you to remember always: never say what the master has said; always say this is what you have heard him say. And it is not only a mannerism; it has tremendous truth in it.The unfoldment of man’s mind leads him to this unchanging truth.The translator goes wrong on many points. And I can understand why he goes wrong, particularly on points which are of very great significance. He can’t help it; he has no understanding of meditation. He says: The unfoldment of man’s mind…Ko Hsuan must have said: The unfoldment of man’s consciousness, not: …man’s mind. The mind has to be dropped, not unfolded. In fact, the moment you drop the mind, the unfoldment of your consciousness begins. But we believe in the mind – we don’t know anything other than the mind – we are addicted to the mind.In Western languages there are not many words for the mind, but in Eastern languages there are many words for the mind, for different purposes because the mind can function in many ways. The East has gone very deep into the phenomenon of the mind and beyond it.It is just like if you look into the languages of the Eskimos you will be surprised: there are one dozen words for ice. No other language has a dozen words for ice. Only Eskimos have a dozen words for ice because they have lived with ice for thousands of years and they have known all its possibilities. They know there are differences, minute differences which are not visible to those who have not lived in the world of an Eskimo. No other language has so many words.Sanskrit has at least one dozen words for the mind because as you go deeper into the mind, you come upon different layers. They are so different that it is not possible to call them all with the same name; they are qualitatively different. And as you go on moving deeper and deeper, a point comes when the mind is left behind and pure consciousness remains. That consciousness knows unfoldment. The mind cannot unfold; it can only close. The more you become addicted to the mind, the more closed you become. The mind is in fact a prison, and the stronger the mind, the more unfortunate for the person because then it will be very difficult for him to get out of it. And our whole educational system enforces the mind, strengthens the mind.Hence I can understand the difficulty of the translator; but you have to remember, because you are working on meditation here and you can understand in a far better way.The unfoldment of man’s consciousness leads him to this unchanging truth. Everything is changing in the world; you cannot find anything in the world which is unchanging unless you go deep within yourself and reach the very center of your being. Only there will you find the center, the center of the cyclone, which remains absolutely unchanging. It is on that very center that the whole change depends, the whole wheel of life and death moves. Without that center, the world will disappear. That center, that unchanging truth is the very foundation of this changing world; it is rooted there. Not to know it is to live a life which is not worth calling life. Not to know it is to have to go on doing foolish things all your life, in order to give a certain fallacy to yourself of the unchanging truth.For example, why are people more interested in money rather than friendship? If it is a question of choice you will choose money more than friendship. Why? Because money seems to be more unchanging. You can depend on it, it is more reliable. If you have a good bank balance it is far more reliable. Who knows about the friend? Today he is a friend, tomorrow he may become the enemy.Machiavelli, in his great book, The Prince, writes: “Don’t say anything, even to your friend, which you would not like to be known by your enemy.” Why? Because your friend can become an enemy any day. And he also says: “Don’t say anything against your enemy which you would not like to say against your friend,” because the enemy can become your friend any day. Things go on changing: the friend becomes the enemy, the enemy becomes the friend.You can depend on money. People love money more than anything else; money seems to be more significant than love. You can purchase love; if not love then at least you can purchase sex. But if you don’t have money you are simply a beggar. With money everything comes. Money seems to have a certain permanence, a certain stability.People are more interested in things than in people. People die; things don’t die. People go on accumulating things for the simple reason that good furniture, good paintings, and a good house are far more permanent – they may last longer than you – but you cannot say the same about people. You love somebody, and tomorrow the person dies. Then you are left empty, with a great wound which will take years to heal or may not ever heal and it will always hurt.Hence people are afraid of love, people are afraid of people. People make friends with animals rather than with people. They would like to have a good dog – it is more predictable and more reliable. Whenever you come home he is there to welcome you, wagging his tail. You can hit him, you can shout at him, you can scream at him, you can scold him, but he never changes his loyalty to you, his obedience to you. You can’t do the same with people – people are dangerous. Hence you see more and more people becoming interested in birds, dogs, horses, for the simple reason they give a certain feel of permanence.Carlo and Elena are in love and want to spend a night together.“Have you understood, my love?” says Elena. “When my parents are asleep I will throw down a cent and that will be the signal. I will leave the door open and you can come up.”Carlo waits under the window. Finally Elena throws the cent down, then eagerly lies down in the bed wearing a flimsy nightgown, and waits… And waits… And waits…After about half an hour she goes to the window and exclaims impatiently, “But, Carlo, are you coming up or not?”“Yes, my love,” replies Carlo, “as soon as I find the cent.”On his tenth birthday, Abraham calls his son.“Now, my son,” he says, “It is time for me to explain the facts of life. We will start from the hands. Be very careful and don’t forget.”“So, the thumb is used to show that a bargain is good. The index finger is used to show what is the best in a bargain. The middle finger is used to show power. The ring finger is just used for the wedding ring. The little finger is used to clean your ear. Have you understood?”“Yes, Pa,” replied the son, “but I would like to know the use of the middle – what you call the power finger.”Abraham leans over his son and whispers, “The power finger, son, you use it at night under the blankets, when you count the money!”Why are people so interested in money? For the simple reason that they are in a great need to find something permanent in this life where everything goes on changing every moment. They want something to rely upon. Unless they find their own center they will go on finding these stupid things. These are poor substitutes.The real thing is the unfoldment of consciousness, because that leads you to the unchanging truth.In unchanging stillness, unchanging purity and rest are found.And when you have found your innermost core, when your lotus of consciousness has blossomed – the Indian mystics have called it the one thousand petaled lotus – when all the petals have opened and you have found the center of the lotus, there is great stillness, a stillness which is unchanging. There is great purity, great innocence, and deep rest. You have come home. The pilgrimage is over. In finding yourself you have found godliness. In reaching your own center you have reached the center of the whole universe. Now there is no need to go anywhere; you have found the infinite treasure – what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God.People have tried to create substitutes. You can create a certain stillness by learning some yoga posture. If your body is still you will feel a certain stillness, but that is not the real stillness; it will be disturbed. It can be disturbed very easily by anything – just an ant crawling up your body is enough to disturb it. Anything can distract it: just a bird calling and you will be distracted. A child starts crying, a small girl starts giggling, a dog starts barking, and that’s enough. And the world is full of so many things continuously happening. You cannot remain still for long; sooner or later it will be disturbed. Because of this, people have moved to the monasteries, people have escaped to the mountains, to the caves. But there also something or other will disturb you.Rather than escaping from the world, escape into yourself. Remain in the world because the world is a great opportunity; it is a constant testing ground. It gives you thousand and one opportunities to see whether you have attained real stillness or it is just an imposed phenomenon that is only skin-deep and can be disturbed by anything.Your so-called religious people are only superficially still; anything can disturb them. In fact they are disturbed by things more than other people. Even if one person in your house becomes religious he becomes a torture to the whole family – children cannot play because he is doing Transcendental Meditation, he is “doing his TM.” Children cannot play, the wife cannot work – everything has to stop for him. And even then he will be disturbed by any small thing. Just the clock ticking is enough, and the TM disappears, because what he is doing is just imposing a mantra, a constant repetition of a certain sound or word. Anything far more interesting is bound to attract him. If somebody puts on beautiful music or somebody starts playing guitar he will be disturbed, he will be immediately disturbed. The reason is not the guitar, the reason is that what he is doing is boring and the guitar is far more attractive. Naturally the mind moves toward that which is more attractive. He is concentrating on Jesus Christ, and a beautiful woman passes by… Now, looking at a man crucified… Who wants to look at a man on the cross? One wants to avoid such things. And a beautiful woman passing by immediately attracts; that becomes a distraction.That’s why your so-called saints have always been against women; that simply shows the women have been disturbing their meditations. In fact, it simply shows their meditations were so boring that any woman could have disturbed it.When one person in the family becomes religious, starts praying or meditating or doing something stupid then the whole family becomes afraid because he is doing something great. In fact, if he is really a meditator there is no question of getting distracted.You cannot distract my meditators – they will distract you! The whole family will be distracted. Just start doing Dynamic Meditation or Kundalini, and not only the family but the whole neighborhood is distracted: they start phoning the police. This is something! Rather than being distracted by any small thing, they are all distracted by your meditation.Real rest – real relaxation, real purity and stillness – is not imposed by any artificial means; it is a spontaneous unfoldment. Then how does it happen? It happens through understanding. Tao believes in understanding. Try to understand. Nobody wants to understand – we want to avoid, we want somehow to bypass our problems. You have problems – you go to somebody like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and you ask him, “I am very worried, anxious, tense. What should I do?”And he says, “Do TM. Repeat this mantra: ‘Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola.’ Go on repeating it fifteen minutes in the morning, fifteen minutes in the evening. It will help.”It will help you to repress the problem, but only to repress; the problem is not solved. How can the problem be solved by repeating “Coca-Cola”? Or maybe “Om”, which is the same; it makes no difference. In fact, “Coca-Cola” seems to be far sweeter, far more appealing! Both are the same – any word will do. How it is going to solve your problems? Your problems will remain; you will still have to solve them. Sooner or later they will surface again. And repressing them is dangerous because they will gain more energy, and the time that is being lost meanwhile is wasted.Tao depends on understanding. Now in the world there are only two things prevalent. One is analysis, Freudian analysis, and the many offshoots of it. Analyze the problem, go on analyzing it. It is like peeling an onion: one layer is removed, another layer is there, far fresher. Remove it, another is there. And all the time tears will be coming to your eyes. Some bargain! And your problems are not as small as an onion because sooner or later the onions will be finished, you will come to the very end, the last layer, and then…emptiness in your hand. But your problems are not so easy. Hence psychoanalysis needs seven years, ten years, and still it is never complete.I have never come across a single person – and I have hundreds of my sannyasins who are psychoanalysts, therapists, well-known therapists – but I have never come across a single person whose analysis is complete. It cannot be complete; it is an unending process. You go on, go on, and each layer will reveal another layer.Sigmund Freud used to reach your childhood. At the age of three or four you start collecting memories, so he will reach that point. Then Arthur Janov found that this doesn’t help, you have to go beyond that, so Primal Therapy came into existence. Now you have to go beyond that.Naturally, a two or three year-old child cannot talk about his problems; he can only kick and scream and throw things. So Primal Therapy is just kicking, shouting and screaming. And Janov thought there will be a final scream – the primal scream, the first scream.When the child is born the first thing he does is scream; that is a physiological necessity. By screaming he cleans his whole breathing system; by screaming he throws his mucus out. That’s why children’s noses go on flowing: when he is in the mother’s womb all his breathing system collects mucus – naturally, he is not breathing; he lives on the mother’s breathing. When he comes out of the womb he has to breathe on his own. The system has never worked and the breathing mechanism is full of mucus; that mucus has to come out. Doctors hang the child upside down; they make him do shirshasana, headstand, so the mucus starts flowing downward because of gravitation. And naturally when you hang somebody upside down he screams, and that very scream helps: the mucus is thrown out and he starts breathing. That is the primal scream.Janov thought, “If we can reach the primal scream we have come to the very bottom of it. Then, all the problems will be solved.” But now there are other therapists who say, “That won’t help because there is still nine months’ conditioning in the mother’s womb. Now we have to go into that – then, all the problems can be solved.”But I would like to tell you that all the problems will not be solved then also, because after those nine months you will come across another layer that will be of the previous life. Then start Freudian psychoanalysis again and then Primal Therapy, and so on, and so forth.Indian mystics who have tried to enter the whole realm of consciousness say there have been at least eighty four million lives before you became man. Now, if you somehow finish analyzing eighty four million lives, then you will find you have to enter the world of the monkeys… So, monkey analysis! And then go on and on… Then finally you will find you have been a fish in the ocean; that is the beginning of life. Then the fish and the problems of the fish… I don’t think there can be any end to psychoanalysis – it is an exercise in utter futility. That is one thing, the Western thing.And the Eastern approach has been: seeing that this whole thing is too long and will never end, bypass it. Just repeat a mantra and forget all about it. But by forgetting all about it you cannot solve anything.Tao is absolutely right: neither analysis will help nor forgetting, but only witnessing, understanding, seeing – seeing clearly. It is neither analysis nor a repetition of a mantra. Tao does not believe in either; its approach is totally new. And only then will you find, in that understanding, that a transformation happens. You will find stillness, purity and rest.He who attains purity and stillness enters into the immutable Tao.And through that witnessing, through that understanding and awareness, you enter the eternal Tao. Tao means the ultimate law of nature, what Buddha calls aes dhammo sanantano. This is the ultimate law of existence, Tao.Having entered into the immutable Tao he is named the possessor of Tao.He is only named, Ko Hsuan says, remember. We have to say something, we have to give that experience a certain name. But he immediately adds:Although he is named the possessor of Tao he knows that he does not possess it.Because he is no longer an ego, how can he possess anything? There is nobody inside him, just a mirror, a pure mirror that reflects; the mirror cannot possess anything. Do you think the mirror can possess anything? You look in the mirror: it reflects your face, but it does not possess it. For the moment it appears it possesses, but that is only an appearance. It does not possess you. You move away, the reflection has gone and the mirror remains in its stillness, in its purity. Whether it reflects or not, its purity remains unaffected.This mirrorlike quality of consciousness cannot be said to possess anything – there is no ego to possess in the first place. Secondly, there is nothing to possess – the very idea of possession divides existence into two: the possessor and the possessed, the subject and the object, the owner and the owned, the observer and the observed. But when you enter ultimate rest, stillness, all duality is transcended; there is only one.In fact, saying that one possesses Tao… It will be far better and far more true to say one is possessed by Tao. Tao fills you, totally fills you; you become part of it. Not that Tao is in your hands, but that you are in the hands of Tao. But our language is such… Our language is made by people who are interested in possessing things.Just the other day somebody has asked, “Osho, my whole mind always goes on thinking about how to possess more, bigger things – how to have a big house, a palace, how to have a bigger bank balance, how to have a longer life.”If you ask Freud, if you ask the Western approach they will say, “This is nothing. This is just the desire to have a bigger sexual organ, that’s all.” Freud reduces everything to sexuality; he seems to be obsessed with it. In fact, it is a revolt against the Christian obsession with sex. Two thousand years of Christianity made people so sex repressive that somebody had to revolt against it, and Sigmund Freud revolted against it. But the revolt went to the other extreme; again everything is colored by sexuality. He thinks people like bigger things – a big house, a big name, fame, a taller body – these are all just substitutes for having a bigger sexual organ. In a way it is true, but only in a way. It is true particularly for the eighteenth-century Western man; the Victorian morality was rooted in it.But the East has a different approach which is far more true. The East says people are interested in bigger things because they see such hollowness in themselves, such emptiness in themselves that they want to fill it somehow. And they go on putting things into it but they disappear – those things disappear and more and more things are needed. Hence the desire comes to have such big things that somehow the inner emptiness can be filled.But it cannot be filled: that inner emptiness is your nature. It has to be loved, lived, understood. Once understood, you will start rejoicing in it; there is no need to fill it. It is beautiful, it is tremendously beautiful; there is nothing more beautiful than that inner emptiness. You are just afraid of the word, of the idea of emptiness, and just because of the idea you go on asking for bigger things. In fact, the desire to have a bigger sexual organ may be nothing but to fill the inner emptiness!Freud was so obsessed with it that he started thinking that women suffer very much from phallic jealousy. That is utterly wrong. If they suffer from phallic jealousy then it should be stated, to keep the balance right, that man suffers from breast jealousy. But Freud never said that; he remains a male chauvinist pig. He would have loved this story:The Danish king, the Swedish king and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, are sitting in a pub having a few beers together. Somehow they end up having a competition to see whose prick is the longest.The Danish king puts his prick on the table. Twelve inches! Everyone applauds and vigorously sings the Danish national anthem.Then the Swedish king puts his prick on the table. Sixteen inches! Everyone screams and shouts and jumps around and sings the Swedish national anthem.Lastly, Prince Philip puts his prick on the table. Twenty-five inches long! And everyone starts singing:“God save the Queen!”Only when he can transmute all living things can he be truly named the possessor of Tao.Who can be called a possessor of Tao? One who knows that he does not possess – that is the first condition to be fulfilled – one who knows that he is possessed by Tao, that he is no more, only Tao is. But what will be the indication? How will we recognize that he possesses the Tao? Ko Hsuan gives a beautiful symbol to recognize the man of Tao. He says: Only when he can transmute all living things can he be truly named the possessor of Tao.The translation is again a little wrong. Ko Hsuan must have meant all living beings, not living things. Things are not living, that’s why they are called things. Living beings… But why say living beings? – because beings are naturally living. But things are complicated: all living beings are neither living nor beings. Many living beings are dead – apparently living, only apparently, not really living.Mrs. Carrot had a very bad car accident and was hospitalized.Her concerned husband, Mr. Carrot, asked the doctor what her fate would be.The doctor reassuringly said, “Do not worry, she will live, but she will probably be a vegetable for the rest of her life!”Many people are just vegetating… And you know three are here: Banana, Potato, Tomato! These people cannot be called living. And even if people are living they don’t have beings. Being is only when you have reached the unfoldment of your consciousness. Being means when becoming is finished, when becoming is no longer needed, when you have arrived home.The man of Tao is one whose touch transmutes people into living, first, and then into being. That’s the miracle of a master. If you allow him to touch you, if you become available to him, he can stir life in you and, finally, he can make you aware of your own being.The only proof of somebody being a man of Tao is that in his proximity people start living on a totally different plane, become more and more lively, start attaining a certain crystallization of being. The man of Tao is one who can impart his Tao to others, who can function like a catalytic agent, so that if you fall in tune with him you go through a transformation, a mutation.He who is able to understand this can lead others to sacred Tao.One who understands the alchemy of how to transform the dead into the living and how to help the becoming into being, who knows this art of alchemy, can lead people to the sacred Tao.The word sacred is used only in the last sutra. This is very significant because when you use the words sacred Tao it becomes synonymous to God. But Ko Hsuan has not mentioned it before because to mention it before will make you worshippers. And all worshippers have gone wrong: they have become Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans; they are not transmuted. Hence he has kept this beautiful word sacred for the very end; this is his last word: sacred Tao. This can be said only when you have understood all the sutras; now you will not become a worshipper.Worshipping is not going to help, praying is not going to help – only meditation, only understanding, only awareness. And calling Tao sacred means everything is sacred, because Tao fills everything. The whole existence is the manifestation of Tao. There is no other God than the universe. There is no other God than this very life. There is no other God than this moment, this now, this here.Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Please say a few words about Sanjay Gandhi and his death. He respected and loved you and had said to Laxmi just a week before his death that soon he will be coming to visit the ashram and to see you.Sanjay Gandhi was a beautiful person, a man of immense integrity, individuality, adventure. He lived adventurously and he died adventurously. In fact, that’s how one should live and one should die. He lived dangerously. The only way to live is to live in danger, because it is only in moments of tremendous danger that one transcends lower planes of being.It has been reported in the newspapers and when Vivek read it she asked me how it was possible – because dying in a plane crash, his whole body was just a mess. All his bones were broken, his skull was broken, his brain had come out of the skull – but on his face there was great peace. She was puzzled. After such a horrible death, how can one’s face be peaceful?But there is a secret in it worth understanding. When one dies on a deathbed after a prolonged disease, continuously thinking and worrying about death, the face cannot be calm and quiet; the worry, the tension, the clinging to life will be there. But when one dies suddenly, when death comes like a surprise, suddenly the mind stops.I have been in many accidents myself and the people who have been with me in those accidents have all experienced that in the moment when the accident is actually happening the mind disappears, because the mind cannot think about it. There is nothing to think about it, there is no way to think about it. The mind stops because the mind can only move in the vicious circle of the known, and the unknown has entered so suddenly that the mind is absolutely incapable of figuring it out, what is happening. In a deep shock the mind stops; for a moment there is a glimpse of no-mind.Sanjay Gandhi died a better death than millions of people who die in their beds after a long, long disease, because they cannot use the opportunity of death. He may not have experienced meditation while he was alive, but he must have tasted just a drop of the nectar of meditation while he was dying. Death came with such immediacy, giving no time for the mind to think about it. Such a death is a beautiful death.Many questions have been asked to me for the past week, since he died. I had not answered them for the simple reason that people who have not meditated, people who have not been here, who have not been my sannyasins will not be able to understand what I am saying.Vinoba Bhave said on Sanjay Gandhi’s death that he died an immature death. That is absolutely wrong. He was far more mature than Morarji Desai. Chronologically he was very young, only thirty-three, but chronological age is not the real age. He had far more perceptiveness, he had far more intelligence, he had far more clarity. He lived totally, he lived each moment of his life. And it was a very natural death to him; it belonged to his very style of life.That’s why I have kept complete silence about it. Now that all the people who had to say something have had their say, I can say my words, which are going to be absolutely different. I don’t feel sad about his death. Yes, the country will miss him, but as far as he is concerned he died beautifully. The country has lost a great opportunity in him because he was a promise, a great hope because he had the guts to go against the traditional, orthodox mind of this country. He was a man of steel – he could have fought against conventions, and he was learning how to fight. And he was succeeding. Slowly, slowly his grip on events was getting better every day.The country has certainly lost an immense opportunity of becoming contemporary. He was a contemporary man; he had no hangovers from the past, he did not believe in the past. But as far as he himself is concerned he could not have died in a better way. This death is a logical conclusion to his whole life.If dying at the age of thirty-three inevitably means an immature death, then Adi Shankaracharya also died an immature death – he was exactly thirty-three. Then Jesus also died an immature death – he was exactly thirty-three. Then Vivekananda also died an immature death – he was also exactly thirty-three. Just living a long life means nothing; length has no meaning. Meaning comes from intensity. It is not a question of quantity but of quality. How long you live makes no difference. How you live, how deeply, how totally, how intensely, how passionately – everything depends on that. And he certainly lived totally, intensely, passionately – and he risked everything for it; he was not in any way a coward.People like Sanjay Gandhi are bound to die in some strange way. This country needs more people like Sanjay Gandhi. For centuries this country has been a cowardly country. The Himalayas belong to this country – the greatest mountains in the world – and for one hundred years continuously people have come from all over the world to climb the virgin peaks of the Himalayas. But no Indian has bothered: Indians believe in security, comfort – why take the risk? Many others have died trying to climb Everest.And when Edmund Hillary came he was asked, “Are you people mad? Why do you bother? What are you going to gain out of it? Even if you reach the top of Everest there is nothing! Why have so many people from all over the world tried to climb the mountain?”Hillary said, “Just because it is there. It is a great challenge. Standing there, unconquered, it is a challenge to the human spirit. It has to be conquered – it is not a question of gaining anything. It is just a challenge to the spirit of man.”Indians can’t understand this. That’s why they have lived for two thousand years in slavery. They will not climb the mountains, they will not swim in the ocean, they will not glide in the sky. They will move very mathematically, very calculatingly.Sanjay Gandhi was a good beginning; he was a pioneer in this way. He was always interested in adventure. He could not fit in any school, he could not fit in any conventional pattern of life. I loved the man.We need many more people who can die in adventures. Their death raises the spirit of the people. If they live, they bring a new quality, a new perfume to people’s life; if they die, their death also brings a new fragrance. Hence I am not sad about him but I am certainly sad about the country. It is really a misfortune for the country, a great calamity, far greater than the death of Jawaharlal Nehru, Sanjay Gandhi’s grandfather, because Jawaharlal had lived his life, he had done whatsoever he wanted to do. There was nothing else that he could have done even if he had lived ten years more; he had blossomed. He was a poet, not a politician; he was also adventurous. Something of him has entered Indira Gandhi, his daughter, and something of him was very much in the bones, the blood, and the marrow of Sanjay Gandhi.Sanjay Gandhi’s death is a far bigger calamity to the country because he had yet to contribute much. He had just begun to open his petals; he had yet to become a flower. He was still a potential. Certainly he would have been a great prime minister of the country if he had lived – he may have proved the greatest prime minister this country has known up until now – he was showing every indication of that.Hence, as far as the country is concerned, it was a calamity. But as far as he himself is concerned he lived beautifully, he died beautifully. And the peace that was on his face must have looked miraculous to everybody – not only to Vivek but to everybody. Whosoever had seen his face must have wondered why he looked so calm, quiet and serene.You have to understand the psychology of such accidents. The mind is very clever about day-to-day affairs; it continues its chattering. It stops only when there is some shock, something which is not digestible, which the mind cannot take in. In fact that is the attraction of adventure. People who go mountain climbing know what is really the attraction. The attraction is not just climbing beautiful mountains with a scenic panorama surrounding it – that is not the point, there is a far deeper psychology behind it. When you are climbing a mountain there are a thousand and one dangers. When you are surrounded with danger your mind stops. You become suddenly aware. There is a great alertness and serenity. You have to take each step very carefully, consciously. That is really what meditation is all about.In my childhood days I used to take my friends to the river. There was a small path by the side of the river. To walk on that edge was very dangerous; just one step taken in unconsciousness and you will fall into the river, and that was the place where the river was the deepest. Nobody used to go there, but that was the spot I loved most and I would ask all my friends to come along with me moving on that narrow edge. Very few were ever ready to go along with me, but those few had a really beautiful experience. They all reported, “This is strange, how the mind stops!”I would take my friends to the railway bridge to jump from the bridge into the river. It was certainly dangerous and it was prohibited. There was always a policeman standing on the railway bridge because that was the place from where people used to commit suicide. We had to bribe the policeman: “We are not committing suicide, we have just come to enjoy the jump!” And slowly, slowly he became aware that “These are the same people – they don’t die or anything, they come again and again and they are not interested in suicide.” In fact, he started loving us and stopped taking bribes. He said, “You can jump – I will not look at that side. You can come whenever you want.”It was dangerous. The bridge was very high and to jump from there… And before you would reach the river there was a time between – the gap between the bridge and the river – when the mind would suddenly stop.Those were my first glimpses of meditation; that’s how I became more and more interested in meditation. I started inquiring how those moments can be made available without going to the mountains, to the river, to the bridges; how one can allow oneself to move into these spaces without going anywhere, just by closing one’s eyes. Once you have tasted, it is not difficult.Sanjay Gandhi died beautifully. He will be born on a far higher plane because he died in a moment when the mind was no longer functioning. He died the death of a meditator without knowing what is happening. Of course it was not a conscious meditation, but still there was something of meditativeness in it. His next life will be of a higher quality. Maybe his next life will become more concerned with the inner adventure; this life was more concerned with the outer adventure. He was an extrovert.He wanted to come here. Many times I had been informed that he wants to come, and this time he had seen all the photos of the ashram. For two hours he was with Laxmi, with Indira, talking, inquiring, was very interested and wanted to come.But my feeling was that in this life he was more of an extrovert. This sudden death will bring a transformation to him: he will become an introvert in his next life, and that is something of immense value.Indira Gandhi must be in great pain. She cannot understand how we celebrate death here. She also wants to come, has been thinking for many days to come. She had settled that in August she would be coming, but now the death of Sanjay may again postpone her coming. She is interested in meditation, but she is, obviously, too occupied with the world, with the problems. And this country has so many problems, almost insoluble.This country is in such a situation that if you solve one problem you create ten others immediately. It is a mess! If you really want to solve the problems, people go against you. She told Laxmi, “I perfectly agree with Osho that the population has to be reduced, and it can only be reduced forcibly. But we have tried and that does not work because the country is a democratic country: people become enemies, and then you can’t come back into power again.” And whatsoever Indira and Sanjay did together in five years, Morarji Desai undid within three years. Now the problems are again the same – or even far worse.China now has the greatest population in the world, but by the end of this century, India will have the greatest population because China is not a democracy and they are using every possible way to prevent the growth of population. And they are succeeding.By the end of this century, India will be the most populated country in the world and, of course, it will have the greatest problems – almost impossible to solve. They can be solved right now, but to solve them means you have to fight with the people for their own sake. They will be against you. They are against me for the simple reason that whatsoever I say can be of help, but it goes against their traditions, against their conventions, against their orthodox mind.Sanjay created more enemies in the country than friends for the simple reason that he really wanted to help the country. He was far more interested in the well-being of the country than becoming a popular leader. If you want to be a popular leader you have to be a follower of your followers; you have just to say what they want to hear. He created more enemies than friends, he was the most hated person, for the simple reason that he had great dreams to help the country. He had a clear vision – and he was on the right track.All the idiots of the country deep down will be feeling very happy: “It is good that he is gone!” Now they can continue living their old stupidities and superstitions.I was shocked to know that at his funeral they were chanting Vedic mantras; that is not right. He would not have liked that at all. He was not a believer in any religion. He certainly believed in service and he believed that to serve is the only way to come closer to God – and he was right. At the funeral they were doing all kinds of foolish things, but Indira was dazed and in such a state of shock that she simply looked on and didn’t say anything when the Indian priests, the Indian priesthood, immediately took over the chants.And the people who were against him are now praising him. People are so stupid, so unconscious, so mechanical; they don’t know what they go on doing. If they had supported this young man, he would have been a blessing to the country. But they tried in every possible way to prevent him. There were at least hundred cases against him in the courts. He was running from one court to another. For the last three years he was harassed as much as anybody can be, but he faced all that harassment without any strain, without any tension; he accepted it as part of his life.If you want to change people, if you want to bring a radical change in their life, if you want to bring a revolution, you have to accept all these things as your destiny; they are inevitable.We need more people like him, particularly in this country. More young men should die climbing mountains, flying in the sky, diving deep in the ocean, exploring the unknown – first outwardly and then inwardly too.My work is totally different – it is inner – but on the fundamentals, Sanjay Gandhi would have absolutely agreed with me. I believe in adventure. Of course I am not interested that my sannyasins should go climbing the mountains because I know of far bigger mountains that are waiting inside you. And I would not encourage you to fly in the sky because there is a far bigger sky within you, far more unknown, far more unexplored, unmapped, uncharted. But the fundamental is the same.The quality of adventure to me is a religious quality, it is a spiritual quality. Whether you use it outwardly or inwardly, it doesn’t matter. But I love all adventurous people, and I love all those who are courageous enough to live in insecurity – and he lived in insecurity – and of course, in insecurity you are always living with death. That’s what insecurity means: that each moment of life is also a moment of death.You ask me to say few words on Sanjay Gandhi and his death.Death is an illusion, death never happens – only the form changes. And because we become too much identified with the form, that’s why we feel so miserable. To know that you are not the body, not the mind, is to know there is no death, that you are eternal. Everybody is part of eternity.There are only two illusions in the world, and they are not really two but two aspects of the same illusion. One is ego, which is false; it gives you the false idea, “I am separate from existence.” And out of this illusion arises the second illusion – the illusion of death. You are not separate from existence, hence how can you die? The wave is not separate from the ocean; it cannot die either. Yes, sometimes it manifests and sometimes it rests and goes into unmanifestation.There is no death, remember. But I am not saying to believe me; I would like you to experience it. There is no death. There is only life and life eternal.The second question:Osho,I was born a Christian but became convinced that Hinduism is the right religion, so I became a Hindu. I was initiated into Hinduism by the founder of the Krishna Consciousness Movement himself and given a new name. But listening to you I have become very confused. Please guide me as to what should I do now.There are many things to be understood. The first thing: nobody is born as a Christian, a Hindu, or a Mohammedan. You are simply born as pure consciousness with no adjective attached to you. You are brought up as a Hindu, a Christian or a Mohammedan. That is another matter. That has nothing to do with your birth; that is conditioning by your parents.And it always happens that whenever you are conditioned by others you feel a deep resistance against it. That is natural; nothing is wrong in it, not at all, because that child wants to remain free and by making him a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu the parents are drawing a small circle around him. They are making him defined; he was born undefined. He was born infinite; now they are making him finite. He was born open, open like a lotus flower. Now the parents, the society, the educational system, the church, are all trying to close him, to make him a prison cell. Nobody likes it – nobody can like it – it is against nature, against Tao.Freedom is our natural love, hence the child starts resisting. He has to repress his resistance; he cannot assert it because he has to depend on the parents. He is utterly helpless; he cannot live without their support. It is a question of survival for him, hence he has to compromise; he compromises with the parents just to survive. By the time he is capable of standing on his own feet he is already conditioned. Now the walls are too thick around him, and living within those walls for twenty-five years, which is almost one-third of one’s life, and the most important one-third, one becomes attached to the walls. One starts accepting them, one starts even becoming attached. But that resistance somewhere in the unconscious continues. If some opportunity arises to go against your conditioning, you will not miss the opportunity.That is what happened to you.You say, “I was born a Christian…” Nobody is born a Christian – you were brought up as a Christian and you must have carried a deep resistance to it. Coming in contact with Hinduism you became convinced of its rightness. What type of contact was this? It was only intellectual. And of course, the Eastern religions are far more appealing intellectually than the Western religions for the simple reason that the East has explored consciousness for a longer time than the West. Eastern science is childish, so is Western religion. Eastern religion is very mature; Western religion is very childish.The greatest religions were born in India – Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism; they contain the highest flights of human consciousness. Mohammedanism, Judaism, Christianity are far behind; intellectually they cannot be very convincing. They will look very primitive compared to Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism.You must have become intellectually convinced. But intellectual conviction is not real conversion; it remains in the head. You simply change from one prison into another – maybe a little bigger, a little better, with more facilities, but the prison is still a prison. If you are really rebellious you will not change one prison for another, you will simply get out of all prisons.That’s why you are becoming very confused here, because I am not here to convert you into another religion – for that, you would be very willing. My sannyasins don’t belong to any religion at all; they have a kind of religiousness. They are religious without any religion.Religion is for me a quality – not a philosophy, not a theology. I am against people moving from Christianity to Hinduism or from Hinduism to Christianity. I am against all these conversions; they are simply stupid.A Polish captain called all his men to the barracks.“Right, men! Today we are changing underwear. Kozlowski, you change with Zabriski. Pilsudski, you change…”Now finally the Polacks have decided to change the underwear, but now they are changing among themselves, so what kind of change is this? It was far better to keep your own underwear – at least it had your own dirt! Now you will be carrying somebody else’s dirt.Are you a Polack?A Polish man walks into a doctor’s office with third-degree burns on both sides of his face. The doctor, in amazement and concern, asks what happened. The Polack explains that he was at home ironing clothes when the telephone rang. Without thinking he put the iron to his ear instead of the phone.“But how did the other side of your face get burned?” asked the doctor.The Polack answered, “He called me back!”It was enough that you were a Christian – only one side of the face was burned – now what kind of nonsense is this, that you became a Hindu?And I know this man who initiated you, the founder of the Krishna Consciousness Movement, Prabhupada. He certainly had some talent in attracting stupid people all over the world. He must have been a Polack himself for many lives! I have never come across any Hare Krishna Movement person who has any kind of intelligence. Now from Christianity you fell into another ditch.Two Polacks arrived late at a concert where pianists of many nationalities were playing. Since they did not have a copy of the program they could not tell which pianist was from what country.Suddenly one of the Polacks said, “That is the Polack pianist.”“How do you know?” asked the other.“Simple. He does everything like the others, but instead of pushing the stool closer to the piano, he sits and pulls the piano closer to himself!”And do you know what happened to the Polack parachutist? He missed the ground!It is good that you are now feeling a little confused. That shows the beginning of intelligence because unless you have some intelligence you cannot be confused. You cannot confuse a rock: confusion means some indication of intelligence. Don’t be worried – you are still a little bit alive. A fragment of you is still intelligent, and that is enough. We will take hold of that fragment and from there we will start changing you – not converting you into another religion but simply making you aware that religion has nothing to do with beliefs, Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan.Religion is a revolution – a revolution from the mind to no-mind, from darkness to light, from death to immortality. Religion is a radical change of your inner gestalt. What you did was just substituting your old beliefs with new beliefs. But I don’t think that makes any difference. You worshipped Jesus Christ, now you will be worshipping Krishna; but the worshipper is the same, the worship is the same. You have not changed – you cannot change this way. You can go to the church, you can go to the temple, but you are the same person. Just by changing from the church to the temple, do you think there will be any transformation of your consciousness? It’s not so cheap. It needs tremendous inner work, it needs great awareness. It is not a question of replacing one belief with another, one image with another, finding substitutes.The basic question is how to get unidentified with the body, with the mind, to know that you are just a watcher, a watcher on the hills, above the clouds, unidentified with any cloud, totally beyond, beyond the beyond.My sannyasins don’t belong to any religion although all religions belong to them. They are vast enough: they can absorb whatsoever is beautiful in Jesus and they can absorb whatsoever is beautiful in Krishna. Why replace Jesus with Krishna? Jesus has something beautiful which Krishna has not got, and Krishna has something else which is beautiful and which is missing in Jesus. You will be far more complete if Jesus, Krishna, Mohammed, Moses, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu, Ko Hsuan, Kabir, Bahauddin, all become part of your inner being. There is no need to be so miserly. Your consciousness is so vast it can contain the whole universe, it can contain the whole sky. Even the sky is not the limit.That’s my whole effort here: to make you more and more available to all aspects of religiousness. Krishna has something beautiful – the flute, the song, the celebration – which is missing in Jesus. But Jesus also has something immensely significant – the cross, the sacrifice, the readiness to die so willingly, with a prayer on his lips, “Forgive, father, all these people because they know not what they are doing,” with such compassion, with such forgiveness. There is no need to drop Jesus. Why not make space enough so they all can be part of you? They are aspects. And you will be missing Buddha – the serenity, the calmness. And you will be missing Bodhidharma – the laughter. And you will be missing Meera – the dance.Why choose? Why be this or that? Why not love all that is beautiful? You can love the roses, you can love the lotuses, you can love all kinds of flowers. These are all flowerings of God.You will feel a little confused because you would like me to give you another substitute, and I don’t give you another substitute. I make you spacious, I make you open to all possibilities.A religious consciousness can contain all that has happened up until now, that is happening now, and that will ever happen in the future. That vastness is the real change that brings you into the shrine of godliness. And godliness has many doors – Jesus says, “My God’s mansion has many rooms” – he can contain contradictions.You are worried because you will see many contradictions here. When I am speaking on Meera I will be speaking for love. When I am speaking on Buddha I will be speaking for meditation. When I am speaking on Tao I will be speaking on the transcendence of both love and meditation. And you will be confused, you will think that I am contradictory. I am not contradictory, I am simply vast enough – I can contain contradictions. And my whole effort is to make you also capable of containing all contradictions in such a deep synchronicity that the opposites become complementaries. Then your inner noise disappears and a melody arises. That melody, that harmony is prayer.The third question:Osho,What is the hardest work that you ever do?I do my hardest work before breakfast. That is getting up!Have you heard about the guy whose name was Will Knott, but who was so lazy he signed his name, Won’t?I belong to the same category. I am a lazy man’s guide to enlightenment!The fourth question:Osho,Cannot people learn by imitating others?That’s how people learn, but that’s how people remain stupid, too. The only way practiced hitherto is that of imitating others. That makes you knowledgeable but it does not make you intelligent. It makes you more informed but it does not release your wisdom. It will make you efficient as far as the outer world is concerned – you will become a better mechanic, a better technician – but as far as the inner dimension is concerned you will become more and more stupid if you imitate.There are things which are learned by imitation: for example, you have to learn language by imitation, otherwise you won’t know any language. Science has to be learned through others. But the inner world is totally different; it follows a totally different law where imitation is a barrier and a wall, not a bridge. In the inner world you have to learn on your own.But people go on doing the same kind of imitation in the inner world too, so they start imitating Buddha, they start imitating Jesus, they start imitating Mahavira, and they end up by being only carbon copies. They become more and more stupid. They cannot find their original face.You can sit like a buddha, you can close your eyes like a buddha, you can use the same posture, you can sit under the same kind of tree, you can eat the same kind of food in the same quantity, you can sleep the way buddha used to sleep, get up at the time buddha used to get up – you can do everything in the minutest detail exactly like a buddha, but it will all be acting; it won’t make you an awakened one.A little rabbit is ready to become an adult, so his daddy says, “Today I will show you how to behave with the ladies!” So they go and find six beautiful female rabbits in the garden.“Look at me,” says daddy rabbit. “Watch! Be aware!”“Hello, madam,” says daddy as he jumps on the first female. And then some time after his jerking is over he says, “Goodbye, madam!”Then he jumps on the second one with a very polite, “Hello madam,” then, “Goodbye madam!”And so on and so forth, very, very slowly…When he is finished he goes to his son. The little rabbit seems very feverish. “Did you get it?” asks his father.“Oh yes, yes, yes!” says the young one. And running at full speed without a single stop he goes on jumping, “Hello madam, goodbye madam, hello madam, goodbye madam, hello madam, goodbye madam, hello madam, goodbye madam…hello daddy, goodbye daddy!”Imitation will make you very stupid, unintelligent. It is the way of the mediocre. Beware of it. In the inner world – and that is the world I am concerned with and that is the world you are here for – imitation won’t help at all. You have to drop imitating completely, totally, entirely, because each individual is unique, so unique that if he imitates anybody else he will miss his uniqueness, and in that uniqueness is his spirit, is his very being. In his uniqueness is hidden his godliness.Cannot you observe that Jesus happened only once? And for two thousand years, how many people have tried to imitate him? Millions. And how many have become Jesus Christ? Not a single one. The same is true about Zarathustra, about Lao Tzu, about Buddha, about Mahavira, about Krishna. Not even a single person has been able to repeat them, and it is not that people have not tried; people have tried in every possible way. Millions of people have tried to be like Buddha – who would not like to be like Buddha? – but they have all failed, utterly failed. Is it not a great lesson to be learned?Just open your eyes and see that God never creates two persons exactly similar; he does not repeat. He is really a creator.It happened once…A man purchased a Picasso painting. It was very costly, one million dollars, but he knew perfectly well that it was authentic – he knew it because he was an eyewitness when Picasso was painting it. When he had purchased it he was so happy – he was a friend of Picasso – he went to show him the painting and to tell him, “I have purchased one of your paintings. Of course it has cost me a fortune, but I am immensely happy that I have now got one of your original paintings.”Picasso looked at the painting and said, “This is not original – this is a copy.”The man was shocked – then he had been robbed of one million dollars! He said, “But what are you saying? I have seen you paint this with my own eyes! I was staying with you in the days when you were painting this!”And the woman who used to live in those days with Picasso also said, “You must be joking because I also remember. You have done this painting yourself and your friend was staying with us.”Picasso said, “I know perfectly well that I have painted it, but it is still not an original because I have painted the same painting before too. Whether I have made the copy or somebody else has made the copy, it makes no difference; it is a copy, it is not original. Yes, I have painted it, but it is a repetition. I will not call it original.”Existence is not repetitive; it is always original.Rejoice in the fact that it has created you as an original being. You are not supposed to be anybody else but yourself. It is disrespectful toward existence, it is ungrateful toward existence – even the effort, even the desire to be somebody else. Feel thankful and grateful that it has never created anybody like you and it will never create anybody like you. Don’t miss this opportunity by imitating.And why do people imitate? – because they don’t trust their own intelligence. They are afraid that if they move on their own they may commit some mistake, so it is better to follow somebody who knows. That is the greatest mistake in life, to follow somebody who knows, because then you will never mature. One grows by committing many mistakes.Commit as many mistakes as possible. Commit new mistakes every day – be inventive, be creative about mistakes. Just remember one thing: don’t create the same mistake again; that is not intelligent. But if you commit a mistake for the first time it is beautiful, it is great because that will help you to grow. It will help you to find out who you are. Just following somebody, even if you reach heaven it will not be worth reaching. You will reach like a child; you will not be able to enjoy it, and you will remain foolish even there, and you will go on doing your foolish things even in heaven. It is better to fall into hell but remain unique, remain yourself; then even hell can be transformed into a heaven.After thirty years of happy marriage, Sadie was on her deathbed. The doctor had given up all hope.Her loving husband, Saul, cried out tearfully, “Oh Sadie, oh Sadie, just tell me if there is anything I can do!”From her deathbed Sadie whispered, “Ah Saul, ah Saul, my loving husband. I want you to do something for me you have never done in all these years.”“Ah yes, Sadie!” cried Saul. “I will do anything for you, my Sadie!”“Saul, I want you to kiss me here between my legs.”“Ah Sadie, I can’t do that!”“Ah, but Saul, you said you would do anything!”So bravely Saul said okay and proceeded to kiss her between her legs.All of a sudden a great rosy glow came over Sadie. She became completely well and jumped up out of bed crying, “Ah wonderful Saul!”But Saul slumped back on the floor crying and beating his breast. Sadie asked, “What is wrong, Saul?”Saul said through his tears, “Ah, but I could have saved my mother and my sister too!”Be a little more intelligent. In the outer world, imitate, or whatsoever you want to, do. But in the inner remain original, remain authentically your own self.I would like to see each of my sannyasin a unique peak, incomparable to anybody else. That’s why I don’t give you any discipline: I want you to discover it. I will help you to become more conscious, but I will not tell you what to do; that has to come out of your own consciousness. I will not give you ten commandments, I will not make rules and regulations for you. You all hanker for rules and regulations because that is easy. If I tell you, “Do this, don’t do that,” you need not use your own intelligence. It is perfectly good: you trust me and you go on doing whatsoever I say, but that will be only control, repression; it will not be freedom, it will not be consciousness.And in the world of freedom, the first step is the last step too. You have to begin from the first step. If the first step is taken in slavery, the last step will also be part of it. The first step has to be taken in tremendous freedom.If you are here, you are here on your own accord. If you are sannyasins it is your surrender, it is your own decision, it is your own commitment. I don’t make any conditions on you and I don’t want you to make any conditions on me from your side.Just the other day I received a letter… The person asked for sannyas in such an aggressive way, as if he is doing some favor to me. And the way he writes the letter is not at all that of a man who wants to surrender, it is that of demand – each word is violent. He says, “Give me sannyas today. I cannot wait. Either say yes or no. I don’t want to follow Arup’s suggestions; I don’t want to do anything told by somebody else. You simply tell me whether you are going to give me sannyas today or not. I want the answer this afternoon!”Now is this a way to be a sannyasin? This is the first time in my life that I have said no to any person – the first time! I have given sannyas to one hundred and fifty thousand people and this is the first time that I had to say no. Sadly I had to say no because this is not the way. If you make conditions, if you demand that “Today I want enlightenment, this very afternoon!”… Today it is sannyas, after sannyas there will be other things.I don’t make any demands on you; please remember not to make any demands on me. I am here just out of my joy; you are here out of your joy. We have met for no other reason. You are not here because of me, I am not here because of you. You are here because of you, I am here because of me. And it is beautiful that we have met – it is a coincidence that we have met.We can share. I can share whatsoever I have, but it is not an imposition on you. You are not to follow it, you have only to understand it. And if out of your understanding something starts happening in you, then you are the source of that happening, I am not the source of that happening. You need not even be grateful to me.The fifth question:Osho,The Transcendental Meditators have an advanced siddhi course where they learn to fly, as they call it. I have seen photographs of them hovering above the ground. How they do it?Mandira, go to the photographic department here and learn a little bit about trick photography – and there is nothing more in it. Krishna Bharti, Champa, they will be of immense help to you. Or if you want really a crazy man then go to Sarjano; he will teach you trick photography. It is all trick photography, nothing else – no siddhi, no flying, nothing else.But stupid people become very interested in such sheer nonsense. If the Transcendental Meditators can fly, what is the need for Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to have an airplane? There is no need at all! We have met – I have met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi just by accident. I was having a camp in Pahalgam in Kashmir and he was also having a camp in Pahalgam. His disciples became very interested and they wanted me to come to them and to talk to them, so I went there. We met. The man is simply ordinary, nothing special. And what he is teaching in the West is a very traditional thing in India; any stupid person knows about it.Just by repeating a mantra you can create a false sense of serenity. It is just autohypnosis and nothing else. You need not go to anybody, you need not learn any Sanskrit mantra, you can just repeat your own name. Your name is Mandira – you can simply go on repeating “Mandira, Mandira, Mandira, Mandira…” Go on repeating. If you repeat it for fifteen minutes you will feel a tranquilizing effect; it is a nonmedicinal tranquilizer. It is good as far as tranquilizers go, but it has nothing to do with meditation. Transcendental Meditation is neither meditation nor transcendental. But now it is flopping, and because it is flopping, something new has to be invented. Now they have invented siddhis and this is nothing but trick photography.The last question:Osho,I am continuously worried what others are thinking about me because I have a very long nose. How can I stop worrying about others' opinions?I don’t think anybody has taken any note about your nose – nobody has reported it to me. In fact, when I gave you sannyas I didn’t notice it either. I started thinking, reading your question, “What nose is she talking about?” People are worried about themselves – why should they be worried about you?Sant Maharaj has written to me, “Osho, you are talking about Prince Philip having a twenty-five inch long prick, and my prick is getting smaller every day, and I am worried! Am I becoming a child again?” Now, if Sant comes to see you, will he be concerned about his own problem or about your nose?Everybody has so many problems. Even a person like me who has no problems did not notice your nose, then what to say about others? Simply forget about it!In an old ladies’ home, things were pretty boring, so one of the inmates decided to create some interest by running naked through the common room. After she had done it one old lady looked up from her knitting and said, “Was that Millie?”“Yes,” said the old lady next to her. “What was she wearing?”“I don’t know,” said the first, “but it really needs ironing!”And you don’t know about long noses…The platoon is ready for inspection by the general. The captain walks up and down to check that everything is in order. Suddenly he turns to the corporal and says, “Couldn’t that soldier with the long nose be put in the second row?”“He is in the third row, captain!” replies the corporal.Don’t be worried about people. And a long nose has its own beauty. It shows intelligence! You see the Jews – from where does their intelligence come? Long noses and small pricks! Now Sant should be worried because as the prick becomes smaller the nose will become longer – because somewhere it has to show! You being a woman, don’t be worried at all. Be as assertive as the liberated women all over the world say. Just exhibit your nose everywhere. Don’t be worried. What is wrong in having a long nose? Just you can do better pranyam. You can have better and stronger lungs, you will live longer. Nothing is wrong in it.A sex maniac walks up to the reception desk of a hotel. He is carrying a chicken under his arms.“Do you have a room for the night?” he asks.“Yes, sir,” replies the clerk.“Then make it a double, please!”You missed it!This is assertiveness. Why bother about people? If you love the chicken, you love the chicken!It is your nose and existence has made it long. There must be some hidden purpose behind it. Enjoy it. Don’t try to hide it: exhibit it. And next time when you come, please inform me before you come so I can see it also. I enjoy all kinds of unique things!Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/tao-the-golden-gate-vol-2-09/

The first question:Osho,What is wrong with me that I cannot see what you are showing to me?There is only one thing wrong with everybody, not only with you. That is a universal problem; it has nothing to do with individuals. It is the mind – the mind keeps your vision closed. The mind means your past, your memories, your prejudices, your conditionings; whatsoever you have been told, taught, educated – all that functions as a barrier. It does not allow you to see clearly, it does not allow you even to listen to what is being said. The moment you hear something, immediately it turns into something else; passing through your mind it is distorted. Unless you put your mind aside you cannot see. And that is a universal problem: it cannot be avoided.Each society has to give a certain mind to the children. The children cannot be left without minds, otherwise they will not be able to cope with life, they will not be able to survive. It is absolutely necessary that a certain kind of education should be given to them, but whatsoever education is given to them becomes a barrier to their inner vision. It is a necessary evil.The function of religion is to undo what the society has to do out of sheer necessity.I am not telling you to not use your mind. Use it when it is needed, but remain capable of putting it aside when it is not needed. Being here with me as a sannyasin in this buddhafield, you can put the mind aside, you can face me in total nudity. Only then is there a possibility to hear that which is said and to see that which is shown to you.It is difficult, arduous, because we have become so identified with the mind; we are so close to the mind there seems to be no space between us and the mind. We don’t know what is what, where our consciousness begins and the mind ends. They have got mixed into each other, intertwined, intermingled; their boundaries have become confused. There is no definite, clear-cut separation between the consciousness and the mind.Learning to watch your thought processes will help you to create the space. Watching creates distance from your mind. The watcher becomes slowly, slowly distant from the watched; the observer and the observed start moving farther and farther away from each other. Soon the watcher is on the hilltop and the watched is in the dark valley far below, and the distinction is so clear, then there is no problem at all.Education is an unavoidable necessity, the mind is an unavoidable necessity. But there comes a moment in your life when something higher than the mind is needed, when you need to transcend the mind, when you go beyond it. That is the whole process of meditation.Listening to me through the mind is bound to create more problems for you than solving them, because whatsoever I say will be heard with so many prejudices that by the time it reaches you, it is no longer what was said.A little boy and his father are in front of the lion’s cage at the zoo. Suddenly the little boy comes too close to the cage and the lion is almost on the boy.A man standing by grabs the boy with a swift movement and saves him.A journalist happens to be among the crowd, so he decides to write an article about it. Among other questions he asks the man, “What party do you belong to?”“I am a Nazi,” replies the man.The next day the newspaper carries the following headline: “A dirty Nazi snatches the lunch of a hungry African immigrant.”That’s how prejudices function. Prejudices create immediate interpretations in you, and they are so quick, they don’t give you any time to ponder over. You understand only that which you can understand, but that is not understanding at all; you are moving in circles.What I am saying to you is something that you have never known before, is something absolutely unknown to you. It is something mysterious; you cannot figure it out by your own calculations. You have to be more aware so that your prejudices don’t interfere, so that your old ideas don’t come in, otherwise you will immediately jump upon conclusions.And the mind is very stupid, it is never intelligent. The mind is never original – it cannot be by its very nature – it only goes on and on repeating the old junk that it knows already. It cannot see anything new. If you come across something absolutely new you will simply miss it; you will not be able to see it or you will see something which is not there at all.Gilliardi arrived in the United States and after a few weeks found he had great need of a woman. He tried flirting with a few at a nearby bar but was unsuccessful because he spoke very little English. Finally one night he picked up a streetwalker and she took him to her apartment. They were in bed making violent love when suddenly Gilliardi realized that he had not spoken a single word to her.“Miss-a,” he said, “I come-a from-a the other side.”“Ah?” said the girl. “This I gotta see!”You will have to forget your language if you want to understand my language. You will have to forget yourself if you want to be in tune with me. That much risk you will have to take.That’s why when people who are very knowledgeable come here, they are absolutely incapable of understanding anything, not because they are ignorant but because they are knowledgeable. The Hindu comes here to listen to me quote the Vedas; instead I quote a joke. He is shocked. He wanted to hear richas to be repeated from the Vedas and the Upanishads: that’s what he was expecting. His expectation is so much that he cannot understand what is happening here. If I had quoted from the scriptures he would have relaxed, he would have felt that he has understood, simply because he would have thought that I am supporting his ideas. He comes here not to understand something new, he comes here to be strengthened, supported, nourished in his own beliefs. He will leave here very happy if I am supporting his ideas. And one thing is absolutely certain: his ideas have not helped him at all, otherwise there was no need to come here. To come here and still hanker to be supported simply shows stupidity.If your ideas are right you need not come here; you live your ideas, you practice them. You have lived according to your ideas and you have reached nowhere. Your Vedas have failed. Your Upanishads have become just a parrotlike phenomenon in you. You go on repeating beautiful words. If you have come here to get some support, some props for your falling ego, for your disintegrating ego, then you have come to a wrong place. Then listening to me you will be shocked; you will immediately close yourself. You will become almost blind and deaf.Jesus says again and again to his disciples, “If you have ears, listen. If you have eyes, see.” Was he talking to blind people and deaf people? He was just talking to ordinary people like you who were able to see and hear perfectly well. So what does he mean? He simply means your ears are so full of noise and your eyes are already so full of ideas that it is impossible to reach you, to touch your heart, to move your heart.Every day I receive many letters, many questions from Christians, from Mohammedans, from Hindus, from all kinds of people who have come with a certain idea. If by chance they feel that I am saying things according to their ideas they are immensely happy and they write me great letters of thankfulness and gratitude. And all that is nonsense; it is neither gratitude nor thankfulness, because in their letters it is very clear: they are not agreeing with me, they are happy they are finding me agreeing with them. But that is just a coincidence.Now, here there are three thousand people – I am bound to say something which will support somebody’s idea. And the next day the same person writes an angry letter – because once I receive somebody’s letter of gratitude I know what has been the cause; immediately the next day I am bound to say something specially for him. And without fail he writes an angry letter, that “I used to think that you are enlightened, but you are not! I am sorry to say, but I have to say the truth.” Just the other day the truth was totally different. Truth changes so easily; if it fits with you it is absolutely okay.I am not here to support you, I am here to dismantle your mind. You need hammering in many ways.A follower of Gurdjieff – Nirvana’s father, an old man – was here a few months before. He had come with great love and respect. He has been writing letters to me that “I want to come before I die, I want to see you. I could not see Gurdjieff; at least I don’t want to miss this opportunity of seeing you.” And then he found an opportunity – some money came by and he immediately rushed… And he was very happy because whatsoever I was saying was fulfilling his expectations.And then Pradeepa disturbed him. She asked a question to me about him: “Why he is not taking sannyas? When he is so in tune with you, why he is not taking sannyas?” And I said just a few words and all his joy disappeared. The next day he left in anger – he immediately wrote a letter, “I am very disillusioned. I had never expected that you would say such things.”If I was saying nice things about Gurdjieff or things which were fitting with his idea of Gurdjieff – they may fit with Gurdjieff or not, that was not the point – if they were fitting with his idea of Gurdjieff… He had never been to Gurdjieff. If he had been to Gurdjieff the same would have happened there – he would have left angry. If he had not come here he would have remained loving and respectful toward me his whole life; he would have died with great love toward me. But what kind of love is this? This is not true love.True love has courage enough. It is ready even to die, what to say about dropping a few prejudices? But people cling to their prejudices as if they are carrying a great treasure. Knowledgeable people are the most ignorant people in the world; the ignorant people are not so ignorant.You must be carrying some knowledge within you – drop your knowledge. This is not a place to carry your knowledge. This is not a place where you can gather more information, where you can become more learned. This is a place to become more innocent, and then things will start happening very easily. If you are carrying some subtle ideas deep down in your unconscious, then you are always looking – maybe not consciously, maybe not very deliberately, but always looking – to be supported, nourished. And if something is not supporting, it hurts, it wounds, and immediately you shrink back, you withdraw from me.And this thing goes on happening every day. People come close to me, they withdraw; they come close to me, they withdraw again. This game goes on happening until finally they realize the whole stupidity and wastage of time.An aboriginal, working at a sheep station in the outback of Australia, rides into the homestead on his horse, obviously upset, dismounts and runs over to the boss. “Hey boss, my wife – she just hadum one plenty white baby!”“Hold on there, Jacky,” replies the cocky, “these things happen. You know we have hundreds of white sheep and occasionally we get a black one. It’s just one of those things.”Jacky considers thoughtfully for a moment and then says, “Okay, boss, I won’t make trouble for you about the white picaninny and you don’t say nothing about them black sheep!”You ask me, “What’s wrong with me that I cannot see what you are showing to me?” Nothing is especially wrong with you, just the same human problem: the problem of the mind. If you are intelligent you can put it aside immediately, right now. All that is needed is an intelligent grasp, just a single moment’s glimpse, and you are out of it – because the mind is not holding you, you are holding the mind.It happened…A man came to Sheik Farid, a Sufi mystic, a great Sufi mystic and a very strange man. The man said, “How can I get out of my chains, my attachment, my ideas, my prejudices?”Farid had his own way of answering things. Rather than answering the person he simply ran to a pillar which was nearby, clung to the pillar and started shouting, “Save me from the pillar!”The man could not believe what is happening – is Farid mad or something? And he was shouting so loudly that people started coming in from the street. A crowd gathered and they asked, “What is the matter with you? Have you gone crazy? You are holding the pillar, the pillar is not holding you. You can leave it!”And the man also said, “I had thought that Farid is a man of great understanding but he seems to be just a madman! I had asked a very subtle question, a very spiritual question which has always been asked by seekers: how to get out of my attachments to ideas, to things and to people? And rather than answering me he simply jumped and clung to the pillar and started shouting, ‘Save me from the pillar!’”Farid looked at the man and he said, “If you can understand this, then you don’t need any answer. Go home and ponder over it. If the pillar is not holding me, neither your chains are holding you – you are holding them. I can leave the pillar – look I am leaving the pillar and I am saved. You also leave…”The man must have been really intelligent – he understood. There was a shock for a moment, the way the question was answered, but in that very shock he could see the point. It penetrated his very heart.He touched the feet of Farid and said, “It is finished! I have asked the same question to many mahatmas, to many saints, and they gave me great discourses on it, and nothing happened. And your mad effort to answer me has immediately transformed something in me. Now I am not going back to my old world, I am going to be with you. I have found the man for whom I was searching all my life. I needed a man like you who can hit me so hard, who could show me my stupidity.”You can drop your mind this very moment because the mind cannot hold you. The mind is just a mechanism, a machine; you can get out of it any moment. But you have invested so much in it that you cling to it, and then you go on asking how to get out of it. The doors are open; there is nobody preventing you. You can come out of it! But rather than coming out of it you simply go on asking, “How to come out of it?” There is no question of how.Whenever anybody asked Gautam Buddha, “How to come out of my misery?” he always used to say, “If your house is on fire, will you ask anybody how to come out of it? Will you wait for some learned answer? Will you consult scriptures or you will jump? If the door is not open, if the door is also aflame, you will jump from the window. You will not even bother that jumping out from the window will look a little odd. If you are in your bathroom taking a bath and you are naked, you will not even bother to wrap a towel around yourself; you will simply run out naked. And you will not think that this is not mannerly, against etiquette, running out naked; you won’t bother at all. If you understand that the house is on fire you will find the way. But you are simply talking, talking about how to get out of misery; you are not aware of the misery.”If one is really aware of the misery, nobody can prevent you. And there is no need to postpone. Postponement means that you have a very mediocre mind. The intelligent person acts immediately because who knows about the next moment? Tomorrow never comes.The second question:Osho,What is wrong with marriage? Why do you always speak against it?Marriage is a great institution. Without marriage, life will be very empty. Without marriage, you will all be buddhas! It is marriage that keeps the world going on; it keeps things running. It keeps all kinds of things moving, alive. In fact, without marriage there will be no religion at all.Religion exists not because of God or for God; it is because of marriage. Marriage creates so much misery that one has to meditate; meditation is a by-product. Without marriage, who will bother to meditate? For what? You will be already blissful! Without marriage there will be no renunciation, Buddha would not have left the world – for what? His wife, Yashodhara, must have created the situation. Mahavira would not have escaped to the mountains. Without marriage there would have been no Buddha, no Mahavira. Just think: history would have been very flat, without any salt, tasteless. Marriage keeps this whole “sorry-go-round” on and on. People call it a “merry-go-round”…I am not against marriage – without marriage, ninety-nine percent of jokes will disappear from the world. How I can be against marriage? I am all for it.Marriage makes many things possible.Marriage is the process of finding what kind of man your wife would have preferred!It is a mirror.Drinking in a bar, two friends are chatting about life.“Who introduced you to your wife?” asks one.The other says, “We met casually. I can’t blame anyone else.”Two women are chatting at the hairdresser.One says, “My husband travels a lot. He spent one month at home out of the whole year.”“One month?” exclaims the other. “That must be very annoying to you.”“No, a month goes by fast!”The doctor and his wife are walking down the street when they are passed by an incredibly beautiful woman. She has big tits, a nice body, and a beautiful face. She seems a little self-conscious of her beauty and as she passes by the doctor she smiles a familiar smile.“Who is that lady?” asks the wife.A little shy, the doctor answers, “A client.”“I know,” the wife replies, “but is she your client or are you hers?”In a small city in the interior of Brazil, a couple is sitting on a bench outside the house enjoying the moonlight. Maria turns to Ze and says, “Ze, do you know something? Tomorrow it is going to be twenty-five years that we have been married!”And Ze answers, “Eh!”“Twenty-five years. Oh! Ze, it is a lot!”“Eh!”“Look, Ze, why don’t we catch some of the chickens in the yard and kill them for tomorrow?”“Why, Maria? Poor chickens, it is not their fault!”“Hey!” cried Satan to the arrival. “You act as if you own the place.”“I do,” came the reply. “My wife gave it to me before I died.”Now, without marriage all these jokes will disappear. Without marriage there will be no misery – and no laughter either. There will be so much silence; it will be nirvana on the earth! Marriage keeps thousands of things going on: religion, the state, nations, wars, literature, movies, science; everything, in fact, depends on the institution of marriage.I am not against marriage; I simply want you to be aware that there is a possibility of going beyond it too. But that possibility also opens up only because marriage creates so much misery for you, so much anguish and anxiety for you, that you have to learn how to transcend it. It is a great push for transcendence. Marriage is not unnecessary; it is needed to bring you to your senses, to bring you to your sanity. Marriage is necessary and yet there comes a point when you have to transcend it too. It is like a ladder. You go up the ladder, it takes you up, but there comes a moment when you have to leave the ladder behind. If you go on clinging to the ladder, then there is danger.Learn something from marriage. Marriage represents the whole world in a miniature form: it teaches you many things. It is only the mediocre ones who learn nothing. Otherwise it will teach you that you don’t know what love is, that you don’t know how to relate, that you don’t know how to communicate, that you don’t know how to commune, that you don’t know how to live with another. It is a mirror: it shows your face to you in all its different aspects. And it is all needed for your maturity. But a person who remains clinging to it forever remains immature. One has to go beyond it too.Marriage basically means that you are not yet able to be alone; you need the other. Without the other you feel meaningless and with the other you feel miserable. Marriage is really a dilemma! If you are alone you are miserable; if you are together you are miserable. It teaches you your reality, that something deep inside you needs transformation so that you can be blissful alone and you can be blissful together. Then marriage is no longer marriage because then it is no longer bondage. Then it is sharing, then it is love. Then it gives you freedom and you give the freedom needed for the other’s growth.The ordinary marriage is an unconscious bondage: you cannot live alone so you become dependent on the other. The other cannot live alone so he or she becomes dependent on you. And we hate the person on which we are dependent; nobody likes to depend on anybody. Our deepest desire is to have freedom, total freedom – and dependence is against freedom. Everybody hates dependence, and that’s why couples are continuously fighting, not knowing why they are fighting. They have to meditate over it, they have to contemplate over it, why they are fighting. Everything is just an excuse to fight. If you change one excuse, another excuse will be found; if no excuse is left then excuses will be invented, but somehow the fight has to be there.The fight has a fundamental reason which has nothing to do with anything else. The fundamental reason is that you hate the person you have to depend upon. You don’t want to recognize it – you don’t want to recognize the fact that you hate the person you believe you love. You hate simply because it is the other that hinders, defines your territories, keeps you confined, makes you feel limited from every side. Your freedom is crippled and paralyzed. How can you love the other person? And you are doing the same to the other. How can the other person love you?Marriage is a great teaching; it is an opportunity to learn that dependence is not love, to learn that to depend means conflict, anger, rage, hatred, jealousy, possessiveness, domination. And one has to learn not to depend. But for that you will need great meditativeness so that you can be so blissful on your own that you don’t need the other. When you don’t need the other, the dependence disappears. Once you don’t need the other you can share your joy – and sharing is beautiful.I would like a different kind of relationship in the world. I call it relating, just to make it different from your old kind of relationship. I would like a different kind of marriage in the world. I will not call it marriage because that word has become poisoned. I would like to call it just a friendship; no legal bondage, just a loving togetherness. No promise for tomorrow – this moment is enough. And if you love each other in this moment and if you enjoy each other in this moment, if you can share with each other in this moment, the next moment will be born out of it. It will become more and more enriched. As time passes by, your love will become deeper, it will start having new dimensions, but it will not create any bondage.Hence my vision of a new humanity does not have any place for the old kind of marriage or the old kind of family because we have suffered enough. I know perfectly well that man and woman will need to be together; not out of need, but out of overflowing joy; not out of poverty but out of richness – because they have so much that they have to give. Just like when a flower opens, its fragrance is released to the winds because it is so full of fragrance it has to release it. Or when a cloud comes in the sky it showers; it has to shower – it is so full of rain water it has to share.Up until now we have not helped man to know what love is; on the contrary we have been forcing him to get married: “Marriage has to be the first thing and then love will come on its own accord.” That whole idea has proved totally wrong. Man has lived in hell for centuries. He has become accustomed to this, it is true – in fact so accustomed that the very idea of a world without marriage shocks him.Just the other day I received a letter saying, “If marriage disappears and the family disappears, what will happen to children?” What has happened to children with marriage and with the family? All children are born so beautiful, so innocent, so intelligent, and the family and the marriage destroy them. They start seeing their mothers and fathers continuously quarreling, nagging. They become accustomed of it and they will repeat the same pattern in their life.I would like marriage to be replaced by relating and the family to be replaced by small communes. For example, this commune: a few hundred people living together, working together, producing together, creating together. The children will not be confined to the small families, the children will belong to the whole commune. Not that they will not get affection from their father and mother – they will get more affection from their father and mother, because the father and mother will also not feel burdened with the children – and they will also get affection from everybody else.This whole idea of “my child” is also egoistic. Children should belong to the commune and it should decide how many children are needed. It cannot be left now to individual families, otherwise the world will become more and more of a hell. And the commune should also decide who are the right people to give birth to children. It will decide scientifically which man can become a father and which woman can become a mother. All men need not be fathers, all women need not be mothers, but they can mother the children of the whole commune, they can father the children of the whole commune.If we use a little science, which is available now, then we can have better children – healthier, more intelligent, more talented, more beautiful. Now, going on producing like animals is very primitive, it is absolutely absurd. And also, there is no need that two persons who are in love should produce a child because now there are scientific ways. If you can get your son to be as intelligent as Albert Einstein then why should you bother to give birth from your own chromosomes? Why should he not be given birth through Albert Einstein’s cells? Just as dying people donate their eyes they can donate their chromosomes, which will be beautiful. Those chromosomes can be preserved for thousands of years; there is no problem in it. And we can go on improving the human race. We are doing this as far as animals are concerned and you can see the difference.In India, look at the cows: the foolish Indians think they respect the cows – they just call them mothers, that’s all. Otherwise the Indian cows are the poorest cows in the world: starving, ill, giving so little milk that it is absolutely uneconomical to preserve them. But all over the world wherever science has entered, better cows, better bulls, better dogs, better animals have become available.The same is possible with man. There is no need to go on hanging onto old ideas. We can stop people like Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Nadir Shah from being born because the first cell of the father is decisive, the egg of the mother is decisive. Now it can be decided what kind of child will be born. Will he be an Adolf Hitler or an Albert Einstein? His whole future can be read – it can almost be predicted.Only one thing will remain unpredictable forever and that is his enlightenment; that will remain unpredictable. Otherwise everything will be predictable. But we can give birth to people who are more intelligent, more healthy. Of course then there is more possibility of their becoming enlightened, of their becoming buddhas.We have to change the whole structure of humanity from the very roots. The way marriage has existed up until now has to go and a totally new concept has to be introduced. Only then can a new man be born on the earth.The third question:Osho,Do you know the Italian language?Michael Potato, I don’t know much of the Italian language, but the little bit that I do know is so beautiful that I would like to know more. But I am a lazy person – I cannot learn anything. In fact, whatsoever I am, I am because I have learned only one thing: how to go on unlearning. Whatsoever I am, I am through the process of unlearning. I would have loved to know Italian language; it seems to be beautiful. But now there is no possibility. Just a little bit – which is not much…An old Italian and a young Italian are sitting in an outdoor cafe watching the women go by.The old Italian asks the young one, “Hey, Giuseppe, you like big-a fat-a ass-a?”The young man answers, “No, I like nice small-a ass-a!”Some time goes by and the old Italian asks, “You like big-a saggy tits-a?”“No,” answers the young Italian, “I like nice little tits-a.”Some time passes again and the old man asks, “You like garlic-a breath-a?”“No, I like nice sweet-a breath-a.”Then the old Italian says, “If you don’t-a like-a big-a, fat-a ass-a, you don’t-a like-a big-a saggy tits-a, and you don’t-a like-a garlic-a breath-a, then how come you keep-a fucking my wife-a?”This much Italian – not more than that! But that is enough for my purposes.The fourth question:Osho,What you are saying and doing here does not seem to be philosophy or religion to me at all.Reverend Banana, once, for a change, you are right, sir. It is not philosophy, it is not religion, it is a totally different phenomenon. I am not interested in philosophy at all because philosophy has not done any service to humanity, it has only filled people’s minds with unnecessary chattering and noise. It has not given man any radical transformation, it gives you only a false feeling of knowing. It is a pseudo phenomenon and it prevents you from searching for the real truth because you become so addicted to words that you totally forget that truth is not a word, that God is not a word, that love is not a word. The philosopher becomes more and more wordy. He becomes so full of words, he forgets completely his being. He is surrounded with crowds of words, clouds of theories, hypotheses, which all pretend to be conclusive, but none of them is conclusive.Philosophy has not reached any conclusion and it will never reach – it is an exercise in utter futility. It is a good game if you want to play an intellectual game, intellectual gymnastics; it is hair splitting. But I am not interested in it at all – and I know it from the inside. I have been a student of philosophy and a professor of philosophy too. I know it as an insider that philosophy is the most useless activity in the world, the most uncreative, the most pretentious – but very ego-fulfilling, gives you great ideas of knowledgeability without making you wise at all.When P. D. Ouspensky met George Gurdjieff for the first time, he was already a world-famous philosopher, a mathematician. He had written his most important book, Tertium Organum. The book is really tremendously beautiful; if you are interested in philosophy, then it is unique. If man who is interested in philosophy has missed P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, he has missed something very significant.Ouspensky presented his book, Tertium Organum, to Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff just looked for five minutes here and there, threw the book and said to Ouspensky, “Take this piece of paper and go in the other room. On one side, write exactly what you know and on the other side, exactly what you don’t know. If you know God, write it on one side; if you don’t know God, write it on the other side. And so on about truth, love, enlightenment, immortality.”Ouspensky was a little puzzled, a little shocked, offended too, because his great book was thrown as if it was just disgusting. And I can understand: he must have felt very wounded. But now that he had come to see this strange man he wanted to try what he was asking. He went into the other room with a pencil and the paper. For the first time in his life, he says, “I became aware that I don’t know anything at all.” It was a cold Russian night; snow was falling outside. Even inside the room it was below zero, but he started perspiring. A world-famous man could not write a single word – love, enlightenment, truth, God – on the side that Gurdjieff had said, “Write on this side if you know” Not a single word!After one hour he came out with the empty paper, gave it back to Gurdjieff and said, “I am sorry, but you are really a strange man! You have already done a miracle. It is for the first time that I realize I know nothing.”Gurdjieff started laughing and he said, “How have you been writing such beautiful books? It is easy to write a beautiful book, it is easy to philosophize; it is far easier if you don’t know. If you know, it becomes more difficult.”Ouspensky became a disciple of Gurdjieff, accepting his ignorance.Gurdjieff said that is the first condition to be fulfilled by a disciple: that he should accept his ignorance. Only then can things be done, only then is there any possibility of inner growth. The false has to be known as false; only then can the real be understood as real.I am not a philosopher. My people here are not philosophers either. Yes, once in a while we joke about philosophy, that’s all…A man walked into a pub, crossed the room, walked up the far wall, then across the ceiling, back down the wall by the door, and left again without saying a word.“Did you see that? It was incredible!” said the stupefied bartender to a local philosopher.“Sure, I saw it – it was really horrible!” said the philosopher. “He was wearing yellow shoes with pink socks!”The corporal calls his soldiers to attention and asks for a volunteer to accomplish a dangerous mission.After a few moments he goes up to a soldier and says, “Congratulations, my brave man! I have heard about you, that you are a great philosopher. You are the only one who has stepped forward! Now you have proved your courage and your mettle to me.”The philosopher-soldier looks around in surprise, then answers, “Well, the truth is – the others have all taken a step backward!”Philosophers live in a kind of deep sleep, a slumber. He was not aware that everybody had moved back. He must not have been there; he must have been somewhere else.Wendell Holmes, a Justice of the Supreme Court of America, was very well known in America for his philosophic attitude toward life. One day he left his courtroom and made his way to the railway station where he boarded an express train. An hour later, as the train crossed the Maryland countryside, the ticket inspector entered his compartment and asked to see his ticket. Holmes searched through all his pockets and his wallet, but was unable to find the ticket. A look of anxiety passed across his face.The ticket inspector, who had recognized Holmes from newspaper reports, said, “Well, there is no need to worry about the ticket, Mr. Holmes. I am sure you forgot to buy one at the station. I can issue you one now.”Holmes’ look of worry had deepened. In a perplexed voice he said, “It is not the ticket that worries me. I just realized I don’t know where I am going.”Philosophers have never known where they are going.Reverend Banana, I can understand your concern that things here don’t seem to be philosophical – they are not. It is an existential commune. We trust in existence, not in philosophy.And you also say it does not seem to be religion. That too is true. It is not religion in the sense Christianity is, in the sense Hinduism is, in the sense Mohammedanism is. It is not fanaticism: there is no dogma, there is no belief. It is religion in the sense Buddha is religious. It is religion in the sense Jesus is religious. It is religion in the sense Ko Hsuan is religious. It is not religion but a religiousness; it is not a question of belief but a question of living.To me, religion is not ritual. If you are looking for ritual it does not exist here. To me religion is an insight, an insight into the beauty of existence, an insight into the tremendous mystery that surrounds us, an insight into your own being and into the beings of others. It has nothing to do with any dogma, any belief, any creed, any cult – it is not a cult at all – it is just a totally different phenomenon.We are trying to live a meditative life, working in the ordinary way but working with a different quality.People are working in the kitchen, cleaning the toilets, or in the carpentry shop or in the boutique or in the bakery or in the garden – just ordinary kinds of activities, but with a different quality: with joy, with silence, with love, with bliss, with a dance in their heart, with celebration.To me, that is true religion: to be able to celebrate life is religion. In that very celebration you come close to God. If one is able to celebrate, God is not far away; if one is not able to celebrate life, then God does not exist for him. God appears only in deep celebration, when you are so full of joy that all misery has left you, all darkness has left you. When you are so full that there is no emptiness in you, that you have started feeling the significance of the ordinary, day-to-day existence, when moment to moment you live totally, intensely, passionately, then God is available.God is not a person but just an experience, an experience of overwhelming mystery, unfathomable mystery. It is not philosophy in the ordinary sense, it is not religion in the ordinary sense either. It is philosophy in the truest sense of the word – philosophy means love for wisdom; then it is philosophy. Religion, the word, the very word, means to be in tune. It comes from religere: to be in deep harmony with the whole, to be married with the whole, to be related with the whole, to forget your ego and your separation. Then it is religion.The last question:Osho,Please tell us a few jokes about Jesus Christ which are only recorded in the Akashic records.Okay.It is a little known fact that Jesus Christ was nearly called Manny shortly after his birth. Just before he was, however, someone walking past the stable peeked a look inside to see what was going on. Hitting his toe on a sharp stone he cried out, “Jesus!”“Oh, that’s a good name,” said Mary. “We will call him that.”Jesus walks into a hotel, throws some nails onto the counter and says, “Can you put me up for the night?”Jesus was resting on the shores of Lake Galilee. A group of children nearby were laughing, throwing water at him, and making a lot of noise.Peter, annoyed, shouted at them, but Jesus stopped him and said, “Let the children come to me…”The noise, the throwing of water, etcetera, continued even more than before. Finally, Peter, tired and very annoyed, tried to shove them away, but again Jesus stopped him and said, “Peter, I told you to let the children come close to me – so that I can kick them in the ass!”Enough for today.

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Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Golden Gate Vol 2 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I wish you would say something about the Eastern indifference to what you are doing, and the Western attraction.It is a very natural phenomenon. Religion is the ultimate luxury.Man lives on three planes. If his bodily needs are fulfilled, only then psychological needs become significant; otherwise not. A hungry man will not be interested in the music of Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner. He will not be interested in the paintings of Michelangelo, Vincent van Gogh, Picasso. It is natural. His first, basic, needs are not fulfilled. Once his bodily needs are fulfilled, immediately his consciousness shifts from the physical plane to the psychological. Consciousness remains attached to the plane where it is most needed. You also know it in ordinary day-to-day existence. If your leg is hurting you forget the whole body, your consciousness becomes focused on the leg. If you have a headache, only then do you become aware of the existence of the head; otherwise, you remain absolutely unaware of its existence. It goes on functioning silently, your attention is not needed.The body is the foundation and the East is suffering from physical needs that are so tremendous that whatsoever goes on in the name of religion is not really religion; it cannot be – it is something else.People gather around Satya Sai Baba, or persons like him, not for spiritual needs, but for physical needs. Somebody is ill and would like a miracle to happen so that he can be cured. Somebody is blind, somebody has no children, somebody has no employment, and they are hoping that by going to the saints, by the blessings of the saints, or by praying in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques, in the gurdwaras, their needs will be fulfilled. This is hoping in vain, but the poor man cannot help it. He goes on hanging around these illusions. It is a vicious circle: he hangs around illusions in the hope that his needs will be fulfilled, and because he hangs around illusions he does not make any real effort to fulfill his needs. Those needs go on growing bigger and bigger. Then he goes on moving more and more into the illusory. His religion is more of a wish-fulfillment – not of growth, not of maturity, not of spiritual flight, but of dreaming, hallucinating.Go alone on a long fast and you will start fantasizing about food – in twenty-four hours you will fantasize about food. You will go into loneliness and after the third week you will start talking to yourself. The need is such that you will start living in an illusion, as if there is somebody with whom you are having a dialogue.The poor man creates a poor God, a God which is nothing but his imagination, a God that exists nowhere. In the past the East has known true religion, now only footprints are left. Buddha knew true religion, Mahavira knew true religion, Krishna knew true religion. They had touched the ultimate peaks of consciousness, but now there are only echoes in the atmosphere. The reality has disappeared long ago and we are worshipping the footprints.People in the East become interested in a kind of religion which I call pseudo, false, basically illusory – and not only that, positively harmful because it prevents scientific growth.If you are hungry you need better technology, not better prayers, not yagnas – not offerings to the fire god – that is utter stupidity. You are already poor and you are wasting money, food, purified butter in the fire, in the hope that the gods will bless you. How long you have been hoping this way? Those gods have not heard you at all. And how long are you going to be deceived by yourself? But just as I said, it is a vicious circle. The hungrier, the more starving, the more undernourished, the more crowded you become – the more your problems become unmanageable – the more you start hoping, wishing, imagining, dreaming, the more you start going to some stupid people in the hope that miracles will be done. They have never been done and they will never be done. Miracles don’t exist.Miracles are absolutely nonexistential, but the poor man’s religion remains focused on the possibility of a miracle.Have you heard about the latest miracle performed by the Polack Pope? He has made a blind man deaf.Once, a couple was thinking about having a baby, one evening after an especially good session of lovemaking.The woman joyfully exclaimed, “Ah, dear, I think that did it! Ah, I am so happy. What will we call it?”The husband smiled, removing the unnoticed condom from himself, and said, “We will call him Houdini.”A madman went to the local Jewish tailor who was a kind of philosopher, to try on his new uniform. He dressed in the uniform and went to look in the mirror.“Wow!” he shouted, “Look at that, Mr. Tailor! You made me a jumpsuit with three sleeves.”“Well,” said the tailor, “you never told me how many you wanted.”Mad people going to mad people.But these mad people are known as mahatmas in the East. The East is full of mahatmas: when you get tired of one mahatma there are other mahatmas, and you go on moving from one shop to another shop. And life is short, you can go on remaining in illusion.The poor man’s religion is that of miracles, that’s why Christianity has a deep attraction for the Eastern man. You can see it happening.Buddhism has great appeal in the West. Hundreds of Buddhist monasteries are opening up in America, in Europe, in Holland, in Germany… And in India, thousands of people are converting themselves every day into Christianity. What is the mathematics of this? Why is it happening? – for the simple reason that the religion of Gautam the Buddha appeals only to those who have all their needs fulfilled. It is the highest quality of religion, it is like an Everest.Jesus has appeal – not because people understand Jesus; he has appeal only because of his miracles. Take the miracles away and people will stop getting into Christianity, they will lose all interest. Hence the Christian theologians, the Christian missionaries go on emphasizing the miracle part, which is just a mythology, which is not true, which is absolutely false and which is not new. It has been in the air for a long time, for the simple reason that Jesus was also working with poor people. He was a poor man’s son. All of his friends and his followers were poor people. They can only understand a language which appeals to their needs. All his followers were either farmers, gardeners, fishermen, carpenters, or people like these – uneducated, uncultured, unsophisticated. They must have created these stories about him, otherwise they would not have remained with him. These miracle stories function like glue. And for two thousand years that has been the appeal of Christianity; it always appeals to the poor.In India you will also not see Jainas being converted to Christianity, although they are rich enough for that. You will not see brahmins being converted to Christianity although they are rich enough for that. Then who are the people who are being converted to Christianity? The very poor people, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the aboriginals, the untouchables, the hungry, the starving, the crippled, the paralyzed, the blind, the deaf, the ill, the orphans – these are the people who become interested in Christianity.Now what do they have to do with meditation? They need miracles; they don’t want any inward eye, they don’t want any spiritual nourishment. This is the first and the most important reason why people are not interested in my vision, particularly in the East. But about that too, one condition has to be remembered.In the East too, the Japanese are interested in me; because Japan is the only country which is rich. You will find hundreds of Japanese here. Many of my meditation centers are opening in Japan, many books are being published in Japan. There is a great stir in Japan, and I have been really surprised. Whenever people come to me I ask, “How long are you going to stay?” Germans almost always stay for three months, four months. Japanese always stay for six months, nine months, twelve months, two years. Japan is the only Eastern country which has come to a rich level of affluence, and their needs are now totally different. They will not go to Satya Sai Baba, they will not be interested there at all.India is too poor to understand me, to be interested in me. Indians come here to stay for one day, two days – at the most three days. Even when they come here for only one day they want to be treated like others. They feel very shocked when they come to know that I will not be initiating them myself, that some of my disciples will initiate them. They feel very shocked: “Why is this treatment given to us?” But they are staying here only one day. In the morning they come, they want sannyas in the evening, and tomorrow they are gone. And the people who have been here for six months meditating, going through dozens of growth groups, working hard, these Indians want that they should be treated exactly like them. They should stay the same time and go through the same processes, and risk as much – but for that they are not ready. They feel offended that they are not given the same treatment.Again and again the Indians write to me, “Westerners are sitting in front of you and we are told to sit at the back.” You should be happy that you are even allowed to sit at the back. Soon there will be no space at the back. You have to earn it. The people who are sitting in front of me have been here for six years, seven years. There are people who have come once and have never left. They deserve it, they have earned it.This is the first reason that I am talking about the highest form of religion: because I am talking about the whole world. To me, nations don’t mean anything, races don’t mean anything, colors don’t mean anything. I am talking about a New Man, who is going to be born, who has become almost an absolute necessity because without the New Man, humanity cannot survive anymore. The old is rotten, and we have to get rid of it, but before we get rid of the old the new has to be brought onto the scene. My work here consists in giving birth to the New Man, to a new humanity.The second reason why the Indians are afraid is that they already think they know, but they know nothing. They are simply carrying a dead heritage. They are very knowledgeable, they can recite the Gita and the Vedas and the Upanishads, parrotlike, not knowing what they are saying. They have not experienced those truths, but they can recite them like gramophone records. And because of this, they think they know what religion is. Why they should come here?The West in that way is innocent, is not knowledgeable. It has a tremendous inquiry, but no blocks. It is ready to explore. The knowledgeable person is never willing to explore; he is always afraid because something may go against his knowledge. He would like truth to be according to him, not vice versa. He is not ready to be according to the truth – which needs guts, which needs an open mind.In the East, particularly in India, people don’t have an open mind at all. They have very closed minds. They are so full of holy cow dung there is no space inside.I can appeal only to those who are explorers, adventurers, inquirers, who are in a way innocent.And the third reason is concerned with those people who are neither poor nor knowledgeable. Why they are not coming here? There are rich people in this country. This is a country of contrasts: ninety-eight percent of people are very poor and two percent of people are very rich. Those two percent of rich people are afraid to come for the simple reason that just to be associated with my name is a danger. They write to me, “We would like to come, but we are afraid.” Just to be associated with my name is dangerous. People will start saying to them, “So you have also become a victim? So you are also hypnotized? We had never thought that you are so mad, so crazy!”And then, coming to listen to me does not mean just listening, as it means when you go to listen to Krishnamurti. You can listen and go home. Here listening means slowly, slowly getting committed. It is involvement, and involvement means your whole life will change with it. Your family life, your personal life, your social life, your business life – everything will be affected by it. You can go and listen to Krishnamurti and there is no problem in it, you remain without any commitment. With me, you become committed.To listen to me is dangerous for two reasons. Firstly, the fear that you may get involved in it – and then where it will lead? Secondly, you will be condemned and criticized by everybody. That keeps people holding themselves back. They read, they listen to the tapes – thousands of people listen to the tapes, thousands of people read the books, and millions of people talk and discuss about me, for and against. In fact, anybody who has any intelligence is already divided by me: either for me or against me.But to come here, to enter the gate needs some courage which Indians have lost long ago; otherwise they would not have been slaves for two thousand years. They don’t have any courage, their backbones are missing, they have no spine. How they manage to walk and live is a miracle.And there are people who are not knowledgeable either, who cannot say they are scholars or pundits or that they know anything of the Vedas or the Upanishads, but their craze is to imitate the West. Their whole craze is… They have the money, they have the opportunity, they go on rushing to the West. They go for world tours, they want to have all kinds of gadgets the West is enjoying. They are not interested in religion, in spirituality. They may show lip service to religion and spirituality because that is a traditional thing, conventional. But it is only lip service; their hearts are for absolute materialistic values.These are the reasons why the Eastern people, particularly Indians, are not interested in coming here. But the whole world is interested.And the Indians are also imitators. Just wait a little. When more and more people from all over the world will be coming here, they will start following them. They are imitators. They are carbon copies. They have always been imitating for two thousand years. They cannot take any step on their own. If they see the West is coming, they will come; but I don’t pay any respect to such people. I don’t have any place in my heart for such people who are imitators.You can see it happen everywhere here. Rabindranath Tagore got the Nobel Prize for his book Gitanjali. The book had already been published for years, but nobody in India had praised it. Once he got the Nobel Prize, the whole of India was praising him, and he could see that. He refused the invitation of Kolkata Corporation. They wanted to honor him. He said, “I won’t come. I refuse this honor because the book has been published for many years in the original, and you have never honored me.” In fact, no notice was taken of his book, and it is one of the greatest books ever written. On the contrary, people were criticizing it, criticizing it because it was not according to the old pattern of Indian poetry. It has something original, and the Indian mind cannot understand anything original; it needs repetitive things, then it praises. But when the whole West started praising him, the whole of India was ready to praise him. He became a great “son of the country”; otherwise nobody was bothering about him.Just now you have seen it happen again. Mother Teresa was here her whole life, working. Nobody was bothering, nobody has really ever heard of her name. Once she got the Nobel Prize, the whole of India is agog.These are imitators. These people don’t have any intelligence of their own. They are ready to do anything, whatsoever is being done by the whole world – they will be ready to do any stupid thing.So just wait. Let more and more people come – and they are coming, they are on the way. My invitation has reached the farthest corners of the world, I have stirred millions of hearts and they will be coming. And they are my people, because their bodily needs are fulfilled, so they don’t come here asking for some stupid miracle. They don’t come here for any psychological needs either. If they have any psychological needs I have got one hundred therapies going on here, so those needs can be fulfilled. My work starts only when your bodily and psychological needs are fulfilled. Only then can you look a little beyond, to the spiritual realm.So whosoever is able to look beyond the body-mind complex belongs to me. Whether he is born in the East or in the West, is black or white, does not matter at all. Whether he is man or woman does not matter at all. I am creating world citizens. And I am not creating a religion. It is only a religiousness, a diffused kind of religiousness, not very tangible. You cannot make a creed out of it, you cannot make a church out of it – impossible! I am not leaving a single Bible or Koran or Gita so you can make a church out of it. When I leave this world I will leave at least one thousand books, so contradictory to each other that anybody trying to make any dogma out of them will go crazy.It is impossible to make any dogma out of my ideas, but you can transform your being through them. Forget about this East and West business; don’t waste my time about these things again and again.The second question:Osho,If an enlightened person cannot lose his buddhahood, how does a baby born as a buddha lose his?Each child is born a buddha, but cannot remain a buddha for long. That is part of growth: he has to lose it.Unless he loses it, he will never be able to understand its value. It is like a fish in the ocean… The fish is born in the ocean, lives in the ocean; but knows nothing of the ocean, cannot know. There is no separation, there is no space, there is no gap between the two. Fetch the fish out of the ocean, throw it on the shore, and immediately there is great understanding in the fish. Now the fish knows for the first time the beauty of the ocean, the joy of the ocean. Now the fish longs for it. Let the fish slip back into the ocean again and see its rejoicing, see its joy.That’s exactly the meaning of the biblical story. Adam and Eve have to leave paradise just to regain it – that’s the only way to regain it. Paradise has to be lost. Only then is there awareness. Innocence is one thing – every child is innocent – but to be aware of innocence is a totally different thing. Only a buddha is aware of innocence; hence the buddha cannot lose it because he is aware. The child has to lose it, he is not aware – he cannot be in the very nature of things; he has never lost it.One morning little Johnny comes down in tears. “Mommy, Mommy,” sobs Johnny, “I got so frightened. I woke up, ran to your bed and you were not there. Then I ran to Dad’s bed and he was not there. Then I ran into my bed and I was not there!”This experience is needed. Everything has to be lost. Suddenly there is only emptiness, meaninglessness, darkness, and the search starts again for that which is lost.Meditation is only a way back home. It is not a search for something new; it is a search for something that was intrinsically our own, but we were bound to be unaware of it.On the first day of kindergarten, Tommy was nervous and upset and wanted to talk to his mother. A teacher helped him place a telephone call to his home, but when the mother answered, Tommy was too nervous to speak right away.“Hello,” the mother said, “who is this?”“This is your son,” said Tommy, bursting into tears. “Have you forgotten me already?”Children are innocent, but their innocence is not the innocence of a buddha. The difference is tremendous. It is unconscious innocence, and because it is unconscious it has no virtue. That’s why Jesus says, “Unless you are like small children” – note the word: unless you are like the small children – “you shall not enter the Kingdom of God.” He is not saying unless you are children; he cannot say that, otherwise every child will enter the Kingdom of God. He is saying unless you are like the small children. The difference is great. To be like the small children certainly means you are not children, and yet you are like the children. There is some similarity and some dissimilarity – something common between the two, and something not common.Little Jeffrey was sad when he found his pet turtle lying on its back on the bank of the pond.“Never mind,” said his father, “We will have a fine funeral for him. I will make a little coffin for him and mother will wrap him in silk. We will buy a white picket fence to put around his grave. After we bury him we will go down to Häagen-Dazs and I will buy a big ice-cream cone.”Suddenly the turtle turned over and headed for the water.“Jeff, look!” shouted his father. “Your turtle is not dead after all.”“Daddy, let’s kill it!”This is innocence, but not buddhalike. Now the child has become so interested in the grave and the white fence and the ice-cream, that who cares for the turtle now? Now all that ceremony…But there is no sin either. There is no virtue, no sin; he is simply unaware. You cannot say he is violent or murderous, no, not at all. He is simply unconscious.Innocence plus consciousness is equal to buddhahood. Innocence minus consciousness is equal to childishness. And how can one be conscious? The only way – and let me emphasize – the only way is to lose it and gain it again.You ask me, “If an enlightened person cannot lose his buddhahood, how does a baby born as a buddha lose his?” The enlightened person has lost it and found it. The baby has not lost it, and has not yet found it; he is born with it, oblivious of it. Hence you will see in the eyes of small children something of the saints, something of the same beauty; but also a deep ignorance. The innocence is there but full of ignorance. The saint is innocent but full of awareness, full of knowing. His innocence is not mixed with ignorance; it is wisdom.And children are bound to lose their innocence. The sooner the better. The more intelligent children will lose it sooner; the stupid children will lose it a little later; the retarded children may not lose it ever. The more intelligent a child is, the quicker he will lose his innocence because he will start inquiring, exploring. He would like to know more and more, he will be very curious, he will ask a thousand and one questions – questions which even his father, his mother, his teachers can’t answer.A child was walking with his father, and he asked, “Why are roses red?”And the father said, “I don’t know.”A little afterward, he asked, “Why does the river always flows downward? Why not upward?”The father said, “Shut up! I don’t know. Don’t bother me.”After few seconds, again he asked, “Where are the stars in the daytime?”And the father said, “I don’t know.” And the father mumbled to himself, “What would have happened if I had asked all these questions to my father?”The child said, “Then you would have been able to answer me.” But then the child remained silent.The silence was so long the father became worried. It was so rare because he was constantly asking – a very intelligent child he must have been – that he asked, “Why are you not asking anything?”The child said, “What is the point?”And the father said, “Then how are you going to learn?”We want children to ask, we want children to inquire although we don’t have answers ourselves. We want them to become knowledgeable and informed because it will be needed in their lives, but we are not very authentic, very true. Even with our small children we are false. A really loving father, a loving mother, a loving teacher, will always say what he knows and what he does not know. He will not pretend.If the child asks, “Who made the world?” he will not say, “God” because he does not know. He will say, “I have been inquiring, I have not found the answer yet. You also inquire. If you find out before me, tell me. If I find out before you I will tell you. But I have not found.” And there will arise a great friendship and a great understanding between the child and the father. And the child will respect such a father his whole life. Otherwise sooner or later he will discover that all your answers were just bullshit. You were pretending that you know, but you know nothing. Then all his respect will disappear.Two boys were talking about their dogs. “I can’t figure it out,” complained one. “How can you teach your dog all those tricks? And I can’t teach my dog anything!”“Well,” said the other boy, “to begin with you have to know more than your dog.”Naturally, children have to learn, and learning means conditioning. From whom are they going to learn? From people who are not buddhas, from people who have not arrived, from people who are themselves groping in the dark, from people whose inner being is a dark continent, from people who have no light of their own. They will learn things from these people and they will become just like these people. They will be lost in the jungle of the world, unless one day they are intelligent enough to see what has happened – how they have lost those beautiful, wonderful, awe-inspiring days, how they have lost the purity, the innocence of their childhood – and they start searching for it again. That is the moment when meditation begins. That is the moment when religion is born.Religion is not Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism. Religion is the beginning of going back to your original source, trying to find your innermost core that you had brought from the unknown, and that is still there wrapped around with information, knowledge – all kinds of things. You will have to peel it like an onion. You will have to go on peeling because there are layers and layers, and you have learned so many lies. You have been told to learn lies, you have been brought up in lies – Christian lies, Hindu lies, Mohammedan lies. Beautiful lies – very appealing, but they are not true. Truth has to be discovered within one’s own being.A brother and sister are making love…It must have happened in France; it cannot happen anywhere else!The brother says, “Mm, you are better than Mum.”“Yes,” answers the sister. “Daddy told me this morning.”Now, these children will be corrupted by you. They are corrupted; in a thousand and one ways we corrupt them. We are also helpless because we have been corrupted by others; that’s our heritage – corruption. That’s what is passed from one generation to another, and we go on handing to the new generation.But the intelligent child sooner or later will discover all this corruption and all this deception, and will be able to get out of it. That’s my definition of sannyas: getting out of all that has been told, taught, that has been given to you by others, discarding it all in total, so that you can regain your innocence. Then one becomes a buddha. Now you cannot lose it because this is your achievement. Now you are fully aware of it. Now nobody can destroy it because there is nothing more valuable than this.The child was unaware; it was bound to happen. So the child cannot be protected, the child cannot be prevented. All that loving parents can do is to go on making him aware, “Whatsoever is being told to you, taught to you, is only hypothetical; it is not truth. Remember. It is utilitarian, it is the best lie that we have discovered up until now, but it is not the truth. You will have to discover truth on your own, you will have to discover it within your own being. You will have to become a light unto yourself.”The third question:Osho,I am homosexual. What should I do about it?It is good that you have confessed it. It is good that you are truthful about it. It is good that you are not hiding it because whenever you expose yourself in totality, it is the beginning of a transformation. Don’t be worried. One has to go beyond sex one day, whether it is homosexuality or heterosexuality or bisexuality – it does not matter much. Sex is sex. These are only preferences, differences of liking. Don’t feel guilty about it, this is not your fault.Homosexuality has come into existence because of repressive measures, because of repressive moralities, because of thousands of years of separating man and woman into separate camps. In the colleges, in the schools, in the army, in the monasteries – everywhere men and women are kept apart. The natural outcome is going to be homosexuality, lesbianism, because the natural energy will try to find some outlet.Homosexuality is a by-product of your so-called religions. The first homosexual must have been born in a monastery, that is almost certain. We don’t know his name, but a memorial should be made dedicated to the unknown – the first homosexual. He must have been a monk.It is a well-known fact that Christian and Buddhist monasteries have been full of homosexuality. It was bound to happen because you don’t give them the science of transcending sex, and you simply tell them to repress the energy. Now the energy starts moving into perverted ways.And don’t take offense at the word perversion. It simply means unnatural, it simply means not as it was prescribed by the biology. The biological route is heterosexual. If you prevent it… It is like a small stream is flowing: you put a rock in its way, it will start flowing from some other side, it will bypass the rock, it will become two streams instead of one. You can go on preventing it and it will go on splitting into many streams. It will find some way. It has a source of water that has to be taken to the ocean.Don’t be worried about it because worrying won’t help. Accept it. Just as repression has created it, a deep acceptance can dissolve it. Accept it. You are a victim of thousands of years of conditioning.Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another, “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”People go on hiding it, but sooner or later you have to find somebody else, and there are ways homosexuals indicate their sexuality to others. They walk differently – they may not say anything, but they walk differently. They look differently, they talk differently, their gestures are different, and other homosexuals immediately understand the language.And it is not a small minority, remember. Ten percent of people all over the world are homosexuals. Out of ten, one person is a homosexual; it is a big number. And it is increasing every day because the women’s liberation movement is creating lesbianism. “Why even depend on men for love? Sisterhood is beautiful. Love your sisters.” The natural outcome will be that many brothers will be left alone.The new bride, frustrated by her groom’s indifference, could not contain herself anymore. “Listen,” she said, “if you are gonna keep on reading these newspapers, I am going downtown to get myself a man.”“Far out!” he said. “Would you get me one too?”A homo and a hetero went into the desert.“Ah,” said the horny hetero, “even if there was a fly here, I could screw it.”“Z-z-z-z,” replied the homo.In a bar, two homosexuals are drinking their martinis with chips and olives. Suddenly one of them pricks his lip with the toothpick. At the sight of the blood he exclaims, “Ah, my, I have got my period.”A little bit perverted, but so what. Nothing to be worried about. Accept it.My fundamental principle is acceptance – tathata. Whatsoever is the situation, you accept it. From there things can begin. Don’t reject it. It is out of rejection the problem has arisen, so only with acceptance… Relax into it and you will be surprised. If you can accept it without any guilt, slowly, slowly your homosexuality will turn into heterosexuality again. Why? – because guilt is also a religious phenomenon, and homosexuality too. They are joined together, they are tied together. If you go on feeling guilty, you will remain homosexual. Drop the guilt, accept it. Nothing is wrong, it is just that you are carrying the whole ugly past of humanity. What can you do? You have come a little late, people have come before and they have dirtied the whole beach, so we have to clean it.But what is the point of crying and weeping and feeling guilty? There is no need to waste energy in that. Accept it with no guilt at all. And with the disappearance of the guilt you will be surprised: if you are a Christian your Christianity disappears; if you are a Jew your Judaism disappears; if you are a Hindu your Hinduism disappears. This is really a miracle: when the guilt is dropped your religions disappear. And when religions disappear you become a far more natural being. You can start seeing things clearly. In fact, what you are seeking in the other man, you cannot find in him. There will be frustration. What the other man is trying to find in you, he cannot find; there will be frustration.Friendship is possible, but love is not possible, and friendship and love are different dimensions. Friendship has its own beauty. Love needs polar opposites, only then is there attraction, only then is there tension enough. Love needs a subtle dialectics, it is a process of dialectics. The man and woman relationship is a dialectical process full of hazards, adventures, fights. It is a kind of intimate enmity. In the morning the fight, in the evening the love, in the morning again the fight, and it goes on moving from one polarity to the other.But this is how it keeps itself alive. It is Hegelian dialectics: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and again synthesis becomes thesis. Just the other night you had reached a treaty, a peaceful state, and in the morning it disappears. And you were thinking, “Now things are going smoothly.” But from the same point, in the morning the argument starts, and by the evening the same point leads you to lovemaking.In fact, unless you fight beforehand, you will not be able to make love really, tremendously. A good fight before making love gives you zest, gusto – just a good fight and you become hot; otherwise, civilized people have become cool. Just a good fight – shouting, throwing things, pillow fighting, and then relaxing into the warmth of each other. The fight creates the distance. The farther away you are – it is a kind of mini-divorce, then comes a mini-honeymoon.It can’t happen in a homosexual relationship. That’s why homosexuals are called gay; there is no dialectics, they are always smiling. But their smile seems to be shallow; it cannot be very deep. They are smiling because there is no possibility of tears, and they understand each other. They are both men or both women, so they understand each other. With understanding there is no fight. A man and woman never understand each other, they cannot. If they understand, immediately all is finished, they have both become buddhas.The fourth question:Osho,Can't I wait a little before taking the jump into sannyas? I don't feel fully ready yet.I know you are a mathematician and a Jew and also an Italian. It is a rare combination. The mathematician is always calculating, but he can never take the jump. Calculation will not allow you to take the jump, it is impossible for the calculating mind. And you will never be fully ready. How will you be fully ready? There are things you become ready for only when you have entered them.No two lovers are fully ready before they enter a love relationship. If they want to be fully ready then a love relationship will never happen. Where are they going to get ready for it? And why this readiness? Is it not out of fear? Something may go wrong…But your whole life, what have you done? You have been calculating, calculating, living in a very businesslike way. What have you achieved? Sometimes taking risks has a beauty of its own. In fact, all great radical changes happen only when you move into some dimension without any calculations.Sannyas is a love affair; it is not mathematics.A mathematician passing through the security check at an airport is discovered to have a bomb in his hand luggage.“You are arrested,” said the security officer.“Arrested? What for? I am not a hijacker, I am a mathematician.”“Then what is this bomb doing in your bag?”“Why, it is a matter of security.”“I don’t understand,” replied the security officer.“Well, my man, consider. If the possibility of one bomb being on board the plane is removed, then the possibility of two bombs being on board the same plane is practically nonexistent.”This is calculation. He is going very mathematically.Sannyas will never happen to you. It is not mathematics; it is poetry, it is music, it is dance, it is celebration. It is a mad, mad love affair. And you are a Jew too. Maybe it is because of your Jewishness that you have become a mathematician. The Jews are good mathematicians. It is no wonder that Albert Einstein proved to be the greatest mathematician of the world. Who else can be the greatest mathematician than a Jew?Aaron Silberstein called his little son Moise, gave him a ruble and said, “Moise, go to the grocer and get two pounds of butter.”Moise went off, taking the little dog of the Silberstein family along. On the way to the grocer’s he decided to make better use of his father’s money. Instead of getting two pounds of butter, he bought two pounds of sweets from the grocer. After he had hidden the sweets in the barn, Moise put on a sad face and went in to meet his father.“What happened?” asked the father. “Where is the butter?”“The dog,” said little Moise, “the fucking beast snatched the butter away from me and ate it all up.”Silberstein grabbed the little dog and put it on the scale. The scale indicated exactly two pounds. He turned to his son and said, “Okay, son. This is the butter, now where is the dog?”Take a jump out of your Jewishness, out of your mathematics. I say you are fully ready; I can certify.Do you think all of my sannyasins were fully ready before they took the jump? They dared! And it is not a question of being fully ready. How you are going to measure and weigh at what point you are fully ready? What is the criterion? You can ask me.The very question says that a deep desire has arisen in you, but your mind is holding you back. Your spirit wants to take the jump, but your mind is not willing. The mind says, “First get ready,” because the mind knows perfectly well one is never ready.The great mathematician was getting old and his health was deteriorating every day. He went to his physician. After a complete check the doctor took a deep breath and began.“Dear sir, in a case like this it is better to be frank and tell you the whole truth.”“Tell me, doctor, whatever it is.”“It is difficult.”“Tell me the truth, doctor. How long do I have to live? A year?”“Less.”“Less? Well, better I should know. Six months, then?”“Less.”“Okay, okay. I can take it. One month?”“I am sorry to have to say it but…”“It is okay, doctor, I accept.” So saying he left the room. The doctor was very impressed at the way the man had taken the news, and he went to the window to take a last look at him.He was standing on the pavement about to cross the road. Just then a hearse passed by, at which he raised his hand and shouted, “Taxi! Taxi!”Tomorrow is not certain. Who knows? – tomorrow may come, may not come. If you are feeling an urge, a deep longing, then take the jump and don’t be so afraid. Gather a little courage. Sannyas has to be a discontinuity with your past. If it is not a discontinuity with the past, it is not sannyas at all. And if you are fully ready it will not be a discontinuity; it will be continuous. You were ready and will come out of that readiness, it will remain part of your past.Sannyas has to be a discontinuous thing. The past simply disappears as if it had never existed. You start anew, fresh.And you are burdened with problems, I can see: mathematician, and a Jew, living in Italy…It is Christmas Eve in a concentration camp, and the general calls all the prisoners into the courtyard and lines them in three rows.“Christmas makes me feel good,” says the general, “and I want to ease your sufferings. The first row one step forward.” The first row does as it is told. The general shouts, “Fire!” and they are all killed. The same happens with the second row. Then again the general shouts, “One step forward, the third row.” All the prisoners step forward except two; they are Italians.They look at each other and then one says, “Ah well, let us step forward, otherwise he gets pissed off.”You ask me, “Can’t I wait a little before taking the jump into sannyas?”You can wait as long as you want, but how long it will take? And death can always end the game. Even the next moment is not certain. All that is certain is this moment, and I can feel a longing. Whenever I see the longing that is enough proof that one is prepared. Don’t ask for perfection. Nobody is ever perfect. Don’t be a perfectionist. Perfectionists are all neurotics. Become a sannyasin the way you are, as you are. Don’t wait any more. You have waited enough. You have been here for at least six or seven weeks, asking me again and again. Now I think it is time.And this longing is not going to leave you. It will become stronger and stronger. If you leave without becoming a sannyasin, you will have to come back. It will haunt you wherever you are. I will follow you.The boss calls for the Jewish accountant, and the secretary says, “He went out, boss. He went to play the sports lottery.”The next day at the same time the boss calls for the accountant again. “He went out, boss. He went to play the horses,” answers the secretary.The third day the boss calls for the accountant again. The secretary explains, “He went out, boss. He went to play the lottery again.”“What is this?” exclaims the boss. “Is he mad? Every day he is going out to play during work time.”The secretary said, “It is the last chance he has to balance the books this month.”That’s all I can say to you. This is the last chance. I may not meet you again. You may not find a madman like me again. Buddhas will always be there, but rarely a buddha like me who will accept all kinds of crazy people.Gautam Buddha was very particular. You had to go through a long initiation process. There were many steps to be fulfilled. But once a man came to him – his name was Sariputta – who became one of his greatest disciples. Sariputta touched Buddha’s feet and said, “Please initiate me.”Buddha said, “First you have to fulfill many other things.”Sariputta said, “I will fulfill everything afterward, but first initiate me.”Buddha said, “You have not even fulfilled the ordinary formality” – of going three times around Buddha, touching his feet three times, and asking three times, “Lord, initiate me.”Sariputta said, “If I die doing all of this ritual, will you be responsible for me? If I miss this opportunity, will you be responsible for me? Then I am ready. I will do three hundred rounds around you, I will touch your feet three hundred times – or as many times as you want. But are you ready to take responsibility for me? Because who knows – I may not be here, you may not be here…”Buddha looked at Sariputta, smiled, and Sariputta was the first disciple who was initiated without fulfilling any requirements. His other disciples were angry and they said, “We had to go through years of training. What has this man done?”Buddha said, “I looked into his eyes. I saw his longing – a pure flame. I can agree with him, he can fulfill all these things later on; these are formalities, these are for fools. But he is not a foolish man, he has tremendous intelligence.”Bodhidharma, one of Buddha’s greatest inheritors, went around this country but could not find a single man to initiate because nobody was able to fulfill his conditions. His conditions were impossible; hence, he had to go to China in search of a disciple. And there too, thousands came but he refused. He sat facing a wall for nine years and said that “Unless the right person turns up, I am not going to look at his face.” Hundreds and thousands came and went away – and he would not look back.Then a disciple came: cut off his own hand, threw it before Bodhidharma, and said, “Turn toward me! Otherwise I will cut off my head!”Bodhidharma had to turn immediately, a hundred and eighty degree turn, and he said, “Wait, don’t be in such a hurry. I have been waiting for you.” He initiated only four persons in China.There are different kinds of buddhas. You will not find a man like me again – it is very rare. It has never happened before and I don’t think there is ever going to be a man like me again.So, I don’t think it is good, wise, Jewish to miss.The last question:Osho,Why are you called the Master of Masters?Reverend Banana, Michael Potato Singh, Michael Tomato; dear gentlemen or ladies as the case may be… Because nobody has yet been able to decide whether these fellows are gentlemen or ladies.It is a difficult question. I had to look in the Akashic records, and not in the past Akashic records – because it is not recorded there – but in the future Akashic records. This is a future story. Listen carefully.It happened in Moksha, the ultimate resting place of the awakened ones. A journalist for the local newspaper, The Nirvana Timeless, was desperately seeking material to fill up the center page of the next edition which was due to appear in twenty-five hundred years. There was not much news around in Moksha, and soon he realized that he would have to make something up himself if the center page was not to be left empty again, as it had been for countless ages.Finally, he hit on the idea of choosing which of the many buddhas, arhats, bodhisattvas, christs, qutubs and other enlightened beings abounding in the lotus paradise was the master of masters – in short, a spiritual Mr. Universe competition.He summoned all the enlightened ones together and asked them to encapsulate in a short phrase the essence of their teaching, which would entitle them to the title of master of masters. There was, as usual, a deep silence which lasted a few hundred years. Finally a Zen master stood forward and hit the journalist hard on the head. This was considered to be well deserved, but not very original.Another hundred years passed and then a Sufi stood up and began to whirl. Unfortunately he was out of training, and after a couple of months he fell flat on his face, causing some merriment among the Hasidic masters, who had been surreptitiously pouring oil on the floor to bring the uppity Arab down.After some goading by Manjushree and Subhuti, Buddha slowly stood up and addressed the gathering in the following way: “There is no teaching and no one to be taught. There is no master and nothing to master. Nothing can be said; there is no one to hear it.” Then he held up a flower and Mahakashyap giggled as usual. Many applauded the Buddha, but to the journalist it did not appear like the kind of news which would help him sell his paper.One after another the enlightened ones came forward to make their bid for the title. Moses gave a few new commandments. Bodhidharma stared at a wall for ninety years. Jesus made a mountain out of a molehill, and delivered a sermon from it. Diogenes displayed his suntan. Shiva and Parvati ran through one hundred and twelve new positions they had invented. Gurdjieff drank twenty bottles of brandy, then walked on his hands on a tightrope over the plenum void, smiling with the left side of his face and grimacing with the right. Lao Tzu had a good belly laugh at all these antics. Mansoor would not stop shouting, “Ana’l haq! Ana’l haq!” and finally had to be put in a straitjacket and given a couple of Valium. Vatsyayana gave himself a blow job to demonstrate existentially that sex and samadhi were manifestations of the same energy – and so on.It proved impossible to choose which of the awakened ones was the master of masters, since even the journalist had attained choiceless awareness long ago. But the day seemed saved when Teertha, a relative newcomer from England, stood up and declared with typical British diplomacy, “The greatest master is the one who has yet to come.”Suddenly an Indian mahatma jumped to his feet and cried triumphantly, “Then that must be me – for I have been celibate for eighty-four million lives.”By unanimous agreement the awakened ones decided the mahatma’s samadhi was not yet “seedless,” and he was dispelled back to samsara to spill his seed once and for all.Just as the mahatma disappeared from sight, Osho came out of his room, where he had been sitting all this time, and made his way toward a small marble podium in the corner of the hall. A deathly hush gripped the audience, and even Mansoor shut up. If a look of dread could be said to cloud those tranquil eyes, this is what happened to the gathering.As Osho sat down and leaned toward the microphone, a cry arose from Mahavira, “Wait! Wait! We proclaim you master of masters! Now please go back to your room.”Osho smiled innocently and left the hall. There was a sigh of relief.The journalist turned to Mahavira in consternation: “I don’t understand. Why did he get the title? What did he do?”“Nothing,” said Mahavira, “but last time he spoke here it took us seven hundred years to get him to stop, and send him to Pune!”Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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When Lieh Tzu was eating at the roadside on a journey to Wei,he saw a hundred-year-old skull.Picking a stalk he pointed to the skull and, turning to his disciple Pai Feng, said,“Only he and I know that you were never born and will never die. Is it he who is truly miserable, is it we who are truly happy?”I rejoice in Lieh Tzu – he is one of the most perfect expressions for the inexpressible.Truth cannot be expressed: that inexpressibility is intrinsic to truth. Thousands and thousands of people have tried to express it – very few have succeeded even in giving a reflection of it. Lieh Tzu is one of those very few; he is rare.Before we start entering into his world, a few things have to be understood about him, about his approach. His approach is that of an artist, a poet, a storyteller – and he is a master storyteller. Whenever somebody has experienced life, his experience has flowered into parables, which seem to be the easiest way to hint at that which cannot be said. A parable is a device, a great device; it is not just an ordinary story. The purpose of it is not to entertain you; the purpose of it is to say something for which there is no other way to say it. Life cannot be put into a theory – it is so vast; it is so infinite.A theory by its very nature is closed. A theory has to be closed if it is a theory; it cannot be open-ended, otherwise it will be meaningless. A parable is open-ended: it says and yet it leaves much unsaid; it only hints. That which cannot be said can be shown. It is a finger pointing to the moon. Don’t cling to the finger – that is irrelevant – look at the moon. These parables in themselves are beautiful, but that is not their purpose; they go beyond, they are transcendental. If you dissect the parable itself, you will not come to much understanding.It is like the navel in the body of man. If you go to the surgeon and ask him what the purpose of the navel in the body is, and if he dissects the body, he will not find any purpose for it. The navel seems almost useless. What is the purpose of the navel? It was purposeful when the child was in the womb: its purpose was that it related the child to the mother; it connected the child with the mother. But now the child is no longer in the womb; the mother may have died, the child has become old, now what is the purpose of the navel? It has a transcendental purpose; the purpose is not in itself. You will have to look everywhere, all around, to find what this indicates – where it points. It indicates that the man was once a child, that the child was once in the womb of a mother, that the child was connected with the mother. This is just a mark that the past has left behind.As the navel shows something about the past, a parable shows something about the future. It shows that there is a possibility of growing, of being connected with existence. Right now that is only a possibility, it is not yet actual. If you just dissect the parable, it becomes an ordinary story. If you don’t dissect it, but just drink the meaning of it, the poetry of it, the music of it – forget the story, just carry the significance of it – soon you will see that it points toward a future, toward something which can be but is not yet. It is transcendental.In the West, nothing like the parables of Lieh Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Buddha exists, only the parables of Jesus. And even Jesus’ parables seem to be such that he must have carried them from the East. There are Aesop’s parables, but they are also reflections of the greatest book of parables of the East, Panchtantra. The parable is an Eastern invention, and of tremendous import.The first thing to be understood about Lieh Tzu is that he is not a theoretician, he will not give you any theory; he will simply give you parables.A theory can be dissected; its meaning is in it, it has no transcendence, the meaning is immanent. A parable cannot be dissected; dissect it, and it will die. The meaning is transcendental. It is not in the parable; it is somewhere else – it has to be. You have to live a parable, then you will come to its meaning. It has to become your heart, your breathing; it has to become your inner rhythm. So these parables are tremendously artistic, but are not mere art: great religion is contained in them.Lieh Tzu is not a theologian either; he does not talk about God. He talks God, but he does not talk about God. Whatsoever he says comes from the source, but he does not talk about the source – let it be very clear to you. There are two types of people: one who talks about God, he is the theologian; one who talks God, he is the mystic. Lieh Tzu is a mystic. The man who talks about God has not known God. Otherwise why would he talk “about” God? The “about” shows his ignorance. When a man talks God he has experienced. Then God is not a theory to be proved or disproved – no; then God is his very life – to be lived.To understand a man like Lieh Tzu you will have to live an authentic life. Only then, by your own experience, you will be able to feel what he means by his parables. It is not that you can learn the theories and become informed; that information will not help. Unless you know, nothing is going to help. So if these parables create a thirst in you to know, a great desire to know, a great hunger to know; if these parables lead you on an unknown journey, on a pilgrimage – then only, only by treading the path, will you become acquainted with the path.Lieh Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu, the three Taoist masters, only talk about “the way” – “Tao” means the way – they don’t talk about the goal at all. They say: “The goal will take care of itself; you need not worry about the goal.” If you know the way you know the goal, because the goal is not at the very end of the way, the goal is all over the way – each moment and each step it is there. It is not that when the way ends you arrive at the goal; each moment, wherever you are, you are at the goal if you are on the way. To be on the way is to be at the goal. Hence they don’t talk about the goal; they don’t talk about God, they don’t talk about moksha, nirvana, enlightenment – no, not at all. Their message is very simple: you have to find the way.Things become a little more complicated because they say that the way has no map; the way is not charted; the way is not such that you can follow somebody and find it. The way is not like a superhighway; the way is more like a bird flying in the sky – it leaves no marks behind. The bird has flown but no marks are left; nobody can follow. So the way is a pathless path. It is a path, but it is a pathless path. It is not ready-made, available; you cannot just decide to walk on it, you will have to find it. And you will have to find it in your own way; nobody else’s way is going to function. Buddha has walked it, Lieh Tzu has walked it, Jesus has walked it, but those ways are not going to help you because you are not Jesus, and you are not Lao Tzu, and you are not Lieh Tzu. You are you, a unique individual. Only by walking, only by living your life, will you find the way. This is something of great value.That’s why Taoism is not an organized religion – cannot be. It is an organic religion, but not an organized religion. You can be a Taoist if you simply live your life authentically, spontaneously; if you have the courage to go into the unknown on your own, individual, not leaning on anybody, not following anybody, simply going into the dark night not knowing whether you will arrive anywhere or you will be lost. If you have the courage, that risk is there – it is risky, it is adventurous.Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism are super-highways: you need not risk anything; you simply follow the crowd, you go with the mob. With Tao you have to go alone, you have to be alone. Tao respects the individual and not the society. Tao respects the unique and not the crowd. Tao respects freedom and not conformity. Tao has no tradition. Tao is a rebellion, and the greatest rebellion possible.That’s why I call Tao “the pathless path.” It is a path, but not like other paths. It has a very different quality to it: the quality of freedom, the quality of anarchy, the quality of chaos. Tao says that if you impose a discipline on yourself, you will be a slave. The discipline has to arise out of your awareness; then you will be a master. If you impose an order on your life, it will be just a pretension: the disorder will remain deep in the very core of your being; the order will be on the surface, at the center there will be disorder. This is not going to help. The real order arises not from the outside, but from the innermost core of your being. You allow disorder, don’t repress it. Face it; take the challenge of disorder – and by taking the challenge of disorder and living it, living dangerously, an order arises in your being. That order is out of chaos, not out of any pattern. This is a totally different gestalt: it is born into you and it is fresh; it is not traditional, it is virgin; it is not secondhand. Tao does not believe in a secondhand religion and in a secondhand god. If you take the God of Jesus you become a Christian, if you take the God of Krishna you become a Hindu, if you take the God of Mohammed you become a Mohammedan. Tao says until you find your God, you are not on the way.All these ways simply distract you from the real way. Following others, you are going astray. Following any pattern of life, you are becoming a slave. Following any pattern, you are imprisoning yourself. And godliness, or Tao, or dharma, or truth, is possible only to one who is absolutely free, unconditionally free.Of course, freedom is dangerous because there is no security in it, no safety in it. There is great safety when you are following the crowd – the crowd protects you. There is great safety when you are following the crowd because in the very presence of so many people you feel that you are not alone – you cannot be lost. Because of this security you are lost; because of this security you never search and you never seek and you never inquire. Truth cannot be found unless you have inquired, unless you have inquired on your own. If you take borrowed truths, you become knowledgeable; but to be knowledgeable is not to know.Tao is very much against knowledge. Tao says that even if you are ignorant and the ignorance is yours, it is good; at least it is yours, and it has an innocence in it. But if you are burdened with accumulated knowledge, scripture, tradition, then you are living a false, pseudo life. Then you are not really living, you are just pretending that you are living. You are making impotent gestures, empty gestures. Your life has not the intensity, the passion – cannot have the passion. That passion arises only when you move on your own, alone, into the vast sky of existence.Why can you not move alone? Because you don’t trust life. You move with Mohammedans, you move with Hindus, you move with Jews, because you don’t trust life, you trust crowds. To move alone one needs great trust in life – trees, rivers, sky, the eternity of it all – one trusts this. You trust man-made conceptions; you trust man-made systems; you trust man-made ideologies. How can man-made ideologies be true?Man has created these ideologies just to hide the fact that he does not know, to hide the fact that he is ignorant. Man is cunning, clever, and he can create rationalizations; but these rationalizations are bogus – you cannot move with them into truth. You will have to drop them. Tao says that ignorance is not the barrier to truth – knowledge is the barrier.Let me tell you a few anecdotes. In Samuel Beckett’s great work, Waiting for Godot, this small incident happens. Ponder over it.Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, are on stage. They are there to wait – just as everybody else in the world is waiting – nobody knows exactly for what. Everybody is waiting, hoping that something is going to happen: today it has not happened; tomorrow it is going to happen. This is the human mind: today is being wasted, but it hopes that tomorrow something is going to happen. And those two tramps are sitting under a tree and waiting, waiting for Godot.Nobody knows exactly who this Godot is. The word sounds like God, but it only sounds like it. In fact the gods you are waiting for are all Godots. You have created them because one has to wait for something, otherwise how will you tolerate existence? For what? How will you postpone living? How will you hope? Life will become intolerable, impossible, if there is nothing to wait for. Somebody is waiting for money, and somebody is waiting for power, and somebody is waiting for enlightenment, and somebody for something else; but everybody is waiting. And people who wait are the people who miss.These two tramps are there just to wait. What they are waiting for is the coming of a man, Godot, who is expected to provide them with shelter and sustenance. Meanwhile, they try to make time pass with small talk, jokes, games, and minor quarrels…That’s what your life is: one is engaged meanwhile with small things. The great thing is going to happen tomorrow. Godot will come tomorrow. Today one is quarrelling – the wife with the husband, the husband with the wife. Small things: “small talk, jokes, games: tedium and emptiness.” Today, that’s what everybody is feeling: tedium, emptiness… “Nothing to be done” is the refrain that rings again and again. They say again and again, “Nothing to be done,” but then they console themselves, “but tomorrow he is coming.” In fact he has never promised them; they have never met him – it is an invention. One has to invent something; out of misery one has to invent the tomorrow and something to cling to. Your gods, your heavens, your paradises, your mokshas, are all inventions. Tao does not talk about them.This Samuel Beckett play, Waiting for Godot, is very essentially Taoist.In the midst of the first act, two strangers – Pozzo and Lucky storm onto the stage. Pozzo seems to be a man of affluence; Lucky, the servant, is being driven to a nearby market to be sold. Pozzo tells the tramps about Lucky’s virtues, the most remarkable of which is that he can think. To show them, Pozzo snaps his whip and commands, “Think!” and there follows a long, hysterically incoherent monologue in which fragments of theology, science, sports, and assorted learning jostle in confusion until the three others hurl themselves on him and silence him.What is your thinking? What do you mean when you say, “I am thinking”? It is a “hysterical, incoherent monologue in which fragments of theology, science, sports, and assorted learning jostle in confusion…” until death comes and silences you. What is your whole thinking? What can you think? What is there to think? And through thinking how can one arrive at truth? Thinking cannot deliver truth. Truth is an experience, and the experience happens only when thinking is no longer there.So Tao says that theology is not going to help; philosophy is not going to help; logic is not going to help; reason is not going to help. You can go on thinking and thinking, and it will be nothing but inventions – the pure inventions of the human mind to hide its own stupidity. Then you can go on and on; one dream can lead into another and that dream can lead you into another dream within dream within dream – that’s what all philosophy is, what all theology is.I have heard a Taoist parable:A man of the State of Cheng was one day gathering fuel when he came across a startled deer which he pursued and killed. Fearing lest anyone should see him, he hastily concealed the carcass in a ditch and covered it with plantain leaves, rejoicing excessively at his good fortune. By and by, he forgot the place where he had put it; and, thinking he must have been dreaming, he set off toward home, humming over the affair on his way.Meanwhile, a man who had overheard his words acted upon them and went and got the deer. Later, when he reached his house, he told his wife, “A woodman dreamt he had got a deer, but he did not know where it was. Now I have got the deer, so his dream was a reality.”“It is you,” replied his wife, “who have been dreaming you saw a woodman. Did he get the deer? And is there really such a person? It is you who have got the deer. How, then, can his dream be a reality?”“It is true,” assented the husband, “that I have got the deer. It is therefore of little importance whether the woodman dreamt the deer or I dreamt the woodman.”Now when the woodman reached his home, he became much annoyed at the loss of the deer, and in the night he actually dreamt where the deer was and who had got it. So next morning he proceeded to the place indicated in his dream – and there it was. He then took legal steps to recover possession. When the case came up, the magistrate delivered the following judgment: “The plaintiff began with a real deer and an alleged dream. He now comes forward with a real dream and an alleged deer. The defendant really got the deer which the plaintiff said he dreamt, and is now trying to keep it; while, according to his wife, both the woodman and the deer are but the figments of a dream, so that no one got the deer at all. However, here is the deer, which you had better divide between you. Nothing else can be done.”When the Prince of Cheng heard this story, he cried out “The magistrate himself must have dreamt the case!”Dream within dream within dream – this is how the mind goes on. Once you start dreaming, there is no end to it; and what you call thinking is better called dreaming – it is not thinking.Remember, truth needs no thinking, it needs experience. When you see the sun and the light you don’t think about it, you see it. When you come across a rose you don’t think about it, you see it. When the fragrance comes to your nostrils you smell it – you don’t think about it. I am here; you are looking at me; there is no need to think about me. Whenever you are close to reality, thinking is not needed – then reality is enough, then the experience is enough. When you are far away from reality, you think: you substitute thinking. A man who has eaten well is not going to dream in the night that he has been invited to a feast. A man who has fasted in the day is bound to dream in the night that he has been invited to a feast. A man who is sexually satisfied is not going to dream about sexual objects. That’s all of Freudian psychology: you dream about things which are missing in your life, you dream to compensate. That’s the whole Taoist approach too. What Freud says about thinking, about dreaming, the Taoist approach says about thinking as such. Dreaming is only a part of thinking and nothing else.Thinking is dreaming with words, dreaming is thinking with pictures – that’s the only difference. Dreaming is a primitive way of thinking and thinking is a more evolved way of dreaming – more civilized, more cultured, more intellectual, but it is the same; only the pictures have been replaced by words. In a way because pictures have been replaced by words, it has gone even further away from reality because reality is closer to pictures than to words.Lieh Tzu is not a thinker. Let that sink in deep; that will help to understand his parables. Lieh Tzu is a poet, not a thinker; and when I say “poet,” I mean one who believes in experiencing, not in speculations.The poet is in search. His search is for the beautiful, but beauty is nothing but truth glimpsed. Truth, when you just glimpse it for a moment, appears as beauty. When truth is realized totally, then you come to know that beauty was only the function of truth. Wherever truth exists, there exists beauty – it is a shadow of truth. When truth is seen through screens, it is beauty; when beauty is naked, it is truth.The difference between the poet and the mystic is not much. The poet is coming closer, the mystic has arrived. For the poet, there are only glimpses of truth; for the mystic, truth has become his very life. The poet is only sometimes transported to the world of truth and then falls back again. For the mystic, truth has become his abode: he lives there; he lives as truth.Poets come closest to religion. Thinkers, philosophers, logicians, theologians, scientists, are very far away. Their whole approach is verbal. The poetic approach is more existential, and the mystic’s approach is existential par excellence; it is absolutely existential.Tao means to exist on the way, and to exist in such a way that the way and you are not two. This existence is one – we are not separate from it. The separation, the idea of separation, is very illusory. We are joined together; we are one whole. We are not islands; we are one continent. You are in me, I am in you. The trees are in you, you are in the trees. It is an interconnected whole.Basho has said it is as if it were a vast spider’s web. Have you tried it? Touch the spider’s web anywhere and the whole web starts shaking, trembling; the whole vibrates. Touch a leaf on the tree and you have made all the stars vibrate with it. You may not be able to see it right now, but things are so deeply related that it is impossible not to touch the stars by touching a leaf, a small leaf of a tree.The whole is one – separation is not possible. The very idea of separation is the barrier. The idea of separation is what we call the ego. If you are with the ego, you are not on the path, you are not in Tao. When the ego is dropped, you are in Tao. Tao means an egoless existence, living as part of this infinite whole, not living as a separate entity.Ordinarily we have been taught to live as separate entities; we have been taught to have our own will. People come to me and they ask me, “How should we develop our willpower?” Tao is against will; Tao is against willpower because Tao is for the whole and not for the part. When the part exists in the whole, everything is harmonious. When the part starts existing on its own, everything becomes disharmonious – there is discord, conflict, confusion. When you are not fused with the whole, there is confusion. If the fusion is not happening with the whole, there is bound to be confusion. Whenever you are not with the whole, you are unhappy.Let this be the definition of happiness: to be with the whole is to be happy. To be with the whole is to be healthy. To be with the whole is to be holy. To be separate is to be unhealthy. To be separate is to be neurotic. To be separate is to fall from grace.The fall of man is not because he has disobeyed God. The fall is because he thinks he is. The fall is because man thinks that he is a separate entity. This is foolish: you could not have existed if your parents were not there, and your parents’ parents, and their parents’ parents, back to Adam and Eve. If Adam and Eve had not existed you would not be here. So you are connected with the whole past.Adam and Eve are just a myth. The past has no beginning – cannot have any beginning; the very idea of beginning is absurd. How can things suddenly begin? It is a beginning-less procession of events. You are connected with the whole past, and you are connected with the whole future too because without you the future will not be the same. You may be nobody, but you will leave your mark. The whole future, the whole eternal future, will have a certain quality because you existed. Maybe you existed only for seventy years, and in those seventy years maybe you existed consciously only for seven seconds, but still you will leave a mark: the whole will not be the same. If you had not been, things would have been completely different; things will now be totally different because you have existed. You will continue. You may not do anything special, anything big and great – just an ordinary life – but still you will affect the whole destiny of existence.Past, future – you are connected: this is the dimension of time. And then in space you are connected with everything. These trees, the sun, the moon, the stars – you are connected with everything. If the sun goes out of existence or simply becomes cool, as one day it is bound to because energy is being dissipated every day… A few scientists think that within four thousand years it will cool down – or forty thousand years, or four million years – that doesn’t matter, some day the sun will cool down. The moment the sun cools down, we will all cool down immediately. We will lose life because life needs warmth; so the sun is continuously giving you life. Remember, in life there is no process which is one-way – cannot be. There is give and take: all roads go both ways. If the sun is giving life to you, you must be giving life to the sun in some way or other.Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples that the moon feeds on man – this was what he meant. You feed on animals, you feed on trees – everything is food for something – so why should man be an exception? Gurdjieff has some point there. Everything is food for something else, so why should man be the only exception that is not food for anything? He is the eater of all of existence – and he is not food for anything? That is not possible; things are linked. So Gurdjieff invented a beautiful theory that man is food for the moon – the moon feeds on man, on man’s consciousness.It has some truth in it because the full-moon night drives people crazy. That’s why mad people are called lunatics; luna means the moon – moonstruck; a lunatic is moonstruck. The ocean goes wild. There is a possibility that man also goes wild on the full-moon night because ninety per cent of man is ocean and nothing else. Ninety per cent of you is just ocean; you are made of ocean. Ninety per cent is water, and this water has the same salts as the ocean in exactly the same proportion. So when the ocean goes wild, something must be happening in your body too.Ninety per cent is ocean within you – something must be going wild. Poets say that they write beautiful poetry at the full moon; lovers say that something becomes tremendously romantic. It is a well established fact now that more people go mad on the full-moon night than on any other night. The least go mad on the no-moon night, and the most go mad on the full-moon night.Maybe Gurdjieff had a point when he said that the moon feeds on your consciousness. It may be just fiction, but even fictions have some part of truth in them. And when a man like Gurdjieff creates a fiction, it has to have some truth in it.The whole is connected. We are eating, we are being eaten: from one side we take, to the other side we give. You eat an apple; one day, the apple tree will eat from your body, your body will become fertilizer. When you are eating the apple, you may never have thought that your father or your grandfather may be in the apple, or that you may be eating your grandmother or grandfather. And, some day, your children will eat you.Everything is connected. This connectedness is what is meant by the word Tao: the connectedness, the interconnectedness, the interdependence of all. Nobody is separate, hence the ego is absurd. Only the whole can say “I,” the part should not say “I.” If it must be said as a linguistic formality then it is acceptable, but one should not claim the “I.”When you exist separately from existence, you exist in misery because you become disconnected; and nobody else is responsible for it – it is you. When you are happy, watch what happens. Whenever you are happy, you don’t have an ego. In those moments of happiness, joy, bliss, suddenly the ego disappears – you are melting into the whole. Boundaries are less clear, boundaries are more blurred. When the boundaries are totally blurred as if the river has disappeared into the ocean, when all boundaries are blurred and you are one, throbbing with the whole, there is happiness.It is said somewhere, once there lived a king. The king had everything that could be desired: wealth, power, even health. He had a wife and children whom he loved, but he did not have happiness. Sad and worried he sat upon his throne…It is natural. The more you have of this world, the less you have of happiness because the more you have of this world, the stronger becomes your ego, the more strengthened is your ego, more crystallized – hence unhappiness. It is never heard of that kings have been happy, very rarely. It is not just a coincidence that Buddha and Mahavir left their kingdoms and became beggars. By becoming beggars they declared, “Now we have become emperors” – because they became happy.A sannyasin is a person who has learned the way of Tao, and he says “I am no longer. Only the whole is.” This is the meaning of Jesus’ saying: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God.” “Poor in spirit” means a man who has no ego, so poor that he has not even the idea of “I.” But, from the other side, he is the richest person. That’s why Jesus says: “Those who are last here will be the first in my Kingdom of God.” The poorest will become the richest. Remember, that by “poor” no financial concept is meant; “poor” means a person who is nothing. By becoming nothing you become part of the whole.The king must have been very unhappy. “I must have happiness,” said the king. The royal physician was summoned. “I want happiness. Make me happy, and I shall make you wealthy. If you do not make me happy, I shall cut off your head,” said the king.The physician was at a loss. What to do? How to make somebody happy? Nobody knows the way; nobody has ever been able to make somebody else happy. But the king was mad, and he might kill the physician. The physician said, “I will have to meditate, sir, and consult the scriptures. Tomorrow morning I will come.” He meditated the whole night and in the morning he came upon the conclusion: “It is very simple.”He had consulted the books, but happiness was not mentioned in the medical books. The problem was difficult, but then he invented something – he prescribed a remedy. He said, “Your Majesty, you must find the shirt of a happy man and take it from him. Then you will have happiness and you will know what happiness is.” A simple remedy: find the shirt of a happy man and wear it.The king was very happy listening to this; he said, “So simple?” He told his chief minister, “Go and find a happy man and bring his shirt as immediately as possible.”The minister went. He went to the richest man, and he asked for his shirt, but he said, “You can take as many shirts as you like, but I am not a happy man. You can have as many shirts as you want, but I am unhappy myself, and I will send my servants too to look for a happy man and his shirt. Thank you for your remedy.”He visited so many people, but nobody was happy. They were all ready; they said, “We can give our lives if the king can become happy. What of shirts? We can give our whole lives, but we are not happy – our shirts won’t do.”Then the minister was very miserable. What to do? Now he would be at fault – the physician had played a game, so he was very much worried. Then somebody said, “Don’t be so worried, I know a happy man. You must have heard of him somewhere, sometimes – he plays on his flute in the night, just by the side of the river. You must have heard him.”He said, “Yes, sometimes in the middle of the night, I was enchanted – such beautiful notes. Who is this man? Where is he?”The man said, “In the night we will go and find him. He always comes, every night.”So they went in the night and the man was playing on his flute and it was tremendously beautiful. The notes were so blissful that the minister was happy. He said, “Now I have found the man!”When they reached there, the man stopped playing. He said, “What do you want?”The minister said, “Are you happy?”He said, “I am happy, I am happiness. What do you want?”The minister danced with happiness. He said, “Now just give your shirt!” And the man remained silent. The minister said, “Why are you silent? Give your shirt! The king needs it.”The man said, “That’s impossible because I don’t have any shirt. You can’t see because it is dark, but I am sitting naked. I would have given you my shirt – I can give my life, but I don’t have any shirt.”“Then why are you so happy?’ the minister asked, “Then how are you so happy?”The man said, “The day I lost all – shirt and all… I became happy the day I lost it all. In fact I don’t have anything, and I don’t have even myself. I am not playing this flute; the whole is playing through me. I am a nonentity, a nothingness, a nobody…”This is the meaning of “the poor in spirit,” one who possesses nothing, who has nothing, who knows nothing, who is nothing. Tao says that when you are nothing, you will become all. Dissolve and you will become whole. Claim that you are all, and you will be miserable.This Tao, this merging with the whole, this disappearing into the cosmos, cannot be taught. You can learn about it, but it cannot be taught. So Lieh Tzu and other Taoist masters don’t preach anything; they don’t have anything to preach. They talk in parables. You can listen to the story, and if you really listen, something will burst open in you. So the whole thing depends on how you listen.Lieh Tzu himself was with his master for many years, just sitting silently, not doing anything, just learning to be silent, learning to be passive, learning to be receptive, learning to be feminine – that is how one becomes a disciple. Let me tell you: there are no masters; there are only disciples – because it cannot be taught, so how to say that there are masters? Buddha cannot teach you, Lieh Tzu cannot teach you, so why call them masters? But if there is a disciple, he learns.A master is not one who teaches you, a master is one in whose presence you can learn. Let the difference be known: a master is not one who teaches you – because there is nothing to teach. A master is one in whose presence it is possible to learn.A seeker came to Jalaluddin Rumi, the Sufi mystic, and asked, “Will you teach me? Will you teach me, master?”Jalaluddin looked at him and said, “Will you allow me to teach?”The man said, “Why should I not allow you to teach? I have come to learn.”Jalaluddin said, “Because that is the main thing – will you allow me to teach? Otherwise I cannot teach because in fact teaching is not possible, only learning is possible. If you allow, then the learning will flower.”Lieh Tzu was with his master for many years, just sitting silently, not doing anything, just becoming more and more passive. A day arrived when he was absolutely silent: there was not a ripple of thought in his being, not a wave. His energy was totally there, a reservoir, a placid lake with no waves, no wind blowing – and he understood.In a single moment it happens. Truth is not a process, it is a happening. It is not gradual; it needs no time to happen. If time is needed, the time is needed only for you because you cannot be silent right now. If you can be silent, it can happen right now. It happens always in silence.What happens in silence? When you are silent, you are not, the boundaries dissolve, you are one with the total.Then what is the function of a master? The function of the master is just to be close to you, so that you can have a taste of someone who has tasted the whole – so that he can become a via media. It is difficult for you to taste the whole because you are so full of the ego. Somebody who is egoless, in whom godliness is flowing easily, one who is glowing with godliness, streaming with this energy… Just sitting by his side, sitting silently, waiting, some day you are over flooded.Let me tell you a Taoist story.A disciple of Lao Tzu said, “Master, I have arrived.”Lao Tzu said, “If you say you have arrived, then it is certain that you have not arrived.”The disciple waited for a few months, then one day he said, “You were right, master. Now, it has arrived.”First he had said, “I have arrived,” and the master denied it. Then after a few months, one day, suddenly he burst open, and he said, “It has arrived.”Lao Tzu looked with tremendous compassion and love and patted his head. And he said, “Now it is right. Now, tell me what has happened. Now I would like to listen. What has happened?”He said, “Up to the day you said, ‘If you say you have arrived, then it is certain that you have not arrived,’ I was making an effort. I was doing all that I could do, I was trying hard. The day you said, ‘If you say you have arrived, then you have not arrived,’ it struck home. How could ‘I’ arrive? Because ‘I’ is the barrier, so I had to give way.”It can arrive, and Taoists even call it “It.” They don’t call it “he.” They don’t call it “she,” they don’t call it “God the Father,” they don’t call it by any personal name they simply say “It.” “It” is non-personal; it is the name of the whole: Tao means “it.”“Tao has arrived,” he said, “and it came only when I was not there.”Lao Tzu said, “Tell the other disciples the situation in which it happened.”And he said, “The only thing that I can say is that I was not good, I was not bad, I was not a sinner, I was not a saint, I was not this, I was not that. I was not anybody in particular when it arrived. I was just passivity, a tremendous passivity, just a door, an opening. I had not even invited it. Listen! I had not even invited it because even the invitation would have gone with my signature. I had not even invited… In fact, I had completely forgotten about it. I was just sitting. I was not even seeking, searching, inquiring. I was not there, and suddenly it flooded me.”It happens that way. It can happen to you here, if you just become more and more passive. Tao is the way of the feminine. All other religions are aggressive; all other religions are more male-oriented; Tao is more female. And remember, truth comes only when you are in a feminine state of consciousness – never otherwise. You cannot conquer truth. That is foolish, silly even to think that you can conquer truth. The part conquering the whole! The part can only allow; the part can only be in a let-go.This let-go will happen if you can do one thing: stop clinging to knowledge, stop clinging to philosophies, stop clinging to doctrines, dogmas. Stop clinging to the churches and the organized religion; otherwise you will have false conceptions, and those false conceptions won’t allow the truth to enter you.A beautiful parable…All along the farmyard gables the swallows sat in a row, twittering uneasily to one another, telling of many things. But thinking only of summer and the south, for autumn was afoot and the north wind was waiting.And suddenly, one day they were all quite gone. And everyone spoke of the swallows and the south.“I think I shall go south myself next year,” said a hen.The year wore on and the swallows came; the year wore on and they sat again on the gables, and all the poultry discussed the departure of the hen.Very early one morning, the wind being from the north, the swallows all soared suddenly and felt the wind in their wings; and a strength came upon them, and a strange old knowledge and a more-than-human faith; and flying high, they left the smoke of our cities.“I think the wind is about right,” said the hen, and she spread her wings and ran out of the poultry yard. And she ran fluttering out onto the road and some way down it, until she came to a garden.At evening she came back panting. In the poultry yard she told the other poultry how she had gone south as far as the highroad, and had seen the great world’s traffic going by. She had come to lands where the potato grew and had seen the stubble upon which men live. And at the end of the road she had found a garden, and there were roses in it, beautiful roses, and the gardener himself was there.“How extremely interesting,” the poultry said, “and what a really beautiful description!”The winter wore away, and the bitter months went by; and the spring of the year appeared, and the swallows came again.But the poultry would not agree that there was a sea in the south, “You should hear our hen!” they said.Now the hen has become the knower. She knows what is in the south, and she has not even gone outside the town – just down the road a little bit.Intellect is a hen… It cannot go very far. But once the hen knows something, it prevents further exploration; it becomes an obstacle.Drop your intellect, and you will not lose anything. Carry your intellect with you and you will lose all. Drop your intellect, and you will lose only your imprisonment, your falsity. Drop your intellect and suddenly your consciousness will soar high, will be on its wings, and you can go to the very south, to the open seas where you belong. Intellect is the burden on man.The last thing before we go into a parable: Tao starts with death. Why? There is something significant in the beginning. Tao says that if you understand death you will understand everything because in death your boundaries will be blurred. In death, you will disappear. In death, the ego will be dropped. In death, mind will no longer be there. In death, all that is non-essential will be dropped, and only the essential will remain.If you can understand death you will be able to understand what Tao is, what the pathless path is – because religion is also a way of dying, love is also a way of dying, prayer is also a way of dying. Meditation is voluntary death. Death is the greatest phenomenon. It is the culmination of life, the crescendo, the highest peak. You know only one peak, and that peak is of sex, and that is the lowest peak of the Himalayas. Yes, it is a peak, but the lowest peak; death is the highest peak.Sex is birth: it is the beginning of the Himalayas, the lowest peak. The highest is not possible at the beginning. Slowly, slowly, the peaks rise higher and higher, finally they come to the peak. Death is the peak, sex is the beginning. Between sex and death is the whole story of life.Western psychology starts by understanding sex. Eastern psychology, the psychology of the buddhas, starts by understanding the psychology of death. To understand sex is very primary; to understand death is the ultimate.By understanding death you can die consciously. If you die consciously you will not be born again – there will be no need. You have learned the lesson; you will not be thrown back again and again into the wheel of life and death. You have known; you have learned – there is no need for you to be sent again to school; you have transcended. If you don’t learn the meaning of death you will have to be thrown back. Life is a situation to learn what death is.This parable:When Lieh Tzu was eating at the roadside on a journey to Wei,he saw a hundred-year-old skull.Picking a stalk he pointed to the skull and, turning to his disciple Pai Feng, said,“Only he and I know that you were never born and will never die. Is it he who is truly miserable, is it we who are truly happy?”A very cryptic statement, a code which has to be decoded. “Only he and I know…” said Lieh Tzu, pointing to the hundred-year-old skull, “…that you were never born and will never die.” Why does he say, “Only he and I”? The skull has died an involuntary death, and Lieh Tzu has died a voluntary death – both are dead in a way.Lieh Tzu has died through meditation. Lieh Tzu has died because he is no longer an ego, because he is no longer separate from the whole, because he is no longer. This is real death, deeper in fact than the death of the skull. It is not really certain whether the man who has died, and whose skull is lying there for a hundred years, has known. It is not certain – he may not have known; he may have known. But it is certain that Lieh Tzu knows: his death is conscious.He used the situation. A parable uses a situation. His disciple, Pai Feng, was sitting by his side, the skull was lying there, and he pointed to the skull: “Only he and I know that you were never born and will never die.” Who dies? And who is born? The ego is born and the ego dies. Deep down, where ego is no longer, you are never born and you never die. You are eternal, you are eternity, you are the very substratum, the very stuff that existence is made of – how can you die? But ego is born and ego dies.You are never born and you can never die, but how to know it? Would you like to wait until death comes? That is very risky because if you live your whole life unconsciously, there is not much possibility that you may become conscious when you die. It is not possible. If your whole life has been a continuity of unconscious living, you will die unconsciously, you will not be able to know. You will die in a coma; you will not be able to observe and see what is happening. You were not even able to see life; how can you see death? Death is more subtle.If you really want to know, then start becoming alert, aware. Live consciously – learn consciousness; accumulate consciousness. Become a great flame of consciousness; then, when death comes, you will be able to witness it; you will be able to see it and you will know: “The body is dying; the ego is dying, but I am not dying because I am the witness.” That witness is the very core of existence. That witness is what other religions call “God,” and what Lieh Tzu, Chuang Tzu called “Tao,” the knower, the knowing element, consciousness, awareness, alertness.Start living a conscious life. Do whatsoever you are doing, but do as if you are a witness to it – watch it, silently go on observing it. Don’t get lost in things; remain alert, remain beyond. Start from small things: walking on the road, eating, taking a bath, holding the hand of a friend, talking, listening – small things – but keep alert. You will forget again and again. Pick it up again, find it out again, remember it again. This is what Buddha called “mindfulness,” what Gurdjieff called “self-remembering.”Go on remembering that you are a witness. In the beginning it is arduous, hard, because our sleep is long. We have slept for many lives; we have become accustomed to sleep, we are snoring – metaphysically. It is difficult, but if you try, by and by a ray of alertness will enter your being. It is possible – difficult, but possible – not impossible. This is the most valuable thing in life.“Only he and I know that you were never born and will never die.” I know you will never die because you were never born, but you don’t know it. My knowing is not going to help you – you have to know it. It has to become your own understanding: a light unto yourself.“Is it he who is truly miserable, is it we who are truly happy?” Then he puts a question to his disciple: “Who is happy, those who are alive or those who are dead? Who is really miserable – those who are dead or those who are alive? And who is really happy?” And he leaves the question. It is a koan: the disciple has to meditate on it.The parable says nothing, it ends abruptly. Now the disciple has to work it out. Now he has to meditate, he has to be aware of death, of life, of love, of this and that. He has to meditate on the fact: Who is really happy? Are you happy by being just alive? You are not; the whole world is so miserable. So one thing can be deduced, and can be deduced unconditionally, that just by being alive one is not bound to be happy. Just being alive is not enough to be happy – something more is needed to be happy, something “plus.” Life plus awareness: then happiness arises because in awareness, in the light of awareness, the darkness of ego disappears.When life has a plus point of awareness great things happen. First: the ego disappears. And with the ego, death disappears because only the ego can die – because the ego was born. With the ego gone, birth has disappeared, death has disappeared. With the ego gone, your separation from existence has disappeared.This is the meaning of the crucifixion: the ego is crucified. When Jesus is crucified, Christ is born – that is the meaning of resurrection. On one side crucifixion; on the other side resurrection.Die if you really want to be alive – very paradoxical, but tremendously true, absolutely true. As you are, you are neither dead nor alive. You are hanging in between, hence the misery, the tension, the anguish. You are split: you are neither alive nor dead. Either be totally alive – and then you will know what life is – or be totally dead. Then too you will know what life is because with totality the door of Tao opens.Be total. A man who is asleep cannot be total in anything. You are eating, you are not totally there; you are thinking a thousand and one things, you are dreaming a thousand and one dreams, you are just stuffing mechanically. You may be making love to your woman or to your man – you are not totally there. You may be thinking of other women – making love to your wife and thinking of some other woman. Or you may be thinking of the market, or of the prices of things that you want to purchase, or of a car, or of a house, or of a thousand and one things – and you are making love mechanically.Be total in your acts, and if you are total you have to be aware; nobody can be total without being aware. Being total means having no other thinking. If you are eating, you are simply eating; you are totally herenow. The eating is all: you are not only stuffing, you are enjoying it. Body, mind, soul all are in tune while you are eating: there is a harmony, a deep rhythm, between all three layers of your being. Then eating becomes meditation; walking becomes meditation; chopping wood becomes meditation; carrying water from the well becomes meditation; cooking food becomes meditation. Small things are transformed: they become luminous acts, and each act becomes so total that each act has the quality of Tao.When you are total, then you are not the doer. Then godliness is the doer, or the total is the doer – you are just a vehicle, a passage. Becoming that passage is bliss, is benediction.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Where does educating the subconsciousness conflict or harmonize with Tao, as it implies discipline with self-effort from an external expression?Tao knows nothing of discipline. Tao is anarchic, spontaneous, effortless. All disciplines are unnatural – they have to be. Nature needs no discipline, it is sufficient unto itself. Trees and rivers and animals and stars don’t know anything of discipline. Discipline is man-created, man-made, and because of discipline man becomes split. One part starts manipulating the other part; then a rift is created. The mind tries to manipulate the body, and the body tries to manipulate the mind in subtle ways, or at least tries to sabotage it. This conflict creates confusion: all conflict is confusion. Because of conflict the fusion cannot happen: you cannot be one, you cannot be fused into one, hence confusion. The ultimate result can only be schizophrenia. You go on fighting and fighting, and by and by you are no longer one individual, you become many – at least two, and if worse happens, then many – then you become a crowd. And when you are not one, you cannot be happy.Happiness is a function of unity. Happiness is the music that happens when you are in unity, when everything fits together, when everything harmonizes, when there is no conflict, not even a trace of it, when you are an orchestra, not a crowd; nobody is trying to manipulate, nobody is trying to become the master, nobody is trying to exploit, oppress. The whole being is overflowing with joy.Tao is spontaneity, it is not discipline, hence Tao is the ultimate in religion – no religion touches that peak. The moment a religion starts becoming a discipline, it has already fallen very low.There are three stages of a religion. Just as there is childhood, youth and old age in the life of a man or a woman, so there are three stages in the life of a religion. When religion is born – the childhood of religion is when a master is alive, fresh, the energy is flowing from the source, and the fragrance is coming. When Buddha is alive, or Lao Tzu is alive, or Jesus is alive, then religion has its first, virgin, innocent state: the childhood. It is as fresh as the dewdrops in the morning, fresh as the roseflower, fresh as the stars, innocent; it knows no discipline, it knows only spontaneity.Then, people start gathering close to a master. That is bound to happen – a magnet is there, people start gathering. The second stage comes: the stage of organic religion. The first stage is individual religion – rebellious, spontaneous; there is no question of any effort, any discipline, any scripture. God is in the nude; truth is as it is – no camouflage, no dressings. Then people start gathering. The second stage is not so rebellious for these people, and because of these people, by and by discipline arises. The master goes on talking of spontaneity, but the followers cannot understand spontaneity; they translate it in terms of disciplining themselves. The master says, “Just be.” They ask, “How to be?” Their question of the “how” by and by brings discipline in; they create the discipline. Let me say it in this way: the master brings spontaneity, the disciples bring discipline.The words disciple and discipline come from the same root. When disciples have gathered around a master, they start translating what he is saying, what he means. They start interpreting, and of course they interpret according to their minds – there is no other way. If you interpret at all, you will misinterpret.The real disciple is one who does not interpret, who does not translate, who listens passively, who is not asking “how,” who is not in a hurry to get some result, who is not goal-oriented, who is not greedy. The greedy disciple immediately creates a discipline. This is the second stage – still alive; I call this stage the organic stage of religion. The master is there, the disciples have come, there is an organic unity but…In the first stage there was only the center; now there is a circumference, and the circumference will go on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. The bigger it is, the less true it will be. The farther away the circumference goes from the center, the further away it goes from truth, innocence. It becomes knowledge, it becomes discipline, dogma, but still a little light comes through all these screens.Then, the third stage: when the master is gone; the religion becomes an organized religion. It is now no longer organic because the center has disappeared. Now the circumference tries to exist without the center – it becomes a church, a creed, a theology. Now religion is very old; and some day, somewhere, the religion dies but the church continues.You ask, “Where does educating the subconsciousness conflict or harmonize with Tao, as it implies discipline with self-effort from an external expression?” Tao never allowed itself to become even an organic religion. Naturally, it never allowed itself to become a church. It has remained spontaneous, hence there are no followers, there is no church like the Vatican, or the Shankaracharya – nothing like that. Tao has remained available for those who are courageous enough to be spontaneous. It needs great courage to be spontaneous because to be spontaneous means to remain in a state of constant uncontrol. Spontaneity means not to interfere with your nature – let it be whatever it is and let it go wherever it is moving; to be like the wind, to be like a river, not knowing where it is going – not caring where it is going, not bothering, not trying to plan, not trying to project.To be natural needs great courage, hence there are very few people who have attained to Tao. There are millions of Christians, millions of Mohammedans, millions of Hindus, millions of Buddhists, but Tao has remained a transcendence, a fragrance – untethered, unimprisoned – hence its beauty, its sublime exquisiteness, its superb truth.The superconscious, the conscious, the unconscious: these divisions exist because you have tried discipline. Otherwise there is an indiscriminate consciousness inside you. There are no divisions. Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians, and other psychologists, talk as if these divisions are naturally there, as if they are part of the facticity of humanity. They are not right. The unconscious exists because man has repressed his natural state; the moment repression disappears, the unconscious also disappears. The unconscious is not a natural division of your consciousness. You have done something with your consciousness: you have forced many things inside your being which you don’t want to look at; you avoid, hence the creation of the unconscious.A buddha knows no unconscious. I don’t know any unconscious. All that is in me I am aware of; I allow it. It is in my vision; there is no dark basement where I go on throwing things. The basement starts existing only when you start repressing. Repression creates divisions, then you become more and more confined because you cannot look deeper: you are afraid, you cannot dare, you cannot afford to… The unconscious is created. Once the unconscious is created, then there is a small overlapping of the conscious and the unconscious; that is called the subconscious. The unconscious means complete darkness, the conscious means light. Of course, between this darkness and light there is an overlap, a small boundary, which is neither dark nor light: that is the subconscious.These three divisions exist because of you, not because of nature. But psychologists go on talking as if they have found some natural division. There is no division at all. The moment you allow spontaneity to explode, your consciousness starts spreading. One day your whole being becomes light; there are no dark corners because there is nothing to hide. You stand nude to your own vision – nothing to hide, nothing to escape from, nothing to be afraid of – you have accepted yourself. In deep acceptance you become one.Tao says that man has an indiscriminate consciousness. You cannot call it “the conscious,” you cannot call it “the unconscious,” you cannot call it “the subconscious,” because these divisions are really fabricated, man-made. When a child is born, he has no unconscious, he has no conscious – he is indiscriminate, he is one. But immediately we start educating him; immediately we start training him: be like this, and don’t be like that. So whatsoever we deny, he has to reject. Those rejected parts go on piling up inside him, and if he has to look at them it hurts – they are his own rejected parts – as if you had cut off his limbs. It is painful to look at them; it is better to forget them. To forget seems to be the only way, and when you forget something that is inside you, the unconscious is created.The unconscious disappears when you again become spontaneous like a child. The whole teaching of Tao is to be again like a child. It means to undo all that the society has done to you; it means to destroy, to dismantle, the structure that society has put around you; to claim your freedom again which is your birth-right; to be radically transformed; to go beyond the structure of the society, to go above. To go to nature against nurture: that’s what the message of Tao is.There is no discipline in Tao – Tao is not Yoga. Tao is just the diametrically opposite viewpoint to Yoga. If Patanjali and Lao Tzu met, they would not be able to understand each other – impossible; Patanjali would talk about discipline. If Patanjali met Confucius, they would become friends immediately; Confucius also talks about discipline, control, character. Lao Tzu talks about characterlessness. Remember the word characterlessness because Lao Tzu says that the real man has no character – cannot have a character; character means something of the past.A real man lives in the moment. He does not live through the past; he has no ideas to live; he simply lives, he responds to the present moment. He has no scriptures to follow, no moralities to follow, he has no commandments. His only attitude is that of spontaneous responsibility: whatsoever is facing him, he responds to totally, he responds fully.A man of character can never respond fully. He has ideas; he has to do things in a certain way. Before the situation arises he has already decided how to act, he has rehearsed. The man of Tao lives without rehearsal; he never manages, he never jumps ahead. Let the moment come and he is there to reflect it, and whatsoever is needed will come out of his being. He trusts nature: his trust is absolute, utterly absolute. The man of character does not trust nature. He says, “I should cultivate good character, otherwise in a certain situation I may behave in a bad way.” He does not trust himself. Look at the absurdity: he does not trust himself, and he is going to cultivate, and he is going to manage – he does not trust himself. His self-distrust is there so he becomes a pseudo person; then he loses authenticity. He smiles because he has to smile; he loves because he has to love; he behaves in a certain way because that is how one should behave – but all is false. Nothing comes from his heart, nothing flows through his heart, nothing has the touch of his being; everything is just managed. Naturally, he lives a very pseudo life: his love is not alive, his smile is painted; his gestures are all impotent, meaningless. He manages – that’s all, but he never lives.Tao has no discipline. It does not trust in character, it trusts in being, in your nature. And there is no effort because all effort is going to create trouble. Effort means conflict; effort means imposing something, effort means that you are at war with yourself. Tao trusts in effortlessness. Jesus says to his disciples: “Look at the lilies in the field, they toil not, they labor not.” They don’t plan for the tomorrow, yet they are tremendously beautiful. Even Solomon was not so beautiful when he was attired in all his beautiful robes and diamonds and ornaments. Even then he was not as beautiful as these lilies in the field. What is the secret of the lilies in the field? They live naturally, they bloom naturally: there is no effort, “they toil not.”Jesus must have got this message from some Taoist source. There are stories that he traveled to India, there are stories that he even traveled to Japan. There is a place in Japan which people say that he came to. There are stories that he traveled to Tibet. If he had traveled to Japan and Tibet he must have come to know something, something about Tao; he must have gathered something. Maybe he never went to Japan and never went to Tibet, maybe it was his own experience he came upon in his own inner search, but he is a Taoist – Jesus can be counted upon. He is a Taoist, hence the Jews could not trust in him. They are fundamentally a law-abiding people; they have lived according to law: the Ten Commandments of Moses. And Jesus says: “Moses has given you law. I will give you another law and a higher law – the law of love.” But love knows no law; he is tricky – love is always lawless. To convince the Jews, the law-abiding people, he says, “I will give you the law of love.” Law of love? It is a contradiction in terms: law is never loving, love is never law-abiding – cannot be. Love is freedom, law is bondage; they never go together, it is impossible to put them together.I have heard…A man was passing through a cemetery and he came upon a grave. There was a beautiful marble stone on the grave, and he read, “Here lies a great lawyer and a great lover.”He said, “Impossible! How can two men be in one grave? A lover? And a great lawyer? Not possible!”Jesus brought love and he brought lawlessness, that’s why the Jews could not forgive him. He had to be punished: he was disrupting the whole society. He was dangerous; he was really dangerous – very few people have been born on the earth that have been so dangerous. He was sabotaging the whole structure when he said, “God is love,” and the God of the Jews was never love. He was a very angry God and a very jealous God, and he would destroy you for small things if you didn’t abide by his commandments. He threw Adam and Eve out of Eden because they disobeyed.Love forgives; love knows how to forgive. Love loves so much that it is impossible to be so angry and enraged. The God of the Jews was destroying cities for small things – because the people were characterless or they were homosexuals. He said he would destroy Sodom and Gomorrah; he said he would destroy whole towns. He flooded the whole world! He wanted to destroy the whole world. He cannot be very loving; he may be just, but he is not loving. How can justice be love? Justice has to be justice. Love is a totally different dimension. The Jews became afraid. Jesus brought spontaneity, he brought lawlessness and he brought rebelliousness, and in such a disguise that people were not even aware of what he was bringing in.If people are against me in India it is natural: my whole message is a sabotage. Jesus says: “I don’t bring peace; I bring a sword.” And Jesus says: “I have come to put the son against the father, and the husband against the wife, and the mother against the son, and the brother against the brother.” What does he mean? These relationships, these so-called “relationships,” are no longer of love; they are only formal. Jesus says: “Love is enough, anything else is going to destroy your naturalness. Love your mother – not because she is your mother; love her, let there be love, but not because she is your mother.” How can you love a woman just because she is your mother? How can you love a woman just because she is your sister? You can fulfill duties but duties are ugly.Duty is an ugly, dirty, four-letter word – avoid it! It has destroyed nature, it has destroyed humanity; it has not allowed man to flower and bloom.No, there is no discipline, and there is no effort in Tao – there is only understanding. Remember, let me repeat it: there is only understanding. Effort means you have not understood rightly – that’s why you have to make an effort. If I say that love is enough, and you understand me, will you make any effort? That very understanding will bring a change. Understanding is revolution. If you understand, love is enough. If you understand that the lilies in the field are beautiful, if you understand what beauty is – to be natural is to be beautiful – are you going to make any effort to attain this beauty? How can you be natural through effort? To be natural you have to drop all effort. And will you try to drop your effort through some effort? Then you will be getting into the same trap again. It is not going to change you.Just see the fact. Just see the fact, and let the fact be there. Let it penetrate into your heart, let it sink in and you will see that the very understanding of the fact has transformed you. Suddenly you see that you are a totally different man. The old man is gone and the new is born – there is no effort.One thing more about Tao: it is sublime laziness. It does not believe in aggression; it does not believe in the male element. Tao is feminine: passivity, receptivity. Try to understand this. There are two ways to approach truth. One way is that of aggression, almost like rape. That’s why I always say science rapes: it is aggressive, it has been coercive on nature; it has forced nature to reveal her secrets. It is very crude, primitive. One has to rape only when one cannot love. A rapist is one who is incapable of love. If you can love a woman, how can you even think of raping her? It will not even come into your dreams – it is impossible. When one fails in loving, then rape arises. Violence arises only when love fails, aggression arises only when love fails. Science is a failure – failure in the sense that we could not persuade nature. It would have been better to persuade.Tao persuades nature. There is no need to coerce. Love, and by and by nature reveals its secrets to you. Science tries to force. You come to know some facts but they are ugly, they are abortive, they are not naturally born.Something of your violence goes on echoing and re-echoing. So it is not just coincidence that science has led to more and more violence in the world: science is violent. It is not just coincidence that science has culminated in atom and hydrogen bombs – they are a natural corollary to it. Science is coercion, and coercion ultimately ends in violence. If we don’t become aware, science is going to become suicide, a universal suicide. One day or other, man is going to commit suicide because if you force nature violently there are going to be repercussions from it. The violence that you do to nature will come back to you.Things happen in such subtle ways that sometimes one is not aware of them. Adolf Hitler destroyed the Jews in Germany. He expelled Albert Einstein because he was a Jew. He never thought that the expulsion of this one man from Germany would be the end of his whole effort, would be the end of Fascism. Albert Einstein was turned out of Germany; he sought asylum in America, and he wrote a letter to Roosevelt proposing that atom bombs be created. It was Albert Einstein who became instrumental in creating the first atomic bomb, and that very atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. It destroyed the Fascists, the Nazis, and Adolf Hitler, and all his dreams of a one-thousand-year rule over the world. Now, if you look back, the thing seems to be very simple. He turned out Albert Einstein, and he could not have even imagined that this turning away of Albert Einstein would be his end. If Albert Einstein were not turned out of Germany, Hitler might have ruled the whole world. A Jew turned out of the country was not significant at all in his eyes. That Jew proved his undoing: in a roundabout way the atom bomb was created.Life is very deeply interconnected: whatsoever happens here will have repercussions there.Tao says: never coerce nature, otherwise nature will throw all coercion back on you, and you will be destroyed. Persuade, love. And, as Tao says don’t coerce outer nature; Tao says don’t coerce inner nature either.Science tries to coerce outer nature, Yoga tries to coerce inner nature – so science and Yoga can go together very well; they are fellow travelers. Einstein could have understood Patanjali very easily, and Patanjali could have understood Einstein very easily. But neither Einstein nor Patanjali would have been able to conceive of what Lao Tzu was saying. He would look mad, he would look absurd. He brings a totally different dimension into the world – the dimension of the feminine.Man is aggressive, woman is receptive. Woman is a womb – receptivity. Lao Tzu says that truth has to be received, not sought. “Seek, and you will never find,” says Lao Tzu. Wait, wait in openness, wait in vulnerability, and you will find truth because truth will come to you. Invite, and wait. Love, and wait. Be in a let-go.That is what I mean when I say “sublime laziness.” It is inactivity, yet it is not lethargy; inactivity, yet it is full of radiance; not doing anything, but pulsating with energy. In fact, a person who is not doing anything should pulsate with tremendous energy because he is not putting his energy anywhere else. So energy is accumulating: he becomes a reservoir – radiant, alive, throbbing, streaming. In that great energy-moment, which is yet inactive, truth happens – hence I call it “sublime laziness.” The active person loses energy; the active person is destroying, dissipating his energy. The inactive person accumulates, so it is not lethargy. A person who is lethargic is inactive and has no energy; he is impotent. Hence I call it sublime laziness.Just a few days ago I was talking about Ashtavakra. He is exactly like Lao Tzu; he also praises the quality of sublime laziness. He calls it alasi shiromani: the emperor of laziness, a great king of laziness, the highest peak of laziness. But remember, inactivity plus energy, plus vitality. Not a single effort has to be made because in the effort so much energy will be wasted that you will be less radiant. Godliness comes to you only when you are vital – optimally vital, optimum. The lowest energy of godliness is closest to man’s highest energy, and there is the communion.To understand Tao is simply to understand.Your repressions are like diseases, and all your efforts bring nothing but repressions.I have heard…A mysterious man was constantly found waiting on the doorsteps of the Metropolitan Museum in the morning when it opened. He was well dressed, but always unshaven, looking as if he had just got out of bed, flung on his clothes and made a dash for the Museum. But once inside, all he did was sit on a bench, unfold The Times, and read for an hour or so.One morning he noticed a guard looking at him, and said testily, “I suppose you’re wondering why I come here? I’m trying to stop smoking, and I have to be some place where they won’t let me smoke, see?” He brooded for a while, then amplified his explanation. “On Sunday mornings, when you people are closed, I have to go to the church.”If you are avoiding something, repressing something, escaping from some fact, your life will become a very ugly phenomenon. You will never be able to live your life because you will never be able to be at ease with yourself. Drop all unease, and remember: easy is right – no effort is needed. I know why effort appeals so much – because effort is very ego-fulfilling. When you make an effort you feel that you are doing something.There is one more question, very much related to this question. The questioner says, “When I came here, in the beginning I was a great spiritual seeker, and I was making a great effort. Now I have become a sort of materialist because now I am making no effort to reach spirituality, to attain nirvana and enlightenment. So, Osho, what has happened to me? Have I fallen from grace?”You have risen in grace. What you were thinking is materialism is true spirituality, and what you were thinking to be spirituality was just greed and materialism. You were trying to become enlightened – that was materialism because that was greed. To have any goals is to be a materialist; not to have any goal is to be spiritual. To try to attain something is to be greedy, to be desirous, to be ambitious – that is all an ego trip. To drop all those trips, and to live herenow, and love the small things of life, is to become spiritual. That is the difference between the so-called “ordinary spirituality” and the spirituality that is of Tao.If you find Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu or Lieh Tzu, you will not be able to recognize them; they will be very ordinary. You will have to be with them to feel it. They don’t impose any extraordinariness; they will not show you miracles, and they will not show you siddhis and powers. They will be very ordinary people.To be ordinary is the message of Tao, to be so ordinary that you don’t have any idea to be anything else; to be so contented, so contented… Eating, drinking, loving, talking, listening, walking, sleeping, sitting in the sun or under the moon, looking at the trees – these small things become sublime when you look with a contented eye. When you are happy, everything becomes tremendously beautiful, everything becomes luminous. It depends on you.Let me tell you that when you came to me you were a materialist – you were thinking that you were spiritual. Now that you are falling into spirituality, by and by you must be becoming a little afraid – where has your spirituality gone? That was materialism. Go throughout India, and you will find that out of a hundred so-called mahatmas, ninety-nine are materialists. Materialists in the sense that they are ambitious, materialists in the sense that they are hankering for something in the afterlife – for heaven, paradise, moksha, nirvana. Their desire is very much alive; in fact, they are more desirous than ordinary people.An ordinary person desires a big car – not much, he can be forgiven. Maybe stupid, but not a sin. A little foolish – so what? But somebody who is desiring heaven, that is too much greed; eternal life, that is too much greed. The car is a toy. A big house is a toy. But this so-called “spiritual man” wants eternity; to be forever and ever, he wants a deathless quality. His ambition is so big, his ego is so big, that he cannot be satisfied with small things. He wants God in his fist – only then, only then can he feel that yes, he is somebody.Try to understand me. Here I am trying to put things upside down because things have been upside down too long. They have to be put right, and this is the only way. If somebody is standing on his head for many days, how do you put him right? Put him “upside down” then he will be right side up. The so-called spirituality is nothing but cloaked materialism.You have to look into things. A man who has no desire is spiritual. A man who does not hanker for any ego-trip is spiritual. A man who is not worried about kundalini and chakras and sahasrar, the one-thousand-petaled lotus opening, that man is spiritual, that man has the quality of being a spiritual man. In his ordinariness he is extraordinary. In his mundane life he has a holiness.Even the division between the spiritual and material is a materialist’s division. A spiritual person knows no divisions; a spiritual person simply accepts whatsoever is; and this isness is one. There is nothing like the spiritual and the material – that again is the division of the ego; all divisions are of the ego. When the ego disappears there is no division, there is one reality, undivided reality. Call it spiritual, call it material – it does not matter; when there is only one, any name will do.In the name of spirituality people have been crippled, destroyed, paralyzed.Once upon a time, the Duke of Lu went forward to meet a sea bird that had made its appearance in the confines of that land-locked country, and escorted it to his ancestral hall.This is a Taoist parable.There, an ox, a sheep and a pig were slaughtered, and a feast was spread before the sea bird, while the band was playing the celebrated music composed under the supervision of the Emperor Shuen. The bird, however, merely looked on, sad and doleful, refusing to relish a morsel of meat or drink a single cup. Thus it died of hunger after three days. The duke fed the bird as he would feed himself, and he failed to see that it should have been treated as a bird and not as a king.The music is meaningless to the bird, and the ox and the sheep and the pig are not his food. Shuen killed the bird.Man has been killed because you have been lured to things for which you are not made. You have not been given a chance to be yourself; you have been manipulated to be somebody else. All ideologies enforce upon you something which you have to become. Tao says: You are already that. There is no need to become – you are already that. You are a being – there is no becoming. You are that already – start living it.See the revolutionary message. There is no need to improve upon yourself; you are already that which you can be. Just start delighting in it, celebrate it, live it. And the more you celebrate, the more you will live in a natural way, the more you will start feeling your innermost core. In the innermost core of your being is Tao: it is your nature, the way.The second question:Osho,Is it good to take risks?Good or bad is not the question. If you are alive you have to take risks. Life is a risk. Only death is secure, life is never secure – there is no security. The companies that are called Life Insurance should really be called Death Insurance – in life there can be no insurance. Life is alive only because there is risk, danger – that’s why there are so many thrills.You ask, “Is it good to take risks?” If you want to be alive you have to take risks; the more risks you take, the more alive you will be. So you are really asking, “Is it good to be alive?” Your question, rightly interpreted, means, “Is it good to be alive?”Now, I am not a murderer, and I don’t want to poison your life. Many people have done that: the priests, the politicians are poisoning your life. They are all teaching you to live within bounds; to live in such a way that there is no risk, so that you are always safe and secure. But then you are dead, then you are already in your grave. Then you become miserable, and then you start seeing that you don’t have any love, that you don’t have any happiness, that nothing worthwhile is happening in your life. Then you start feeling there is no meaning, no significance; and the reason is that you are avoiding risks. Meaning comes through being dangerous, adventurous. Value arises only when you are alive; value comes through vitality.Virtue simply means to have the quality of courage. Courage is the only virtue.If you don’t live a life of danger, then better to commit suicide. Then why burden this earth? Then why feel miserable? Then what is the point of it all? Then your misery leads nowhere; then your misery is just a rut in which you go on moving.Look at people. Their eyes have lost the luster of life; their faces are more like masks than real faces. They don’t live; they only pretend that they are living. They act, they don’t live. And then, naturally, they come to feel that there is no meaning – no flowering, no fragrance, no dance, no song arising. They go to the priest, and the priest says, “Yes, the song is possible, but it happens only when you are dead. After death.” They go to the politician; he says, “Yes, life can have meaning, but the social structure has to be changed, the economic structure has to be changed, the whole history has to be changed. Communism has to be brought in; socialism has to be brought in.”When people lose meaning, of course they start asking where to find it. There are two people they go to: the priest and the politician – and they are the persons who put you into a state where meaning is lost. Now this is a very great conspiracy. First they destroy the possibility of meaning, and then, of course, you are in their hands – you have to go and ask, and they show you the ways.Look at a child. He has meaning. Have you watched a child playing with the pebbles on the seashore or running after a butterfly? Just watch, but don’t make him self-conscious: the moment he becomes self-conscious he is no longer a child. Just watch, hiding somewhere – absorbed, the child is completely lost. And how beautiful he is! The grace on his face, the color, the joy, the glee, the gladness, the vitality – as if he has wings, and he is so absorbed. In that absorbed moment he is closest to godliness; he is in Tao, he is on the way, he is enjoying this moment. He is tremendously happy, so happy that he is not even aware of happiness because only miserable people become aware of happiness. He is so happy – who bothers? He is so totally in the moment that he is not an outsider.Do one thing: bring a camera and try to take a photograph of the child. The moment he becomes aware that the photograph is being taken, all gladness disappears. His face is no longer true; his mask has come on. His eyes are no longer absorbed – that shining quality is no longer there, they have become dull. He is no longer dynamic; he has become static, rigid. Now he has become self-conscious, the ego has entered; with the camera, the ego has entered. Now the child is ugly.That’s why it is very difficult to have a beautiful picture. The person may be beautiful, but when you take him to the photo studio, suddenly something goes wrong. The picture never comes out so well. Have you ever been satisfied with any of your pictures? Whenever you look at the picture, something is missing. What is missing? You became self-conscious, you became aware; you started performing. You wanted to look very good, happy, smiling; a great personality, magnetic, charismatic, and it all went down the drain; you became just ugly, dead. You were conscious of the camera, and you were conscious of the people who would look at your picture. You were so self-conscious, how could you be beautiful?A person who is continuously thinking whether there is any risk or not becomes so self-conscious that he never lives. He becomes rigid and dull and stupid – mediocre. Forget all about risks. Life is a risk. The day you were born, one thing became certain: that you are going to die. Now, what greater risk can there be?My mother’s mother was a very old woman, and she was always afraid for me. I was continuously traveling on the train – fifteen days a month I was on the train. She was always afraid, and she would say, “There are so many accidents!” Every day she would look in the newspaper just to see whether there had been some train accident, some airplane had fallen or something. She would collect all the cuttings, and whenever I would go visit, she would show them to me. “Look! So many car accidents, so many airplanes burned, and so many trains wrecked, and so many people killed. What are you doing? Fifteen days on the trains, planes, cars! Stop this!”So I said one day, “Listen. If you are really interested in statistics then do you know that ninety-seven per cent of people die in their beds? So should I stand outside the bed the whole night? It is risky; there is no other thing more risky than to be in the bed. Ninety-seven per cent of people die in their beds! You are safer in an airplane – rarely does somebody die in an airplane, rarely in a train.”She was very puzzled. She said, “It is true, but that cannot be done – it is impossible. Yes, that’s true.” Since then, she stopped talking about the accidents – she understood.The day you were born you took the greatest risk that you could ever take. Death is going to happen; death is bound to happen. You have already taken one step into the grave the day you were born. Now, what more risks can you take? Even if you go on avoiding risks, you will die, so why not take the risks and live really authentically?A rich man once said to a friend, “Why is it that everybody is always criticizing me for being miserly when everyone knows I have made provisions to leave everything I possess to charity when I die?”“Well,” said the friend, “Let me tell you about the pig and the cow. The pig was lamenting to the cow one day about how unpopular he was. ‘People are always talking about your gentleness and your kind eyes,’ said the pig. ‘Sure, you give milk and cream, but I give even more. I give bacon and ham, and I give bristles, and they even pickle my feet! Still nobody likes me. Why is it?’ The cow thought a minute and then said, ‘Well, maybe it’s because I give while I’m still living.’”Death is going to take everything. Then why be worried? Rather than saving it for death to take away, share it – take risks. The miserly man is the stupid man; everything will be taken away. Don’t be so cautious.Don’t be so cautious; have the spirit of adventure. Yes, I know sometimes you may commit a mistake, but nothing is wrong in that. Sometimes you may go astray, but nothing is wrong in it. Those who can go astray can come back; but those who never go anywhere are dead.Never commit the same mistake again and again – invent new mistakes every day. Be creative. Risk in new ways. That’s what sannyas is all about: to be risky, to live dangerously, to live without security and safety. To be tremendously in love with life is what sannyas is.And don’t postpone it because all postponement is again being very cautious. Do it right now. If you have understood this, let life happen.A pious brother sat on the front pew during the Sunday morning sermon. Presently he began to remove one of his shoes. This unusual procedure in the midst of a church service caused those who could see him to smile and lose interest for a time in the sermon. The brother then proceeded to remove his sock. This caused so much distraction that the preacher stopped in his discourse and asked the brother if there was something the matter.“No,’ said the disturber, “I just noticed that one of my socks was wrong-side out.”“Well, my brother,” chided the minister, “could you not wait until the service is over to make the change?”“No, sir,” was the reply, “when I find I am wrong I always proceed at once to get it right.”That should be the procedure: whenever you feel that something is wrong, get it right immediately – don’t postpone. If you have never taken any risk, take it now, and you will be richer for that.The third question:Osho,You say to be thankful to someone when he accepts the love you bring – but the seeds of my love fall mostly on stony ground.Then be thankful to the stony ground!The fourth question:Osho,Yesterday you said that the understanding of death is the basis of Eastern psychology, and the understanding of sex is the basis of Western psychology. Will you please say something more about it?Death is the greatest thing that is going to happen in life; death is the climax. Death has to be understood because death is the goal of life: all life is moving toward death. Not to understand death will really mean not to understand life.We have been taught to avoid the fact of death; we don’t talk about it, we don’t think about it. The very idea gives us shivers; a trembling arises in the being and we want to be occupied somewhere else. When somebody dies you feel a little embarrassed. It looks like this is not the thing to be done – why should he die?Anybody’s death brings you again and again to the awkward situation, and the awkward question arises in your being: “One day, am I also going to die?” And you want to avoid that.The East has not avoided anything. That’s the beauty of Eastern psychology: whatsoever is, is – and it has to be looked into. Death is, so death has to be looked into, it has to be faced. And you will see that a person who avoids death will be avoiding life also because there is only one way to avoid death – to avoid life. Otherwise life is always leading you toward death. Whatsoever you do, you are going toward death. Don’t do anything: the only way to avoid death is to avoid life.There is a way you can manage: you could fall into a coma. Then you could live longer because then there would be no accidents. The doctor could give you intravenous injections, feed you through injections, and you could lie down in the bed, protected, and you could live very long. You could live one thousand years, but that would not be life, that would be vegetating – you would be a vegetable. But you could live long.There are a few people lying in underground, air-conditioned chambers in America, who have died. But they have made their wills out so that their money is used to protect their bodies because there is a rumor in scientific circles that within twenty years it will be possible to revive a person. So they have made a trust – of all their properties. It is very costly – almost ten thousand dollars per day – but their bodies are being taken care of so that nothing goes wrong. So after twenty years, when science becomes capable of reviving them, they will be revived. Now for twenty years, and even after twenty years when you are revived, what are you going to do? You will repeat the same foolishness that you were doing before. You will start chasing women again, and competing in the market again, and arranging money to die and be protected again. What is the point of it all?Man is so afraid of death. The East says that death has to be looked in the eyes; death has to be looked into deeply. If you can look, if you can encounter death, in that very encounter you transcend death. You come to know that there is some element in you which is beyond death. Avoiding death, you remain under the control of death; facing death, you transcend death.We never think about our own death. Whenever we think about it, it is always somebody else’s death: death means somebody else’s death – never yours.Finklestein was arguing with a salesman.“I don’t want I should buy your eggs,” he shouted, “My hotel should burn down and I wouldn’t buy them. My wife should die and I wouldn’t buy them. My children should choke and I wouldn’t buy them.”The egg peddler caught the spirit of the argument and said, “You should go blind and buy a case.”“Listen,” cautioned Finklestein, “leave me out of it.”Whenever you are talking about death, danger, you are always leaving yourself out of it. That is no way to encounter life; that is no way to face the reality and truth of life. If death is, death is – what is the point of avoiding it? Look at it. The sooner you look the better.The East says that by looking deeply into death, you transcend death; suddenly, you become aware that one who can look into death is beyond death. Deep meditation brings you to the moment of death voluntarily and consciously. Meditation is a death: one dies and is reborn again. One dies from the world of phenomena, and one is born into the world of noumena. One dies to the temporal, and one is born into the eternal. When you come back from your deep ecstasy in meditation, your whole life is transformed. Then you live without fear because there is no death.From childhood we are making people afraid. From childhood everybody is protecting himself – we even contaminate children’s minds.One Sunday at the zoo, Bill and his father stopped before the lion’s cage.“Here’s the king of the beasts,” said his father.“Why do you call him that, Daddy?”“Well, he’s the big shot. He can lick any other animal. He’s a real man-eater too.”“You mean he would even eat you?” asked the boy.“I guess he would – if he got out.”Bill studied the lion with interest. Finally, he turned and looked up at his father.“Daddy,” he whispered, “if he does get out, what bus should I take home?”Everyone thinks, even a child, that death will pass him – he will be left out of it. It will take Daddy, and he will have to go home, so “What number bus?”There is something in the human mind that keeps away from death, and there is a reason for it, there is a cause: it is because the mind is going to die. You are not going to die. But don’t misunderstand me. When I say you are not going to die, I am talking of something inside you which you are not aware of. Your mind is going to die. That’s all you have known about yourself, and even that you have not known totally – you know only a fragment of the mind. Your mind is going to die; your mind is not eternal. It is a time-phenomenon; it is born and it dies. Your body is going to die: it is a constructed thing. It is the meeting of your father and mother, it is accidental. But you, you existed before your father and mother ever met, and you will exist when your body has gone into the earth – disappeared, “dust to dust.” You will exist. But that you, you have not known yet.The East says that this element can be known only when you encounter death, when you face death, when you accept the challenge of death. Then you will see that deep inside – the body is gone, the mind is gone, the ego is gone. And if you remain courageous and go on facing the fact, you will come to a moment when suddenly you will see that all is gone and yet you are. And this is your reality. This is the answer to the question: “Who am l?”The last question:Osho,Becoming a sannyasin is attractive. But now I am deeply involved with Arica. I love Oscar Ichizo very much. The contradiction would be loving and serving two masters. How do I resolve it?As far as I am concerned there is no problem – you should ask Oscar.I am not jealous. You can love me, and you can love a thousand and one masters – there is no problem. In fact, my whole effort here is to make you fall in love with Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Buddha, Krishna, Christ, Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, Ramana. Ramakrishna – a thousand and one. I am not jealous. I am vast, I can contain all your loves; so as far as I am concerned, there is no need to be worried.But before deciding anything, you should ask Oscar because I have the feeling that he is jealous.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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When Confucius was roaming on Mount T’ai, he saw Jung Ch’i Ch’i walking on the moors of Ch’ang in a rough fur coat with a rope round his waist, singing as he strummed a lute.“Master, what is the reason for your joy?” asked Confucius.“I have many joys. Of the myriad things which heaven begot, mankind is the most noble – and I have the luck to be human.This is my first joy.People are born who do not live a day or a month, who never get out of their swaddling clothes, but I have already lived to ninety. This is my joy.For all men, poverty is the norm and death is the end. Abiding by the norm, awaiting my end, what is there to be concerned about?”“Good!” said Confucius, “here is a man who knows how to console himself.”This is a beautiful parable, and not only beautiful but very subtle. If you look only on the surface, you will miss the meaning. Taoist parables are not on the surface. They are very deep, and they have to be penetrated and looked into and meditated upon; then only will you know the real meaning. This parable, on the surface, seems to be in favor of Confucius. On the surface it seems that the parable is saying that Confucius is wise. The reality is just the opposite.There is a diametrical opposition between the Taoist attitude and the Confucian attitude. Confucius is as far from the Taoist vision as possible. Confucius believes in law; Confucius believes in tradition; Confucius believes in discipline. Confucius believes in character, morality, culture, society, education. Tao believes in spontaneity, individuality, freedom. Tao is rebellious; Confucius is very conformist.Taoism is the profoundest non-conformism that has ever been evolved anywhere in the world, at any time in history; essentially it is rebellion. So there has been a rebellion, and the Taoist mystics, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu, go on ridiculing the Confucian attitude. This is a parable of ridicule. You will understand it when I explain it to you. Their ridicule is also very subtle, not gross. First let us understand the surface meaning.When Confucius was roaming on Mount T’ai, he saw Jung Ch’i Ch’i walking on the moors of Ch’ang in a rough fur coat with a rope around his waist, singing as he strummed a lute.Singing, music, dancing are all the language of joy, of happiness. It is an expression that a person is not miserable. But it may be just an appearance, it may be just projected, it may be just cultivated; deep down the situation may be just the opposite. Sometimes it happens that you laugh because you don’t want to cry. Sometimes it happens that you smile because tears are coming, and if you don’t smile, they will start rolling down your cheeks. Sometimes you maintain an attitude, a cultivated face, a mask, that you are happy because what is the point of showing your unhappiness to the world? That’s why people look so happy. Everybody thinks he is the unhappiest person in the world because he knows his reality, and he knows only the faces of others, their cultivated faces. So everybody deep down thinks, “I am the most miserable person, and why am I the most miserable person when everybody is so happy?”Singing and dancing are certainly a language of joy, but you can learn the language without knowing what joy is. That’s what humanity has done: people have learned gestures – empty gestures.But Confucius is deceived. He asks:“Master, what is the reason for your joy?”The mask has deceived Confucius; the man may be joyful, may not be joyful. The man has to be looked into directly – through his nature, not through his expression. The expression can be false: people have learned expression. Sometimes, have you noticed? Somebody is smiling – on the lips there is a beautiful smile – but look into the eyes, and the eyes say just the opposite. Somebody says something to you, “I love you.” Look at the face, and at the eyes, and the very vibe of the person, and it seems that he hates you. But just to be polite he is saying, “I love you.”Confucius looked only at the appearance: that is the first thing to be remembered; and he was deceived – deceived so much that he called the man “master.”He asks: “Master, what is the reason for your joy?” Now again, joy has no reason, joy cannot have a reason to it. If joy has any reason, it is not joy at all: joy can only be without any reason, uncaused. A disease has a reason, but health? Health is natural. If you go and ask the doctor, “Why am I healthy?” he cannot answer you. If you go to the doctor and you say, “Why am I ill?” he can answer you because illness has a cause. He can diagnose your case, and he can find the reason you are ill; but nobody has been yet able to find a reason why a man is healthy. Health is natural, health is as it should be. Illness is as it should not be; illness means something has gone wrong. When everything is going well, one is healthy. When everything is in tune, one is healthy. When one is harmonious with the whole, one is healthy. There is no reason for it.But Confucius asked: “Master, what is the reason for your joy?” Again Lieh Tzu is joking about Confucius, that’s how they are very subtle people. He is saying that the whole Confucian wrong attitude is there in the very question: Confucius thinks there are reasons for joy. There cannot be reasons for joy. Joy simply is – unexplained, unexplainable. When it is, it is; when it is not, it is not. When it is not, you can find the reasons why it is not; but when it is, you cannot find any reasons why it is. If you can show reasons why it is, then your joy is cultivated, not real, not true, not authentic. It is not flowing from your innermost core; it is just that you are managing it, you are manipulating it, you are pretending it. When a joy is a pretended joy, you can find a reason. But when the joy is truly there, it is so mysterious, it is so primal, that you cannot find any reason in it.If you ask a Buddha, “Why are you happy?” he will shrug his shoulders. If you ask Lao Tzu, “Why are you blissful?” he will say, “Don’t ask. Rather than asking why I am blissful, inquire why you are not.”It is like a small spring in the mountains: when there is no hindrance, the spring flows; when there are rocks in the way, it cannot flow. When the rocks are removed… You don’t create the spring – you only remove the negative; you only remove the obstacle. The spring was there, but because of the rock it was not able to flow. When you remove the rock you are not creating the spring – the spring was already there. By removing the rock you have removed the negative, the obstacle, and the spring flows. Now if somebody asks, “Why does the spring flow?”… Because the spring is there, that’s why it flows. If it is not flowing, then there is a cause to it. Let this sink deep into you because it is your problem too.Never ask why you are happy, never ask why one is blissful, otherwise you have asked a wrong question. Never ask why there is a God. If you ask, you have asked a wrong question; and all the answers that can be given are bound to be wrong because a wrong question provokes wrong answers. “Why is God?” That is irrelevant; it is simply the case.Confucius is asking something, and by asking that, he is showing his presuppositions: Confucius believes that everything has a cause. If everything has a cause, then only science can exist. Then there is no possibility for religion. Science is the inquiry into the cause-and-effect relationship, an inquiry into causation, an inquiry into causality. That is the whole scientific attitude: they say that if something is there, there must be a cause for it – you may know, you may not know, but the cause is bound to be there. “If we don’t know today, we will know tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, but the cause is bound to be known, because the cause must be there.” This is the scientific attitude: everything can be reduced to its cause.And what is the religious attitude? Religion says that nothing can really be reduced to its cause. That which can be reduced is not essential. The essential simply is – it exists without any cause; it is mysterious. This is the meaning of mystery: there is no cause to it.Confucius is asking a question according to his presuppositions, according to his philosophy: “Master, what is the reason for your joy?” Why is he asking? So that, if the reason is known, others can also cultivate it. If somebody says, “By standing on my head I become very peaceful,” you also can stand on your head, and you can become peaceful. Somebody says, “I am happy because I have renounced the world,” so you also renounce the world, and you become happy. Then happiness becomes something that can be manipulated. This is how people are – imitating each other.In fact there is no cause for happiness. The day you understand this, you can be happy any moment. If there is a cause, then the cause will take time: you will have to practice it; you will have to practice long. And the whole radical attitude of Tao is that you can be happy this moment.What does this mean? This means that there is no cause, so there is no need to practice. It is just a question of allowing it – it is already there if you allow it. If you don’t allow it, you function like a rock: if you allow the flow, the rock is removed. It is only a question of allowing it.God is there if you allow him – that’s all.If you don’t allow, God will not enter because he cannot destroy your freedom; he protects your freedom. If you say, “no,” he is not going to enter into your being. If on your door it is written that nobody is allowed without permission, he will wait. He is not even going to ask your permission – he will simply wait because even to ask your permission is to interfere with your freedom. He will wait. He will not ring the bell. He will simply wait. God is everywhere, waiting, and he waits so silently; that’s why his presence is not felt, he looks almost absent. Can’t you see it? God seems to be the most absent thing in the world. That’s why atheists can exist, and they can say, “Where is your God? We don’t see…” He is so noninterfering; he allows you total freedom. And total freedom implies in it to go against even God.Your nature is that of bliss. You are made of the stuff called bliss. But you have to allow it, you have to relax, you have to be in a let-go; no cause is there – just a let-go is needed. Hence, theoretically, it can happen at this very moment – not even a split second has to be wasted. If there is a cause, then a long time will be needed, and even then one never knows – you may succeed, you may not succeed.See the difference between the Hindu attitude and the Taoist attitude. The Hindu, the Jaina, the Buddhist, all say: “Past lives, karma, have to be removed. Much has to be done; great discipline is needed – only then will you be able to attain.” Ashtavakra, Lao Tzu, Bodhidharma, Lin Chi all say, “Nothing is needed, just allow it. Relax – allow it, and this very moment it will start pouring into you.”Confucius says: “Master, what is the reason for your joy?” “Tell me how you have attained it. Tell me what was your process – what methodology you followed; what principles, what disciplines, what scriptures. How have you attained it?” Now Confucius is greedy. He wants to attain to the same state where song is natural, and music flows, and one is celebrating. He is tremendously enchanted by this man because he is …in a rough fur coat with a rope around his waist, singing as he strummed a lute.A poor man has nothing to be happy for, has nothing to be happy about. If he were miserable, it would be understandable; if he were depressed, it would be understandable – Confucius would have passed him, not even noticing his existence. But this poor man who has nothing, …a rope around his waist… singing?… Singing a song of joy? Strumming a lute? Confucius is enchanted, magnetized, but he asks a wrong question.A Taoist will never ask such a question. Joy is, and simply is; it has no cause to it, hence no methods are possible, only understanding.That man said,“I have many joys.”If you have many joys, you have not understood what joy is because joy is only one. There cannot be many joys. There can be many diseases, but there cannot be many “healths.” You may have your disease, I may have mine, somebody else has his own; but when I am healthy, you are healthy, somebody else is healthy – what is the difference? Can you make a distinction between my health and your health? There is no possibility of it: health is universal, disease is personal. Disease is of the ego, health is not of the ego. Disease is of the body, of the mind; health is of the beyond, and the beyond is one. My body differs from yours – naturally I will have a different disease, you will have a different disease, but health? Health is simply one. It has the taste, the same taste always, eternally the same.Somebody asked Buddha, “What is the taste of your buddhahood?” He said, “Go and taste the sea, and taste it from anywhere – from this bank, from any bank of any beach. Or go to the middle of the ocean and taste it there, or go to the other shore – and you will find the taste always the same: the same salty taste. Buddhahood has one taste.” Whosoever has become a Buddha has come to the same taste. Health has the same taste. When the child is healthy, the young man is healthy, and the old man is healthy, then too it has the same taste. When the woman is healthy, the man is healthy – the same taste.But diseases are different. Now, medical science says that even when two persons are suffering from the same disease, even then the two diseases are not the same. Hence sometimes it happens that you are suffering from some disease – maybe tuberculosis – and your wife is suffering from the same disease, tuberculosis, but the same medicines don’t work. You need one medicine; your wife needs some other medicine. That’s why the physician is needed; otherwise the chemist would be enough. If once it was decided that tuberculosis needed this medicine, then what would be the point in going to the physician? The chemist could supply it.Now, more and more, as medical science is going deeper into the phenomena of health and disease, they are becoming aware that each disease has a personality in it: it belongs to the person. So now they say: don’t treat the disease, treat the person. Don’t be too much concerned with the disease. Look to the person: his total personality, his way of life, his attitudes, his habits, patterns. Look into them, and then you will find that the name TB may be the same – because it would be very difficult to have separate names for everybody – but each person who suffers from tuberculosis suffers differently, and a different treatment is needed.Diseases are personal, but health? Health is impersonal, universal. So is joy. Misery is a disease; joy is health, well-being. Now Confucius has asked a wrong question, and provoked a wrong answer. And, of course, the man does not know anything about joy.He says: “I have many joys.” Many? Then something has gone wrong. Joy is one. When you say you have many joys, you don’t know what joy is. You may be talking about pleasures; you may be talking about your so-called “moments of happiness” which are not really moments of happiness, but only of less misery. A person is very miserable, then one day he feels less miserable, and he says, “I am very happy.” That is just relative; he does not know what happiness is.He knows only sometimes very intense misery, sometimes not so intense. When it is not so intense, he says, “I am happy.” You can observe it in yourself. Have you ever known what happiness is? Do you know the taste of it? You have known only different stages of misery.Sometimes the misery is such that it is unbearable. Sometimes it is bearable, within control – you can tolerate it. You move from less misery to more misery, from more misery to less misery. But you have not known what happiness is. Once you have known what happiness is, then there is no need to be miserable at all – because then you have the key. You can open that door any moment you decide to open it. But you cannot open the door of happiness – that simply shows that you don’t have the key. You just know relative states of the same phenomenon: sometimes it is very dark, and you cannot see at all, and sometimes it is not so dark, it is dim. But you have not known what light is. Light is not a relative state of darkness – light is not less darkness, remember light is a totally different kind of energy; it has nothing to do with darkness. Darkness and light cannot exist together in the same room. Light is a positivity, darkness is a negativity – so is misery.“I have many joys.” Said the man, “Of the myriad things which heaven begot, mankind is the most noble – and I have the luck to be human.This is my first joy.”On the surface, it looks very meaningful, appealing, because it is so fulfilling to the human ego. Man has always been thinking himself the most superior creation of God. Man has always thought of himself as next to God, and he feels very happy. But how is happiness possible through the ego? Unhappiness comes through the ego. This is one of the greatest egoist points: that man is next to God. And you say that just to be polite; deep down you know that God is next to you.The very idea of “I” has in it an implication of being the first, and then everything is secondary. Friedrich Nietzsche is truer than many other people, he says, “I cannot allow God to exist because then I am secondary, and I cannot be secondary; I cannot accept my status as secondary. If God is, then I will always be secondary. However I grow, and wherever I reach, I will be secondary – I will never be primary, the first.” This is not acceptable, so he says, “God is dead and man is free.” He says, “God is the bondage.” This is true – in a way. In a way, I say, because that’s how everybody thinks deep down: every ego wants God to be second.Even when you are a great worshipper, a great so-called “religious” person, you are trying every moment to manipulate God according to you. “Do my will!” That’s all that your prayer means: “Do according to me. Listen to me.” Your whole effort is to convert God into your servant. You call him “Lord,” “Master,” but those are just bribes; you are trying to manipulate him. You say, “I am nobody, you are all,” but deep down you know who is who. In fact, even when you fight for your God, it is your God. Even when you sacrifice yourself on some pedestal, on some altar, it is to your God that you sacrifice. When you bow down to an image of God in a temple, in a mosque, in a church, it is to your image that you have created it; it is your God. You are bowing down in front of your own creation. You are bowing down as if before a mirror. You are reflected there and you say, “How beautiful!” When a Christian says, “How beautiful Christ is,” when a Hindu, “How beautiful Krishna is,” and when a Buddhist says, “How beautiful Buddha is”… The Buddhist will not accept that Christ is beautiful because that does not fulfill his ego. The Christian will not accept that Buddha is beautiful – that does not fulfill his ego. The Hindu cannot believe that Christ or Mohammed or Moses is beautiful – that does not fulfill his ego.Remember: we are fulfilling our egos in every way possible – gross or subtle, direct or indirect. A religious person is one who knows this, becomes aware of this, and in that awareness the ego disappears.A religious person has no idea who is superior. A religious person cannot say, “I am superior to the tree, I am superior to the animal, I am superior to the bird.” A religious person cannot say, “I am superior.” A religious person has come to know “I am not,” and in that experience of “I am not.” joy flows in; the rock has been removed.Now this man says: “I have many joys. Of the myriad things which heaven begot, mankind is the most noble…” Why? Why is mankind the most noble? If we look at human history, mankind seems to be the most ignoble. Look at the animals: they have not been so violent, so murderous; they have not been so insane. Have you ever seen any animal turning into a politician, trying to become a president of a country? They are not insane: they live naturally. They die naturally. Animals in the wild never go mad. Sometimes they go mad when they are forced to live in a zoo – the zoo is a human creation. Animals never commit suicide, but sometimes in the zoo they do. Animals never turn homosexual in the natural wild state, but in the zoo they do. In the zoo they become murderous, dangerous. Yes, they kill, but they kill only when they want to eat. Man kills for no reason. A man goes to the wild and kills a tiger and he says, “This is play. This is game. I was hunting.” Have you ever heard of any lion hunting? They never hunt as man hunts. When a lion is hungry, of course he kills, and that’s a natural way for him.I have heard…Once a lion and a fox entered a restaurant – maybe the Vrindavan café. They took seats and the fox ordered, but the fox ordered only for one. So the waiter asked, “And what about your friend?”And the fox said, “What do you think? If he was hungry, should I be sitting here?”He is not hungry – that is certain. When animals are hungry they kill, but they don’t kill as game, they don’t kill for fun; they are not interested in killing in itself. Of course they are interested in food – nothing is wrong in it. Man kills for no reason. Animals don’t kill for ideologies: they don’t say, “I am a Communist and you are a Capitalist. I will kill you.” They don’t say, “I am a Fascist and you are a Communist so I will kill you.” They don’t have any ideologies, and they don’t kill because they are Christians, Hindus and Mohammedans.Man kills for any excuse, for any excuse whatsoever. Hindus can kill Mohammedans, Mohammedans can kill Hindus, Christians can kill Mohammedans, and Buddhists, and so on and so forth. And for what? For abstract doctrines, principles – nobody is ready to live for those doctrines, but everybody is ready to kill others for those same doctrines. If somebody insults the Bible, the Christian is ready to kill him, and if you ask him, “Are you living your Bible?” he will say, “It is very difficult.” He is not interested in living it, nobody is interested in living it; but if it comes to killing, then everybody becomes very interested.Down the centuries, in three thousand years, there have been five thousand wars. No, no animal is so ignoble – animals have a natural nobility. Man is very cunning.The man said: “…mankind is the most noble – and I have the luck to be human. This is my first joy.” This is not joy. This is the pleasure that comes from feeling egoistic, from thinking, “I am somebody.” And remember, this cannot lead you to real happiness because deep down there is comparison. If you are feeling superior, at any moment you can feel inferior.Once I heard a religious man, a saint, a very well known saint in India, teaching his disciples, saying, “Always look to people who don’t have as much as you have, and you will feel very happy. If you have a house, always look to people who don’t have a house.” Naturally, you will feel happy. “If you have only one eye, look at the person who is blind, and you will feel happy.” But what type of happiness is this? And what type of religion is this? Naturally you cannot throw away the other aspect of the coin. You have one eye – when you look at the blind person, you feel happy. But when you come across a man who has two beautiful eyes, then what will you do? You will feel unhappy. In your so-called happiness, unhappiness is implied.No, through comparison nobody comes to joy. Joy is a non-comparative state. Don’t compare.I have heard…A father took his son to see a show which featured fifty of the most beautiful, naked performers in the country.”Phew! Phew! Phew! Father kept muttering all during the performance.“What’s the matter, Pop, don’t you like the show?” the boy asked.“Sure I do,” he replied, “I was thinking of your mother.”If you are comparing, your comparison is going to create trouble. Remember: joy is not out of comparison – never.But this man said: “I have many joys. Of the myriad things which heaven begot, mankind is the most noble – and I have the luck to be human. This is my first joy.”This is not much of a joy. It is just a titillation of the ego: you feel good, you feel superior. But a person who needs to be superior to feel good is a person who is carrying a volcano within him. A person who has to be superior to feel happy is suffering deep down from an inferiority complex. Only an inferior person thinks in terms of superiority. A real person, an authentic person, is neither superior nor inferior. He simply is – unique; nobody is lower than him and nobody is higher than him.All of existence is equal. The trees and the rocks, and the animals and the birds, and men and women, and God – all are sharing the whole of existence on equal terms. The moment you see this tremendous equality, this oneness, you are joyful. And then your joy has no cause, it is uncaused.“People are born who do not live a day or a month, who never get out of their swaddling clothes. But I have already lived to ninety.This is my joy.”Comparing: somebody was born and died, somebody was young and died, and this man is comparing: “I am ninety years of age, I have lived my life, so what is there to be miserable about? I am happy, I have lived more than others.” But if those others had not died, then? If he were alone in the world, then would this man be happy? Just think. The whole world disappears, only this man is left. There are no animals, no birds, no rocks – he cannot compare himself, and he cannot call himself “the superior man.” There are no young people dying, no children dying – he cannot compare himself – that he has lived ninety years of age. If he is left alone, will he be happy? All his happiness will disappear because it was coming from comparisons.Tao says that if you are alone, absolutely alone, and your happiness still remains the same, then you have attained – otherwise you have not attained.A comparative happiness is pseudo happiness. “I have a big car and you don’t have one. Because you don’t have one, I am happy.” This is something foolish. How can I be happy because you don’t have a car? What has it to do with my happiness that you don’t have a car? “I have a big house and you don’t have a big house, so I am happy.” This happiness seems more interested in making others unhappy rather than in being happy oneself. “You don’t have a car, you don’t have a good house – I am happy because you are miserable.” Look at the logic of it, the mathematics is simple: “I am happy when people are miserable, so if people are more miserable, I will be happy; if the whole world is going to hell, I will be supremely happy.” This is the logic, and this is what man has been doing.In Kolkata, I used to stay in a house, the most beautiful house in Kolkata. The owner was madly in love with his house. It was a marble mansion, really beautiful, built with taste, with very aristocratic taste, and in Kolkata to have ten acres of garden in the middle of Kolkata was something impossible – and he had it. He was really in deep love with it, and whenever I stayed with him, he would take me to the swimming pool, to the garden, to the lawn; he would show me this and that – what improvements he had made since I had last been there. But the last time I went he was very miserable. I said, “What is the matter? You have not taken me anywhere. Have you not done anything new?”He said, “My interest is gone. Can’t you see that next door, my neighbor has made a better house? Unless I can make a bigger house than his, I will remain unhappy.”This man had the same house, but his happiness had disappeared.“What has your happiness to do with your neighbor? If he has made a bigger house, how does it concern you? Your house remains the same! And you are no longer happy. Then certainly,” I told him, “it was not your house that you were happy with. You were happy because of the neighbor’s poor house.”Watch. Always watch. It is violence to be happy because somebody is miserable. This is how people start moving in the wrong direction – become oppressors, become exploiters, become dangerous. They are a curse on the earth. But their whole logic is the same.What this man is saying is: “I am happier than others. Look: many people have died when they were young, and I am still alive, healthy, and I am ninety years of age. This is my joy.”“For all men, poverty is the norm and death is the end. Abiding by the norm, awaiting my end, what is there to be concerned about?”Now he says “Almost all men are poor, so that is the norm – to be poor; and naturally everybody is going to die, so I am going to die. I am poor, I am going to die – everybody is going to die, everybody else is poor, so why be miserable? That’s why I am happy.”This is not happiness.“Good!” said Confucius…Confucius was very much impressed, he said:“Good! Here is a man who knows how to console himself.”In this sentence, Lieh Tzu has played a trick. He says that Confucius was very much impressed. He said: “Good! Here is a man who knows how to console himself.”…because for Confucius, to be satisfied in life is the goal; to have consolation is the goal. To ask for more, Confucius says, is to ask for the impossible. This is all that a man can have, and this man knows how to console himself, and he is happy, and he is singing.But to the Taoist, consolation is negative – it is not contentment. Contentment has nothing to do with consolation; contentment is a totally different dimension. Try to understand it: consolation means somehow rationalizing one’s situation – trying not to be worried, trying not to be too much concerned – creating buffers around oneself. That’s what Gurdjieff used to call “buffers,” everybody creates buffers around himself so that life is not so shocking.They use buffers on the railway trains or springs on the cars, so that when you are moving on a hilly road – and life is a hilly track – you don’t go on bumping. Those springs function as buffers. If the road is rough, the roughness is absorbed by the springs, by the buffers – it does not reach you.So-called “philosophies of consolation” are buffers. You see that you are poor; a great unhappiness arises in you – you create the buffer: “So many people are poor, millions of people are poor, so why be worried about it? This is how things are.” You have created a buffer. You are ill; misery arises – you go to the hospital and see the people there, and you will feel very happy. You have created a buffer: at least you are not as ill as others are. You have lost one leg – just go to the street and see a beggar who has lost both legs; then feel consoled.These are buffers: always look to those who don’t even have as much as you have. That way life becomes less shocking, you live more conveniently, more comfortably, and you are not touched. By and by, between you and life there is such a distance created by the buffers that nothing ever reaches you. You live encapsulated inside your buffers, philosophies, consolations. Life ends one day – you can console yourself: “Everybody has to die.” Nothing special is happening to you; God is not especially unkind to you, it happens to everybody. Or you can start believing in the theory of reincarnation: that you will be born and the soul is eternal – again a buffer. Or you can think that it is only the body that dies, and what is the body? Nothing but bones, marrow, flesh, blood; it is nothing of worth, it is useless, a dirty bag – so let it die. But your pure soul is going to be forever and ever – a buffer is created.These buffers don’t allow you to see what reality is; they are the way you console yourself. But Confucius believes that consolation is the end: if a man can console himself, he has known the art of life. That’s what Confucius thinks – that the whole art of life is how to live in this miserable world in comparative ease, not too burdened, comparatively. Yes, there is misery, but one can protect oneself from misery by creating conceptions, rationalizations. And humanity has been moving from one rationalization to another – always it finds a new rationalization.For example, in the East this rationalization is very ancient: if you are miserable, they say, you must have done something wrong in your past life. Something has gone wrong in your past; you have done some wrong karma, hence you are miserable. Now things are explained, so one has to suffer. You have sown, now you are reaping.I have heard about a man who was a very good tailor.He was caught stealing and he was sentenced to two years in jail. The mayor of the town went to see him because he was the best tailor in the town, and the whole town was suffering from his absence. The mayor loved this tailor. When he went to see him in the jail, he was doing some needlework, sewing something, his old habit – what else to do? So the mayor asked, ‘So, I see you are sewing something?’And the tailor said “No sir, reaping.”The whole philosophy of karma is that you have sown already, now you are reaping; you have done something, and it is a natural consequence. It consoles… So nobody is doing anything unjust to you – God is not unjust, fate is not unjust, the world is not unjust, the society is not unjust; it is your own karma, so what can you do? One has to pass through it and one has to keep one’s equanimity, one’s equilibrium. And don’t do such a thing again, otherwise in the next life you will suffer again. So that is the only thing that can be done: you cannot change the past, but you can still manage the future, a beautiful consolation.It has helped the East to remain poor, miserable. It has helped the East to remain ugly, ill, unhygienic. It has helped the East to console itself, and that consolation has turned into a tremendous lethargy. There is nothing you can do – you have to tolerate it. All that is needed is to beware of the future. So the past has to be accepted and the future has to be feared; that’s all. But even in poverty, in misery, the East seems to be happier than the West. Why? Because the East has a beautiful buffer, a strong buffer, to protect itself.Each society has to create these consolations in different ways. In the West now, psychoanalysis is one of the most consoling processes. You go to the psychoanalyst, and he throws the whole responsibility on your mother; you feel unburdened. You say, “So what can I do?” You cannot change your mother the same as you cannot change your past, your mother is your past – what can you do? Next time, be a little more alert! Don’t enter anybody’s womb, that’s all. This has happened: you were born to such and such a mother, and she has spoiled your life. One feels good that you are not responsible; you feel good. It is just a calamity that has happened, and whatsoever has happened, has happened; accept it. Long years of psychoanalysis simply prepare you to accept it; they simply make you alert that things have been this way and nothing can be done about it. All their explanations are rationalizations. And they find answers for whatsoever you ask.If you smoke, they have answers for why you smoke. Your mother must have taken away the breast sooner than you wanted, hence you are smoking. So you are not responsible; what to do? Your mother took away the breast, now the cigar is a substitute breast – and it is, a little. They find very clever explanations! It seems it is a little true, because from the breast flows warm milk and from the cigarette flows warm smoke. There is a certain similarity, and you do hold the cigar in the same way you hold a breast in your mouth.But when it comes to them, themselves, then it is troublesome. It is said that Freud used to explain everything through sex – whatsoever you would do, he would find a sexual explanation. If, in your dream you were climbing a mountain, it was sexual: you were climbing a woman. If, in your dream you were driving fast, it was nothing, it was sexual: you wanted to penetrate a woman fast. He found sex in every explanation. As in the East every explanation has been found through the soul, and it has become a very consoling process; so Freud analyzed everything through sex.Sometimes he would be in difficulty: he himself was a chain smoker, so he had to say… Once somebody asked him, “What is the meaning of your cigar smoking?”He said, “Sometimes a cigar may be just a cigar.”Of course the disciple was not satisfied, and the disciple said to the other disciples, “That simply shows that it is a rationalization on the part of Sigmund Freud for his cigar smoking.”He wanted to protect himself. Now it would be too much to think that he had some complex behind this smoking. Everybody has a complex, so everybody has to give in to the consolation that because of this complex… But Freud could not have a complex, otherwise it would become a disturbing thing to him. “I am the greatest psychoanalyst ever, the founder of psychoanalysis, and I am smoking, and I know what it is.” So he says, “Sometimes a cigar is a just a cigar.”This way of explaining things has become very prevalent in the West. It has almost taken on epidemic proportions. Psychoanalysis is always trying to get to the “why” of everything, as if by knowing the “why” anything is solved. Why are you so miserable? Go to the psychoanalyst, he will find a “why” for it. “Your father was such, your mother was such, your childhood was such – that’s why,” and you become happy. You become happy because now you have a rationalization.I have heard the shortest psychiatric joke ever. Listen, it is very small. Be careful!A man asked another man, “Are you a psychiatrist?”And the other man said, “Why do you ask?”And the man said, “So, you are a psychiatrist!”“Why,” a continuous why, as if having a why is going to explain anything. It simply postpones understanding: it pushes the same problem a little further back, and again the why can be asked. Hindus say that you did something wrong in the past life. Ask why, and they have to go to another past life. Then ask why, and the mahatma will become very angry and he will say, “Stop! You are going beyond! These are things to be experienced, not asked about.” What is the point of saying, “I have done something wrong in the past life, why? Then something else in another life, and why? Why did I do the wrong thing in my first life?” It is useless. But as in the East religion became a consolation, so psychoanalysis is becoming a consolation in the West.Psychoanalysis is almost an obsessive compulsion to analyze each and every thing and to find the cause of it. Particularly in America it has become almost a collective neurosis; everybody is going to the psychoanalyst or the psychiatrist – anybody who can afford it is going. Those who are not going to the psychiatrist are poor people, they cannot afford it. When women meet in their clubs, they talk about their psychiatrist: what he has said and how profound his analysis is. Everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator. If you ask the psychoanalyst, “What is the cause of this lotus?” he will say, “The mud.” If you have spiritual experiences, what is the cause? He will go to sex – the mud, the lowest denominator.These things help, in a way. If you find that all is sublimated sexuality, you are at ease. So you don’t need to worry about it, you don’t need to be in search of it – this is just sublimated sexuality. You are okay wherever you are. If Buddha attained to bliss, it is nothing but sexual. These mahatmas who are experiencing sahasras are experiencing nothing but sexuality, fantasy; so nothing is wrong. You can go on reading your Playboy and enjoy your sexual fantasy, because Buddha’s experience was also nothing but a sublimated sexual fantasy. Consolations…I have heard a Second World War story about a priest who repeatedly preached to the troops about predestination.The priest told the soldiers not to worry about their future or fate on the battlefield because if they were predestined to be killed, a bullet would find its mark no matter where they were; or, on the other hand, if they were to be spared, no bullet would hit them.Sometime later, in the heat of battle, with bullets spraying around him, the priest hotfooted it to the nearest and biggest tree. A soldier was behind it. He inquired of the priest about his predestination sermons and why he should be seeking shelter now.“You do not fully understand the principles and theories of predestination,” the priest replied, “I was predestined to run and hide behind this tree.”Explanations and explanations, clever consolations, places to hide.Life has to be faced. It is rough; there is much pain, but the pain has to be faced. There is misery; it has to be encountered, it has to be passed through without any explanations and without any consolations. If you can live your life without any theorization about it – directly, immediately, moment to moment – one day, you will come to that source of joy which is not a consolation, which is a contentment. And what is the difference? Contentment is a positive state of your being, a consolation is just negative. I have one eye, others don’t have even one – I feel consoled. I am miserable, others are even more miserable – I am consoled. I am young, others are old – I am consoled. I am old, others have died young – I am consoled. Consolations and consolations, but all are empty.Confucius believes in consolations, Lieh Tzu believes in contentment, and the difference has to be remembered. Contentment comes only when you are not comparing, when you are simply within yourself, totally in yourself – centered, rooted. By being in your being, you suddenly realize that the whole is yours, and you are of the whole; you are not separate. The ego has disappeared; you have become universal. In that moment, there is great contentment, great benediction. But that benediction, that contentment, does not come through rationalization; it comes through realization – that is the difference.Consolation is a rationalization, contentment is a realization.So there are three states of mind. Discontent – a state of comparison; comparing with those who have more than you, and then there is discontent. Somebody has a beautiful car and you are walking on foot; you are a pedestrian, then you are discontented. The second stage is comparison – you are a pedestrian, and you see a beggar who has no feet: comparing with that one who has less than you, but still comparison. Discontent is one aspect of the coin; comparison, the so-called contentment is the other aspect of the same coin. And the name of the coin is comparison. When you have thrown away the coin completely – all comparison and discontent – then suddenly you are in a state of no-comparison: that is real contentment. Then you don’t compare who has more, who has less. In fact, then it is not a question of having, then it is a question of being. Having never helps.I was reading the other night some very strange statistics which Bill Bright records in his beautiful book, Jesus and the Intellectual.In 1923, a very important meeting was held at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago. Attending this meeting were nine of the world’s most successful financiers: Charles Schwab, president of the largest independent steel company; Samuel Insull, president of the largest utility company; Howard Hopson, president of the largest gas company; Arthur Cotton, the greatest wheat speculator; Richard Whitney, President of the New York Stock Exchange; Albert Fall, a member of the President’s Cabinet; Leon Fraser, President of the Bank of International Settlements; Jesse Livermore, the greatest “bear” on Wall Street; and Iver Kreuger, head of the greatest monopoly.Twenty-five years later, Charles Schwab died in bankruptcy, having lived on borrowed money for five years before his death; Samuel Insull had died a fugitive from justice and penniless in a foreign land; Howard Hopson was insane; Arthur Cotton had died abroad, insolvent; Richard Whitney had spent time in Sing Sing. Albert Fall had been pardoned so that he could die at home; Jesse Livermore, Iver Kreuger and Leon Fraser had all died by suicide. All of these men had learned well the art of making a living, but none of them had learned how to live.You can have as much as you desire, but by having, nobody ever attains to life. Life comes only through being, not through having.There are three types of people: those who have – the worldly; those who renounce – the other-worldly. The first and the second are not opposite to each other, however opposite they may appear. One believes that by having more you will attain to happiness, the other believes that by not having more you will attain to happiness, but both believe in having. The third – the totally different dimension is of being: neither having nor not having.That’s what I mean by sannyas. Don’t be worldly, don’t be otherworldly. Don’t compare with those who have more, don’t compare with those who have less. Compare not. Just be yourself, allow your being. Be – that being will bring you tremendous joy. That joy will be one, not many. And that joy will not have any cause to it – it will be uncaused, it will be just like well-being, health.I have heard…Once there was a man, alone and miserable. He prayed to God and said, “My Lord, send me a beautiful woman; I am very alone, I need company.”God laughed and said, “Why not a cross?”The man was very angry and said, “Cross! What for? Do I want to commit suicide? I want only a beautiful woman.”So he got a beautiful woman, but soon he became even more miserable than before. The woman was a constant pain in the neck.He prayed again and said, “My Lord, send me a sword.” He was planning to kill the woman and be free of her; he was longing to have the good old days back again.But again God laughed and said, “What about the cross? Should I send it now?”The man was in a rage and said, “Don’t you think that this woman was enough of a cross? Please just send me a sword.”So the sword came. He killed the woman and was caught and ordered to be crucified. He prayed to God and laughed loudly and said, “Forgive me, my Lord, I didn’t listen to you – you were asking to send this cross from the very beginning. Had I listened to you, I would have saved myself so many unnecessary troubles.”The world, the otherworld; the householder’s life and the monk’s life; so many troubles. If you listen to Tao, then the message is very simple: be rooted in your being, and you will be saved from all the troubles, all the troubles that having brings and the troubles that not having brings. You just be.Being is the goal of Tao.One thing more should be understood: being, you already are. There is no becoming; you are not to become. It is already the case – you already have it within you. It just has to be allowed to open so that the perfume is released to the winds; and that is the real song, the joy.The man was singing, but the song was just a pretension; it came out of consolation – it was not a true song. The man was playing on an instrument, but it was not true music because the true music comes only when you are deeply rooted in yourself. Then you become the instrument and God plays on it.Remember, if you are searching for consolation you will find it, but it is a false coin. Comfortable, convenient, it is like a drug: you start drinking and you remain miserable. The misery does not change, but through drinking you start forgetting about it. Consolation is a sort of intoxication, and nothing is changed because the door to misery remains open – you still go on comparing. Comparison is the root cause of misery. Be non-comparative – be neither higher nor lower, just be yourself; not thinking in relation to others, just think in terms of your tremendous aloneness – then you are happy.I have heard…She had one of those one-in-a-million figures. Luscious, well-developed, neat, with perfect contours. But despite all these gifts she developed a neurosis about peeping Toms.“What measures do you take to avoid this calamity?” asked her psychiatrist.“Well, I keep the shades down, I bar the windows and I always undress behind a screen.”“How do you keep the boys from peeking through the keyhole?”“I leave the door open.”Certainly, when you leave the door open nobody can peep through the keyhole; but the door is open, so what is the point? Consolation is like that: the door remains open because consolation depends on comparison and misery also depends on comparison. So the door is open, but you become more and more intoxicated with consolation, more and more suffocated by your own theorizations, rationalizations; more and more insulated. Hiding behind your buffers, you miss life.Drop comparing.Now, this parable, read ordinarily, will give you an impression that Lieh Tzu is not saying anything against Confucius. That is their way of saying things; they are very subtle people. He has not uttered a single word against Confucius, and he has demolished the whole Confucian philosophy. So when you are reading these parables, they are not simple parables. They are simple in a way, but they are very profound. You have to dive deep; you have to dig, you have to go into them, and you have to know the difference between discipline and spontaneity.Whenever anything is of discipline, Tao is against it. Whenever anything is of spontaneity, Tao is for it. Tao is spontaneity, Tao is suchness – Tao is tremendous acceptance of whatsoever is. And in that acceptance one flowers.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is not illusion?All is illusion except the witness. All is dream except the witness. Only the knower is true, is real. Whatsoever you see is illusory; the seer is not illusory. In the night you see one type of dream, in the day you see another type of dream. In the night the dreams of the day are forgotten; in the day the dreams of the night are forgotten. Sometimes you dream with open eyes and sometimes you dream with closed eyes, but one thing remains eternally there, never changing, and that is your consciousness. In the night you see dreams; in the day you see things, the world. Everything changes: night into day, day into night, dreams into thoughts, thoughts into dreams. Only one thing remains eternally there – your witnessing.That which is eternal is true. That which is changing is illusory.Remember, by “illusion” I don’t mean that it is not. By “illusion” I only mean that it is not eternally true. What is the meaning of something being temporarily true, true only for the moment? Before the moment it was untrue, after the moment it again becomes untrue. That’s why in the East we have not been chasing life. Before birth it was not there; after death it will not be there again. So this momentary phenomenon is not of much value. There is no need to get obsessed by it; one can pass through it unconcerned, untouched by it.The emphasis of the West is on that which is seen, and the emphasis of the East is on the seer. Either you focus on the object or you focus on yourself. When you focus on the object, your approach is scientific, objective. When you focus on the subject, your approach is religious. This subject is eternally true.The Bible says: “In the beginning there was the Word.” The East cannot say that. The East says: “In the beginning there was the witness; in the middle there is the witness; in the end there will be the witness – one thing remains eternally the substratum of all.” Even if the word had been there in the beginning, somebody must have heard it, otherwise it cannot be. So the one who heard it precedes the word; the word cannot be in the beginning. Just go on looking more and more for the witness, and go on getting more and more involved in the witness, and one day the gestalt changes. Your focus goes through a transformation.For example, right now you are listening to me. You can listen in two ways because each thing can be done in two ways: Eastern and Western. You are listening to me; your emphasis can be on what I am saying, on the speaker – then it is a Western approach. The Eastern approach is that your emphasis be on the listener, the watcher, the observer, the witness. You are not too concerned with what is being said or what is being heard, but with who this witness is who is hearing this. You are seeing me. Who is this seer who is seeing? That transformation, that change of gestalt, will bring you to the world of non-illusion; otherwise everything is illusory.I understand your question. You mean by it that there must be something real in the outside world and something unreal. No, the outside is unreal. It is not that something is real and something is unreal; the outside is unreal and the inside is real. With the outside, mind grows; with the inside, meditation. To work with the outside, your mind becomes more and more efficient. In the West the mind has become tremendously clever. When you start looking at the inside, at the looker, then meditation grows. Then you don’t become a great thinker or a great philosopher, but you experience truth – you become a great mystic, you become a Buddha, a Lieh Tzu, a Jesus.The whole emphasis – always remember – is on the mirror that reflects. Don’t become too attached to that which is reflected. You look in the mirror; your image looks so real, but it is unreal. Don’t get too obsessed with the image. The image is unreal in the mirror and the person who is standing before the mirror is also unreal. Only one thing is real: the consciousness that knows “I am standing before the mirror,” the consciousness which knows that the mirror is reflecting the one who is standing. That transcendental consciousness is reality, and through that descends the benediction, sat-chit-anand; through that one becomes true, conscious and blissful.Why do we call the world illusory? Let me remind you again: by “illusory” we don’t mean unreal, we mean temporarily real, only for the time being real.Why do we call the outer world unreal? Because it brings only misery and it gives you only projections, ambitions, desires; it never allows you to be really happy, authentically happy. It gives you hope but never fulfills it. It leads you on many journeys, but the goal never arrives, hence it is called maya, illusion. It deceives you; it is a mirage – it appears to be there, but when you reach there you don’t find anything; and by the time you reach there, your desires are projected further ahead. It is like the horizon: you go toward it; it goes on receding. You never arrive – you cannot arrive, by its very nature it is not possible. It only appears to be there – it is not there.Just the opposite is the case when you enter your inner world of consciousness: the closer you come, the more real it becomes. The closer you come, the more blissful, the more cheerful, the more joyful you become. The closer you come, the more authentic and true you become; and the moment you stand at the very center, you are truth itself. In that moment the Upanishadic seer declared: “I am God, I am Brahman. Aham brahmasmi.” In that moment of inner centering, al-Hillaj Mansoor declared: “Ana’l haq, I am the truth.” In that moment, Jesus said, “I and my God are not two, but one.”If you move toward the object, you are moving away from yourself. And the further away you go from yourself, the further away you are going from truth because truth is centered in you.You ask, “What is not illusion?” I would like to say: everything is illusion, except you. But I should hurry to say that when I say “you,” I don’t mean the you that you know, I mean the you that is yet undiscovered by you. The you that you know belongs to the outside world, it is as much unreal as the outside world. The you that you know is nothing but an accumulation of all the illusions, all your dreams and desires. The you I am talking about has nothing to do with you as such; it is the eternal you, the eternal thou. It is not yours, it is not mine, it is nobody else’s. It is everybody’s; it is the very center of all.When your I drops, then the real I arises. When your self disappears, the real self arrives. People come to me, and they say, “We feel it is very difficult to surrender because surrendering means we will be losing ourselves.” What they say is true, and what they say is not really true. It is true because their self, the self that they have known up to now, is going to be dropped. But it is not really true because once this false self is dropped, the real self arises. It is there, it is hidden behind the cloud of the false self. You, as you really are in your center, are the reality. Everything else is illusory.To know this reality, one has to come to a moment of total inactivity because whenever you are acting, you are outside yourself. That’s why Lieh Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu, emphasized passivity so much; when you are active, you are relating with the outside world.What is activity? Activity means relating with the outside. When you are passive, you are not relating at all. You are simply there, unrelated; there is no bridge between you and the outside – all bridges have disappeared. In this total silence, in this total unrelatedness, you become aware of who you are. Otherwise activity keeps you so occupied that there is no space for the self to assert, to manifest, itself. It goes on waiting. It goes on waiting, and you go on remaining occupied with trivia, with mundane things.One has to learn to do nothing.I have heard…The bum appeared at the doctor’s office in massive pain. After a careful examination the physician told the man he’d have to give up wine, women and song.“But, doctor,” the man protested, not knowing what that had to do with his ailment, “I can’t bend down.”“Oh yes,” said the doc, “You’ll have to give up smoking too.”“I object,” said the bum.“Why?” asked the doctor.“I feel like a fool standing around doing nothing.”Doing nothing, one feels as if one is a fool. One has to do something – if you cannot do anything, at least smoke. People start smoking whenever they don’t have anything to do; smoking is a complementary thing. Whenever you don’t have anything to do, at least you can smoke; you then feel occupied. People feel foolish if they have nothing to do. Have you not observed this phenomenon in yourself? If you are just sitting, you start feeling restless – you have to do something. If somebody comes, you will pretend to do something. You will start reading the same newspaper you have read already, just for show. Somebody has come, so you take the newspaper in your hand so that he knows that you are doing something; otherwise he will think you are a fool. What are you doing? A man has to do something always and always, and continuously. People pretend, they cannot just be – it is not allowed.In the West you have the saying: The empty mind is the Devil’s workshop. If somebody is not doing anything, that is dangerous. In fact, the active mind is the Devil’s workshop. The empty mind has never done anything wrong to anybody. Hitler was not an empty mind, Buddha was an empty mind. Genghis Khan was not an empty mind, Chuang Tzu was. All the nonsense that has happened down the centuries has been done by active minds. The inactive mind has not done any wrong because the inactive mind is not interested in doing at all – so who bothers about it? You cannot persuade an inactive mind to become an Adolf Hitler; he will laugh at the ridiculousness of it. “Why?” he will ask, “For what?”Alexander, while coming to India, met Diogenes – he was an inactive mind. He was lying on the bank of a river resting, taking a sunbath naked. Alexander was very impressed: the peace that surrounded this naked man, the silence; the beauty of this man, the grandeur, the grace, the natural simplicity, the spontaneity. Alexander felt jealous. It is said that Alexander had never felt jealous of anybody else because he had more than anybody else – why should he feel jealous? But with this naked man he felt jealous – he had something that Alexander could never even dream of. Alexander said to Diogenes, “Next time I am sent back to the world, I will ask God, ‘Make me a Diogenes; don’t make me an Alexander again.’”Diogenes laughed. He said “Why wait that long? You can become Diogenes right now. Who is preventing you from it? You can rest here and take a sunbath, as I am doing.”The point was clear – as clear as it can be. Alexander felt ashamed and he said, “Yes, I also hope that one day, when I have conquered the whole world, I will also rest and enjoy life like you.”“But,” Diogenes said, “I don’t understand. Why? If I can enjoy life without conquering the world, why can’t you enjoy it right now? That can happen right now. Why are you postponing? This bank of the river is big enough for many people. You will not be encroaching on my space – it is big enough; nobody ever comes here.”It is said that Alexander became very sad after he met Diogenes, and he remained sad for many days, and he talked again and again about Diogenes. The impact was tremendous.A passive, inactive, empty mind has a beauty; only in the inactive mind can one come to know what is true. Activity creates illusion. Your activity creates ripples around you, and you cannot see that which is. Inactivity: all ripples gone, the lake silent, the mind has no thought; everything has disappeared, the smoke has gone, and the flame burns bright. When consciousness burns so bright that there is no smoke and the flame is pure, then you know what is real.The way to reality is through inaction, passivity, receptivity. The way to the real is through feminine receptivity. The way to the unreal is through male, aggressive activity.The second question:Osho,Why don't I have a question?You are fortunate, Vani. Don’t bring the question through the back door; don’t become worried about it: “Why don’t I have a question?” You are fortunate; you are blessed because not to have a question means you are getting ready to have the answer.A person who is too full of questions will never receive the answer, remember. Ordinarily people think, “How are you going to get the answer if you don’t ask?” That is wrong. You only get the answer when there is no question. A non-questioning mind arrives; a questioning mind never arrives. If you ask – yes, some answer will be given to you, but it will never be received. When a mind is too obsessed with questions, even if this mind should receive an answer, it will create more questions out of the answer and nothing else. You ask one question; I will answer, and out of my answer you will find ten more questions arising in you. Your questioning mind will go on creating questions. You need a non-questioning mind to receive the answer.The answer is here. The answer has always been here, but because you are asking so many questions you cannot receive it.It used to happen that whenever a person would come to Buddha and ask some question, he would say, “Wait for one year; be silent for one year. Drop all thinking, and after one year, if you ask, I will answer.”A great scholar came, and he asked many questions, and Buddha listened and then he said, “I will answer but you will have to wait one year. That’s my condition and my promise too. After one year I will answer.”The man said, “Okay.”Another disciple of Buddha, who was sitting under the tree, started laughing loudly. The man, the questioner, felt a little embarrassed, and he asked, “What is the matter? Why is he laughing?”Buddha said, “Ask him.”And the man asked, “Why are you laughing?”He said, “Buddha is deceptive, he deceived me and now I am laughing because he is deceiving you too. He told me the same thing: ‘Wait one year, silently. Drop your thinking, let all thoughts disappear and then ask.’ But when thoughts disappear, how are you supposed to ask? Now no question is left! So I am laughing; he is deceiving you also. If you really want to ask, ask now; otherwise you will never ask.”But Buddha said, “That is my condition, and if you ask after one year, I will answer. If you don’t ask, then I am not responsible.”One year passed and Buddha asked that man, “Now what do you say? Have you some questions left?”The man started laughing and he said, “Now I understand why that disciple was laughing that day. Questions have disappeared!”Good, if no question arises, that’s how it should be. Don’t feel uneasy about it. I understand. One feels uneasy, one feels a little abnormal. When everybody is asking questions and you are not, you feel, “What is wrong with me?” When everybody is going to the doctor, one starts thinking to go, otherwise people will think that something is wrong. Whatsoever is being done by everybody, one imitates. Don’t try to create a question which is not there. Rest in this non-questioning attitude.Don’t think that your quest is not intense. The mind will say, “No question is arising because there is no quest.” No, if there is a real, authentic quest, questions disappear – only thirst remains. That is a totally different state of mind: no question is formulated, only the quest, an unverbalized intensity, a passion. One wants to know, but there is no question because how can you ask the real question? The real question is going to be so profound that it cannot be put into words. All that can be put into words will be trivial, will be ordinary, will not be of much depth. Words are on the surface. There is a state of mind when there is no question, but the quest is there like your heartbeat: you feel it, but you cannot say what it is. Then you have become the question. No question is there – your whole being has become a question, a quest, a thirst, a hunger; and in that moment, when your whole being is a quest without any verbal questions, the answer comes. In fact, the answer is there in that intensity – you become aware of it.I am not saying that you should not ask questions. If they come, ask them. I am not saying that you should start fighting with questions. If they are not coming, good, no need to produce them, no need to make an effort to formulate them. If they are coming, good; let them be relieved, let them be asked, don’t start fighting. The mind is always very tempted to do the wrong thing. For example, I am saying to Vani that if the question is not coming, no need to ask, good. But I am not saying it to others who are asking questions. And the questions are arising. If they are arising and you don’t ask them, they will become stronger and stronger.An unasked question, if it is there, will start haunting you, will drive you crazy. That’s not the way to get rid of it. Go on asking. Watch, witness that the question arises; you ask it, I answer. Then watch your mind – what your mind is doing – whether it is receiving the answer or is creating new questions. Watch it, and by and by you will become aware that this seems to be a ridiculous situation: you ask a question, an answer is given, ten questions arise. You ask ten questions; ten answers will be given, a hundred questions will arise and so on and so forth. This will be ad infinitum.Just watch the ridiculousness of it, the hopelessness of it. And out of that experience of hopelessness, out of that understanding that this is not the way, one day, suddenly you will feel that the question is not arising.I am not saying that you should fight with the questions; I am saying just understand the questioning pattern of your mind. Then, out of that understanding, questions burn and disappear. One day, you will be in the same position as Vani is. Suddenly you will see there is no question, and a question will arise: ‘Why don’t I have a question?’ Don’t ask that question because that is not a question at all. Then you are turning a blessing into a curse. Don’t bring things in from the back door.I have heard…Mulla Nasruddin had one of the finest apple orchards in the state, and come fall, regular as clockwork, the kids from the neighborhood would sneak in to purloin apples. Regularly, too, Nasruddin would come charging angrily out of his house, waving a shotgun, and threatening the fleeing youths with everything he could think of.After watching one of these vain pursuits, a neighbor said to Mulla Nasruddin, “Danged if I can understand you, Nasruddin. You’re normally a calm and generous man – and you’ve got ten times as many apples ripening in that garden as you can possibly use, why don’t you just let the kids have some?”“Heck,” laughed Nasruddin, “I want them to have the apples. But I was a boy once myself, and if I didn’t holler and chase them they’d never come back.”Thoughts are like children – so are questions. If you chase them, they will come back; if you don’t chase them, they will not come back – what is the point? So don’t take a shotgun and chase your questions, otherwise they will come, and they will come in crowds and bring others too, and you will go crazy. Never chase thoughts; just try to see the whole process – how the mind functions. Once you know how the mind functions, in that very knowing, you have transcended.Yes, one day it happens, you are there with a deep passion to know and there is no question. Then your whole consciousness has become a quest, and in that very intensity something evaporates, something changes. Out of that very intensity – just as at a hundred degrees the water evaporates – in that hundred degree quest, when you are totally in it, something radically changes. That change will bring you to the answer.No question ever brings the answer, only a non-questioning quest.The third question:Osho,Since your lecture yesterday, I worry that what I felt was acceptance of a situation may merely be consolation. How can I know when I have accepted something or when I have only consoled or distracted myself from the pain?It is simple. Consolation is out of thinking, explanations, theories; acceptance is out of understanding. When you explain yourself, you console. When you understand, then there is acceptance. Consolation has to be brought in; acceptance comes on its own. Acceptance is a happening; consolation is a doing.You are miserable; then you seek some theory to explain it - past life karmas; somewhere you try to find a shelter. Or maybe God is putting you in misery so that you can grow: it is a challenge to grow – a consolation. Or it is the nature of life; you philosophize, you say, “Everybody is in misery, and I cannot be the exception. Buddha says that all of life is misery – so it is. One has to accept it, what else can one do? One has to accept it.” Then it is consolation. Then you try hard to create a buffer around yourself.Acceptance is out of understanding – it has no explanation. The misery is there. You look into the misery, and you don’t bring any theory, and you don’t bring any explanation; you simply look into the fact of misery, and looking into the fact of misery, suddenly, you find there is arising an acceptance. If somebody asks, “Why?” you will not be able to answer because there is no why. You will not be able to show the cause. You will simply say, “It has happened.”Acceptance is like love – all that is really beautiful is always like love. When you fall in love with a woman or a man and somebody asks, “Why?” can you really answer it? You try sometimes, but all your answers are absurd. You say, “Because the woman is beautiful,” but there are millions of people, and they have not fallen in love with that woman. If she were beautiful she would not have been available to you – somebody else would have grabbed her before you. But nobody else thinks she is beautiful, so in fact, you are putting things upside down. You say, “I have fallen in love because she is beautiful.” The real thing is just the opposite: she looks beautiful because you have fallen in love. One day, when love will disappear, the same woman will not look beautiful to you; she may even start looking ugly and horrible. Right now, you cannot leave her for a single moment. One day, when love has disappeared, you will not be able to tolerate her presence for a single moment.You cannot do anything about love. When it comes, it comes; when it goes, it goes. It is like a breeze: it comes, and it is gone. Acceptance is like love; it is a happening. When you are true, authentically with the reality of the moment, you don’t look to the past to find an explanation, you don’t look to the future to find an explanation; you simply look into the fact. You don’t ask Buddha, you don’t ask Krishna, you don’t ask Lieh Tzu, you don’t ask anybody; you simply look into the facticity of the misery. You simply live the pain, you simply go into it. Alone, holding nobody’s hand – Buddha’s, Krishna’s, Christ’s – you simply go into it. All those hands would become consolations; all those people would become explanations.You will say, “Jesus says this, Buddha says this, that’s why I have to accept.” But that acceptance is pseudo: it has not arisen out of your own experience. Go into the pain of a situation single-handed, alone. Face the situation as it is, with no mind to explain it away. Just look into it without any thought interfering, and then there will be acceptance. It will not be a consolation; there will be great contentment. Suddenly you will see that you can accept, but there is no cause to it.Consolation has a cause to it. Consolation is a false coin – it deceives you, it pretends to be the real thing – it is not the real thing. And I would like to tell the questioner that it is very possible that whatsoever he was thinking to be acceptance must have been consolation, because if it were acceptance no doubt would arise. The certainty is self-evident: if it were acceptance, no confusion would be possible, no worry would arise. It must have been consolation because consolation is just on the surface; it never goes deep, and anything can shake it and shatter it.Drop all consolations – they are of no worth; they are just wasting time. It is better to suffer than to be consoled. It is better to be in pain than to be in consolation because through pain there is a possibility to reach to real acceptance. Through consolation there is no possibility; you have taken a wrong turn. Through consolation you never get to the reality; you have fallen victim to a dream. Now you will have to live in your consolation, and you will start being afraid of reality because everything of the real will be a shattering thing for your consolation. You will avoid, you will not see directly, you will escape from facts. If somebody brings you to the facts, you will start feeling very restless, you will start perspiring, you will feel nervous, because you will know that now everything is going to be shattered.Consolation is a belief. A created thing cannot be of much value. You have created it – it cannot be bigger than you, it is bound to be smaller than you. Acceptance is bigger than you – it happens. When does acceptance happen? It happens when you don’t cling to any consolation. So put all the consolations aside.It is hard. Tao is so pure that in the beginning it is very hard. You want to play with toys, and Tao never gives you any toys. It has no belief systems to supply; it simply forces you to encounter the reality, whatsoever it is. Painful? Then let it be painful; what can be done? Whatsoever it is; it has to be looked into. But through that very encounter arises a tremendously new consciousness; a new being is born.So please put aside all your consolations, all your theories and beliefs; they are hindering your path. Once you are nude, with no belief systems around you, once you are unburdened, then immediately a great trust happens: trust in life, trust in existence. And trust is not a belief. Trust is a total conversion. It is a new birth. It is a resurrection.So be very alert. It is very easy to fall into the trap of consolations because they are cheap; you can purchase them anywhere. Every temple, every church, every organized religion is supplying them. People go to church just for that – to find consolations. Your sleep is disturbed, you need a lullaby – you go to church and the priest supplies you with the lullaby: he sings the song, he repeats the song again and again – you become consoled. It is like a tranquilizer, it gives you good sleep.Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples: “I am doing only two things in your life. First, if you have really come to me then you will never be able to sleep again, I will disturb your sleep permanently. And second, if you listen to me your life will be hard, arduous. But one thing I can promise: you will not die a dirty death; you will not die like a dog.”Both are tremendously significant. If your sleep is disturbed, only then will you not die like a dog. Dog means the animal state, fast asleep, unconscious. You can die consciously, then you die a beautiful death because then you know, even while dying, you know that you are not dying. That’s the beauty of it. Right now, even alive, you don’t know you are alive. Even living, there is no life – you are simply dragging – it is phony. A man who has encountered life and its facts, and gone through its pleasures and pains, dark nights and beautiful days, and watched everything and has become a profound observer will die in a totally different way. He will die alert, aware.Just a few days ago I was reading the memoirs of the doctor who attended Gurdjieff when he died, and the doctor said, “I have attended so many people while they were dying, but this death was tremendously exceptional.” The doctor said, “I cannot think that anybody has ever died like that. The moment he was dying, he opened his eyes, sat up in his bed, supported by many pillows, asked for his hat, put his hat on – a very beautiful red hat – took his cigar in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other hand, smoked and sipped the coffee.”The doctor was watching the disciples crying and weeping, and the doctor knew that within seconds Gurdjieff was going to disappear. His legs had become numb – they had gathered too much water and the water had to be removed. And the doctor knew that he might not be able to completely remove the water because before the water was removed, Gurdjieff would be gone. He asked Gurdjieff – because giving him pain seemed unnecessary now that he was going to die; death was certain – he asked Gurdjieff, “What should I do?”And Gurdjieff said, “If you are tired, then I can wait a little longer. I have been waiting so many years for death. You can rest a little and then you can do it. I have been waiting so long, I can wait a little longer – there is no problem. If you are too tired, you can have a little rest – two, three hours – because you have not been asleep the whole night. If you are not tired, you do your work.”Crying, because he also was a disciple, the doctor started taking water out of his legs. And Gurdjieff was there, sipping his coffee and smoking his cigar and talking and joking. All life had disappeared from the body, but his face was aflame, his eyes were so radiant. And at the last moment he said, “Has anybody any question? Because now I am leaving.”He used to say to his disciples that one can die very consciously, and he died very consciously. Just twenty-four hours before he was removed to the hospital he has been insisting that he would not go to the hospital, and he asked the doctor, “What do you think? Can the hospital save me? If I cannot save myself, then who can save me?” the doctor had been crying, so he said, “Okay, if you are crying, I will go to the hospital.”So the doctor ran outside to phone for the ambulance. And when the ambulance came, he went into the room – Gurdjieff had disappeared! He could not believe how he had gone because he could not move!Gurdjieff was standing on the road near the ambulance. He came in and he said, “The ambulance has come – where is the doctor?” He was walking and the doctor could not believe it – it was impossible, he was not in a state to walk. Other doctors came to consult and they, nobody, could believe that he could walk, but he walked to the ambulance. Not only that, he came in again to inquire, “Where is the doctor?”Two weeks before – and he was ill, very ill – suddenly one evening he asked his disciples, “Bring my car, I would like to drive.” Two weeks before!They said, “The doctor says you should not move out of the bed.”He said, “Forget all about doctors. Bring my car.” And he drove the car and went to a certain Russian church. There he sat for one hour, with closed eyes, under a tree. That was the place where he would be buried two weeks later. He had gone there two weeks before to see the place, and he sat on the exact place where he was to be buried two weeks later. And then they all understood: death was so clear to him – when it was going to happen, where he was going to be buried. And that was a church he had never gone to in his whole life. It was not that he used to visit it; he had never gone. That was the first and the last time alive. The next time he was dead.When Bennett, the narrator of the story, arrived twenty-four hours later, Gurdjieff had died. He arrived in the middle of the night, rushed to the church where the body was lying and went into the room; there was nobody there. He sat silently, and then he became afraid; he started trembling because it felt as if Gurdjieff were still alive. Bennett was a scientist, a mathematician, and he could not be deceived. He was not a devotee, he was not emotional or sentimental; not the feeling type at all. So he went close to the body to feel what the matter was and became completely silent to listen. It felt as if somebody were breathing. He went all around the room. Whenever he came closer to the body he would hear the breathing more clearly, whenever he went further away, the breathing would not be heard so clearly. The man was dead, but Bennett had a feeling that he was still hovering around – as if the body were alive, as if his presence were there.It is possible. A man who dies totally alert can do many things. A man who dies in awareness, in fact, never dies. He has come to recognize the deathless in himself.Drop consolations, beliefs, become more and more alert. Drop your sleep, and drop your lullabies; that is the only way. Tao is simple and yet arduous: simple because Tao cannot be arduous; arduous because you are very complex and you cannot be simple easily. The complexity is in you not in Tao. Tao is a very simple approach; a simpler approach is not possible. No discipline, no character, no morality, nothing is expected of you – only one thing: that you live naturally, simply, in tune with existence. Don’t bring beliefs and don’t bring any theories; don’t bring any theologies into it.Tao mystics never talk about God, reincarnation, heaven, hell. No, they don’t talk about these things. These are all creations of the human mind: explanations for something which can never be explained, explanations for the mystery. In fact, all explanations are against God because explanation de-mystifies existence. Existence is a mystery, and one should accept it as a mystery and should not pretend to have any explanation. No, explanation is not needed – only exclamation, a wondering heart, awakened, surprised, feeling the mystery of life each moment. Then, and only then, you know what truth is. And truth liberates.The fourth question:Osho,Who is a Christian?Difficult to say because I am not a Christian, neither was Christ a Christian. One thing is certain: that Christ was not a Christian, Buddha was not a Buddhist, Krishna was not a Hindu.To be a Christian one has to avoid being a Christ. To be a Christian means to remain asleep. You are using another drug called Christianity to remain asleep. Somebody else is using another drug called Hinduism to remain asleep, but these are all drugs. A real man, a man of courage, has the courage to face reality as it is. A real man has the courage not to be secondhand. A Christian is secondhand, Christ is firsthand – don’t become secondhand.Go to reality, direct, immediate – not through any belief system, otherwise you will never reach to reality. The belief system will hinder you; it will not allow you to see directly: it is an imprisonment.There are many prisons on earth. They say that there are three hundred religions, so three hundred prisons – beautiful prisons, very well decorated, comfortable, convenient, but a prison is a prison. Get out of prisons.When I initiate you into sannyas, I am initiating you into freedom. My initiation into sannyas is initiation into absolute freedom. By becoming a sannyasin you can become a Christ, but never a Christian; you can become a Krishna, but never a Hindu; you can become a Buddha, but never a Buddhist. And remember, if you really want to become a Buddha, then avoid the doctrine that has gathered around Buddha.The Zen people say, “If you meet Buddha on the way, kill him immediately!” They even go to this extent: they say “If you repeat the name of Buddha, immediately rinse your mouth!” Not that they are disrespectful about Buddha, they have tremendous respect. Their respect is impeccable, but still, what they are saying is significant. It is very easy for the mind to gather knowledge, to gather belief; it is very easy for the mind because nothing is at stake. If you become a Christian, you don’t put anything at stake, you are not committed to anything – you can simply go to church.I have heard a definition of the Christian: a Christian is a man who feels repentance on a Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday. Deceptions, all deceptions.The fifth question:Osho,When does discipline become meditation?Never. Discipline never becomes meditation; meditation certainly becomes a discipline. Don’t start with discipline otherwise you will never arrive at meditation. Start with meditation, and you will arrive at a discipline; the discipline will not be imposed from the outside. It will be an inner overflow; you will become luminous from within.In fact, to call it “discipline” is not good because it is so utterly free – but still you can call it discipline. Your life will be disciplined, not by any effort, but by your inner understanding. You will behave responsibly, not that you have to behave that way, you will behave responsibly because a conscious man can behave only in that way – there is no other way. You will not behave for any profit, for any motive; you will behave out of your spontaneity; there will be no greed in it. If somebody is a Christian saint, he is greedy; he wants to reach to a Christian paradise. If somebody is a Jaina monk, he is greedy, he is a businessman. He is trying to win by virtue, to be victorious in the other world, to become a spiritual conqueror; but the idea is one of greed.If you go and look around the world at monks and saints and mahatmas, you will find ninety-nine per cent of them are just greedy people, materialistic people. They are disciplining themselves because they know that if they sacrifice, the payoff is going to be great. They are ready to sacrifice; they are ready even to kill themselves – but it is a bargain.A man of meditation, of understanding, has no motive, no bargain with reality. How can you bargain with reality? The whole idea is silly. A man of meditation is good because it feels good to be good; there is no motive. He is virtuous because being virtuous he feels so happy and so delighted. He loves, he shares, just like a flower shares its scent, its fragrance – naturally. His virtue is not cultivated or conditioned; it is a quality of growth in his being.So you ask, “When does discipline become meditation?” Never. Discipline never becomes meditation; but meditation always brings discipline, an inner discipline. That discipline is beautiful because it is not against freedom. That discipline is because of freedom. That discipline is not a new cage; that discipline makes you totally free and liberated. You don’t have any commandments to follow; you don’t follow anybody, any scripture, you simply follow your own inner core. There is no conflict within you, there are no alternatives. You are not to choose, you don’t have to choose to do this or to do that. Whatsoever arises in your being, you do. There is never any repentance because a man of meditation cannot do wrong – it doesn’t happen. Whatsoever he is doing, he is doing totally; the next moment he has moved beyond it. He never looks back, he never repents: whatsoever happened, happened; whatsoever did not happen, did not happen. He neither praises himself saying, “I did this.” Neither does he ever feel guilty, saying, “Why could I not do this?” He has no hangover; he has a clean break with the past. Each moment he moves into the future, each moment the past disappears and he is fresh like the dewdrops in the morning.That discipline has freshness, that discipline has freedom, that discipline has fragrance. Otherwise, discipline makes people dull, stupid. Discipline makes people mediocre; discipline kills your freedom, kills your being; discipline becomes a suicide. So never start with discipline, start with meditation. That’s why my emphasis is on meditation. If discipline comes out of meditation – good, otherwise it is not needed. It is better to have no character than to have a forced character.The sixth question:Osho,Why am I still not happy?Because you still are chasing happiness. Happiness cannot be sought, you cannot seek it. It is a by-product, it is a natural consequence. If you make a goal out of happiness you will never find it, you will always miss it. It comes very silently, it comes like a whisper; it comes like your shadow. When you are totally absorbed in something and not thinking about happiness at all, it is there. Whenever you are thinking about it, it is not there, it is very shy. Whenever you look around, it disappears; whenever you start thinking, “Am I happy or not?” you are not. A happy man never thinks about happiness – he is so happy, how can he think about happiness? Only an unhappy man thinks about happiness, and by thinking, he becomes more unhappy.I have heard…A big dog saw a little dog chasing its tail, and asked, “Why are you chasing your tail so?”Said the puppy, “I have mastered philosophy, I have solved the problems of the universe which no dog before me has rightly solved: I have learned that the best thing for a dog is happiness, and that happiness is in my tail. Therefore I am chasing it, and when I catch it I shall have it.”Said the old dog, “My son, I too have paid attention to the problems of this universe in my weak way, and have formed some opinions. I too have judged that happiness is a fine thing for a dog, and that happiness is in my tail. But I have noticed that when I go about my business, it comes after me. I need not chase it.”Listen to this old dog’s idea.You must have seen that whenever a dog is happy, he wags his tail, so naturally dogs think that happiness must be in the tail. Then they start chasing it, but you cannot chase your own tail. You jump, the tail jumps; you jump more, the tail jumps more – you will get crazy. That’s what is happening.Listen to the old dog. You go about your business, and it comes after you. One thing has to be learned – nothing is more valuable than that – and that is to be absorbed into whatsoever you are doing. Don’t think about whether it is a very great thing or not. If you are cleaning the floor, get totally absorbed in it. If you are cooking, get absorbed in it. Washing your clothes, get absorbed in it.Whenever you are dissolved in your act, ego disappears. Then there is no space for the ego to exist. In that very moment when ego is not, there is happiness.So let me say it in this way: ego is misery, no ego is happiness. Ego remains only when you are split, ego is not whenever you are harmonious. Dancing, you become the dance – ego disappears; singing, you become the song – ego disappears; sitting silently doing nothing, you become that non-doing – and ego disappears. Act or no act, remember one thing: get absorbed in it, whatsoever it is. You have gone for a morning walk, get totally absorbed in it. Forget all about yourself; forget all about happiness; forget all about health, the oxygen in the air and all calculations; forget all that you have read about the beautiful experience of a morning walk – forget everything. Just walk, and one day you will find that suddenly you are totally there, and it has been there; happiness has visited you.You will lose contact again and again because the moment you start thinking about it, thinking that it is there, it is gone. You come in, it goes out; you go out, it comes in; you cannot be with it together. Both you and happiness cannot be together in the room – that’s impossible.Start losing yourself. You may be too much after it, you may be continuously thinking about it, you may be planning how to attain it – then it is never going to happen. If you are too much after happiness, all that happens is hell. If you forget about it, it is a very natural phenomenon. Self-consciousness does not allow it; that makes you very narrow. When the self disappears, when self-consciousness disappears, you are vast like the sky. Suddenly it pours into you.The art of being happy is the art of forgetfulness. And when I’m saying this, remember: don’t start planning how to forget, how not to think about happiness – otherwise you are again in the same trap.It is not a question of “how,” you simply do it. It is not a question of tomorrow; you do it right now, this very moment. Listen to me. This very moment, listen totally. Don’t think about what I am saying, don’t try to figure it out, don’t plan. Just listen. Just be here with me, this moment, and happiness is here. Silent, listening, attentive, with no self – how can you miss happiness? Nobody has ever heard that anybody can miss happiness when one is silent, attentive, self-forgetful, absorbed.If you cannot be absorbed into my word, into my presence, it will be difficult for you to be absorbed anywhere else. Listening to me, just listen, and let it be this very moment.An old rabbi used to say to his people, “Repent the day before you die.”“But,” they said to him, “Rabbi, we know not the day of our death.”“Then,” he answered, “repent today, repent now.”Don’t postpone because one never knows. Tomorrow you may not be here, the next moment you may not be here, so this is the only moment you have. Now is the only time you have, and here is the only place you have. I am not telling you to prepare, to get ready. That’s the whole message of Tao too: you are ready as you are. Start enjoying this moment and happiness will follow you. It always follows you because it is in the tail. When you go about doing your business, the tail comes along.The seventh question:Osho,For the last two, three days, I feel as if you are constantly looking at me. Tell me, what do you want to say to me through your eyes?I have been constantly looking at you – not only for two, three days, but you may have only become aware of it during the last two, three days. Good that you became aware.When I look at you there is a message because there are many things which cannot be said in words. I have to say with my hands, and I have to say with my eyes, and I have to say with my silence, and I have to say with my presence. Words are inadequate; they go only so far – beyond that they cannot go. But eyes can convey. The eye contact can become a great communion.So when you see me looking at you, into your eyes, don’t miss that moment. In that moment don’t start thinking, in that moment just look into me, in that moment be lost. In that moment, don’t think, “What is the message?” because if you start thinking about the message, you have missed. The eye contact itself is the message. Just be here, present, looking into my eyes and something is going to happen, something will transpire between me and you. Here I am not. If you can look into my eyes for a single second, totally, you will also disappear. And when the master and the disciple both are not, there is the meeting.“I am newly initiated and wish to be instructed in Zen.” Thus Kyosai approached the Master Gensha. “How do I enter in the way, master?”“Do you hear the river running nearby?” asked Gensha.“Yes,” said the seeker, “I do, master.”Then, for a single moment, there was absolute silence and then Gensha said, “There! Here is the way to enter.”He is not talking about the river, remember. When he said, “Do you hear the river running nearby?” the disciple became aware. In that awareness, for a single moment, thoughts stopped. He heard the river running by, the noise, the song, the dance of the river – for a single moment he was no longer self-conscious; his awareness was total. The master watched. When the master felt that the moment had come – the seeker was no longer there; the questioner was no longer there; his self-consciousness had disappeared, and there was only silent awareness and listening to the river running by – he shouted, “There! Here is the way to enter.”Remember, he was not talking about the river. He was talking about this inner awareness. This silence, this self-unconsciousness, this purity, this innocence that had entered into the being of this disciple: he said, “Here is the way to enter.”When I look into your eyes, and if you are also looking into my eyes: “There! Here is the way to enter.”The eighth question:Osho,I often take drugs. Once when I was attending the discourse, I closed my eyes and suddenly felt the same as I feel on a drug trip. Is there any relation or similarity between samadhi and drugs?There is and there is not. There is because drugs create a false samadhi, a pseudo samadhi almost like samadhi. So there is a relationship because even if drugs create a false samadhi, they create something similar to samadhi. And there is also no relationship because the false is not the real, and the false can never be the real.It is like this: if you are hungry in the night and you dream that you are eating – yes, eating in the dream – everything looks like eating; you feel satisfied, you turn over and continue in sleep. In the morning you feel it was just a dream. It has not nourished you, it simply deceived you.Drugs deceive you and create a false samadhi – they don’t nourish you.Some day, when you will awake, then you will see that you were simply dreaming that you were eating. It helped because if you are hungry in your sleep, the dream that you are eating helps you to continue sleep, otherwise your sleep will be broken. If the hunger is too much, how can you sleep? So the mind creates a dream: the mind says, “Okay, you are hungry – eat!” In the dream you go to the fridge, you open the fridge, you are eating many things that you have always been denying yourself. You eat well, you feel perfectly good, you turn over and you go on sleeping. In the morning you know that it was a false food. Dream food cannot help – but you will only know in the morning, not before it. And the morning I am talking about may not come if you don’t work for it.So drugs can deceive you, they can deceive you for your whole life. They create a similarity through chemical change: through chemical coercion of the body and the mind, a certain state is created which feels as if one has arrived. In the morning, when the drug influence is over, you are in exactly the same place as you were before – maybe even lower, because every high experience through drugs is bound to be followed by a very low and depressed experience. Then again more drugs are needed, and the quantity has to be increased – you become an addict. This is not a way toward truth because it is not nourishing.Samadhi is a nourishment. You are not drugged by samadhi, you are awakened. But there is a similarity, so sometimes it can happen if you have been taking drugs. Listening to me there can come a moment when you become silent, you are en rapport with me. And suddenly there is a moment, a moment of tremendous joy and beauty, and because you have taken the drug in the past, you will think in terms of the drug. But if it is happening just by listening to me. Think of it. If you meditate, if you go into the same world where I exist, into the same dimension where I exist – and if it can happen just by listening to me – then what to say about when you yourself will move into this world? Then you will know and you will have something to compare to. Then you will know that all those experiences through drugs were just foolish, silly; you were wasting your energy and wasting your time.They keep you asleep. If you are interested in sleep, drugs are good, alcohol is good, any type of chemical that helps you feel that you are happy seems good. Happiness never comes through it, but it gives you the illusion of being happy; it keeps you asleep. If you are interested in becoming alert, awakened, then the drug is dangerous. Then you are undoing your very longing to become awakened, enlightened. You are undoing it with your drugs.I have heard…A traveling salesman in the Deep South hit a hotel where the rooms were infested with giant, economy-size mosquitoes. Furthermore, he was told that no mosquito netting was available. “All you got to do is follow the example of the man who owns this hotel, Colonel Rip Clatterborn,” the desk clerk told him.“And how,” inquired the salesman sarcastically, “does your blasted Colonel Clatterborn manage to go to sleep without a net?”“He doesn’t,” admitted the clerk. “But the Colonel is what you might call a dedicated drinker. He goes to bed so well oiled he doesn’t notice the mosquitoes for the first half of the night. And for the second half, the mosquitoes are so drunk they don’t notice the Colonel.”You can go on playing this way, but you are wasting a tremendous opportunity. Avoid drugs. If you are really interested, then why not take the real drug? Samadhi is the real drug, but you cannot purchase it at the druggist’s. You cannot purchase it through a dope pusher. You have to attain samadhi through great intensity, thirst, passion, inquiry. Samadhi must be attained. Drugs are available from the outside, samadhi happens in your innermost core; it is the ultimate drug – soma.The last question:Osho,I want to ask three very short questions.Thank you. If you ask short questions, I am going to give you short answers.First: What do you think of life?Life is wonderful. Without it, you are dead.The second: What do you think about the love of a good woman?Now, that is not fair. To ask such a question of a chronic bachelor is not right, but since you have asked, I have to answer. And I know the answer, this is the answer – there is nothing better in the world than the love of a good woman, unless, of course, it is the love of a bad woman.And the third. Was there any long period in your life when you did not speak at all?Believe it or not, but once it did happen. For a year and a half I didn’t speak at all – no morning discourse, no evening darshan. That year and a half was the time immediately after I was born.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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When Lin Lei was nearly a hundred, he put on his fur coat in the middle of spring, and went to pick up the grains dropped by the reapers, singing as he made his way through the fields.Confucius, who was on a journey to Wei, saw him in the distance. Turning to his disciples he said, “That old man should be worth talking to. Someone should go and find out what he has to say.”Tzu Kung asked to be the one to go. He met Lin Lei at the end of the embankment, and, looking him in the face, sighed, “Don’t you even feel any regret? Yet you pick up the grains singing as you go.”Lin Lei neither halted his step nor paused his song. Tzu Kung went on pressing him until he looked up and answered, “What have I to regret?”“A child, you never learned how to behave;A man, you never strove to make your mark.No wife nor son in your old age,And the time of your death is near.“Master what happiness have you had that you should sing as you walk picking up the grains?”“The reason for my happiness all men share,” said Lin Lei smiling, “but instead, they worry over them. It is because I took no pains learning to behave when I was young, and never strove to make my mark when I grew up that I have been able to live so long. It is because I have no wife and sons in my old age and the time of my death is near that I can be so happy.”“It is human to want long life, and hate death – why should you be happy to die?”“Death is a return to where we set out from when we were born. So how do I know that when I die here I shall not be born somewhere else? How do I know that life and death are not as good as each other? How do I know that it is not a delusion to crave anxiously for life? How do I know that present death would not be better than my past life?”Tzu Kung listened but did not understand his meaning. He returned and told Confucius.“I knew he would be worth talking to,” said Confucius, “and so he is, but he is a man who has found it, yet not found all of it.”Tao is not rational. It is not anti-rational either. It is super-rational. Life is more than reason. Life is more than can be understood by the mind. Life has to give you more than you can learn. It is bigger than your capacity for learning. It is bigger than you can ever know, but it can be felt. Tao is intuitive. Tao is more total. When you approach life through the head, and only through the head, it is a partial approach; misunderstanding is bound to be there. A man who is trying to figure it out is bound to fall into a tremendous trap and will not be able to come out of it easily. Once you start intellectualizing about life, you start going astray. Life has to be lived. Life has to be lived existentially and not intellectually. Intellect is not a bridge, but a barrier.This has to be understood – then the parable is of tremendous import. We are going to go into it very slowly, trying to understand each sentence in it, each word actually.The Confucian approach is a mind approach. The Taoist approach is a no-mind approach. Confucius thinks about life. Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, they don’t think about life because, they say, you can go on thinking and thinking about and about, and you will go round and round and you will never reach the center. About and about is not the way. Go direct, be immediate. See life, don’t think about it.Always remember, the menu is not the dinner. You can go on studying the menu – that is not going to help. You will have to eat; you will have to swallow; you will have to digest; you will have to be existentially connected with your food. You will have to absorb it into your being. You will have to make it a part of your being. Just studying the menu or the cookbook is not going to help. The scholar goes on studying the menu: the hungrier he becomes, the more he studies the menu; and, naturally, the scholar remains one of the hungriest persons in life. He has never lived, he has never loved, he has never taken any risk; he has never moved, never danced, never celebrated. He has been just sitting there and thinking about it. The scholar has decided that first he has to understand intellectually, then he will move. Now this is no way to move. First you have to move and then comes understanding.Many people come to me and they say that they would like to become sannyasins. They are attracted to the idea, they are intrigued, but they have to think about it. First, naturally, they say they have to think about it, then they will decide. How can you think about sannyas? What will you think about it? It is an inner experience, it is something of the inner space, it is a contact with me of the inner self; nobody can watch it. You can watch sannyasins, but you cannot know anything about sannyas by watching sannyasins. Even if the sannyasin himself tries to figure it out intellectually, he will not be able to. Sannyas has to be tasted – even then it is very difficult to intellectually explain it. To think about it without moving into it is impossible. It is as if somebody says, “First I will have to know about love and then I will love.” How are you going to know about love? The only way to know about love is to fall in love – there is no other way. You can go to the library, you can ask many people, you can consult books and encyclopedias, and you will find a thousand and one things about love, but not love. You may become too much of a scholar, your mind may be stuffed with information, but information is not knowing.Knowledge is not knowing. It can deceive you, but it cannot deceive life. As far as life is concerned you will remain a desert – the flower of love will never bloom in your being. So is sannyas. So is everything that is significant. So is everything that is organic. So is everything that is alive. This is the basic standpoint of Tao.Now this parable.When Lin Lei was nearly a hundred, he put on his fur coat in the middle of spring, and went to pick up the grains dropped by the reapers, singing as he made his way through the fields.Lin Lei is a Taoist master, but Taoist masters live a very ordinary life. They don’t live in any extraordinary way, they don’t claim that they are special beings, talented geniuses, sages, saints, mahatmas – they don’t claim anything. They simply live a very ordinary life because they are natural beings: natural like the trees, natural like the birds, natural like nature itself. They are not in any way egoistic. For example, if in India you want to find out where the mahatmas are, you can easily find them. But if you had gone to visit ancient China and you wanted to know a Taoist master, nobody would have been able to tell you where you would find one. You would have had to look around, move about, wander around the country, and at some point you might have come across one. But there is no way unless you have experienced something of it in your own being. Unless you have the taste, the flavor, you will not be able to recognize a Taoist master.Lin Lei is a Taoist master – a simple man, very old, very ancient; a hundred years old and he is picking up the grains dropped by the reapers. Now this is the lowliest job one can find, the most beggarly and yet he is: …singing as he made his way through the fields. The Taoist is always happy because he does not wait for any cause: he does not wait for any special situation in which he is going to be happy. Happiness is like breathing, happiness is like the beat of the heart – happiness is his being, it is not something that happens to him. Happiness is not something that happens and does not happen, happiness is something that is always there. He is full of happiness. Happiness is the stuff that existence is made of; a Taoist has fallen in harmony with existence – naturally he is happy. Whatsoever he is doing, he is doing it happily. His happiness precedes his action.Sometimes you are happy, and sometimes you are unhappy because your happiness is conditional. When you are succeeding you are happy, when you are failing you are unhappy; your happiness depends on some outer cause. You cannot always sing; even if you sing, your song will not always have a singing quality. Sometimes it will be really a delight and sometimes just a repetition – dead and dull. Sometimes, when your friend has come, when you have found a beloved, you are happy. Sometimes, when your friend has gone, the beloved is lost, you are unhappy. Your happiness and unhappiness are caused from the outside – it is not an inner flow; it is not something that you possess. It is given to you by others and taken away, given to you by circumstances and taken away. This is not of worth because you remain a slave, you are not the master of your own state of being.The Taoists call a person a master whose happiness is absolutely his own. He can be happy irrespective of the situation: young he is happy, old he is happy; as an emperor he is happy, as a beggar he is happy. His song is uncontaminated by circumstances; his song is his own, his song is his natural rhythm.This man, a hundred years old… Ordinarily, a man of one hundred years of age will not be able to sing – what is there to sing about now? Life has disappeared, life has oozed out, he is almost as dry as a bone, and there is nothing to hope for, only death is to come. Singing, celebrating – for what? A man of a hundred years has no future: his life is spent, he is exhausted, any moment death will knock him down.For whom? For what? What reason has a man to sing like that? And, at the age of a hundred years, one has to go on and do such a beggarly job, one has to pick up the grains dropped by the reapers. That means nobody is there to look after the old man. He is left alone – no family it seems, no son, no daughters, no wife, no brothers; nobody to look after him. What is there to sing about?If you have the song – the real song, the song that arises from your intrinsic core, your innermost center – then it does not matter. One can go on singing even when death is descending. One can go on singing even if somebody is killing you. Your body can be killed, but not your song. Your body can be imprisoned, but not your song. Your song is eternal because it is uncaused.Remember this very fundamental law of life: that which is caused is never eternal, that which is caused is temporal. When the cause will disappear, it will disappear; it is a by-product. That which is uncaused is going to be forever and forever because there is nothing that can destroy it. Your body will die – it has been caused; the meeting of your father and mother was the cause of it. Your body will die: one day it was caused. It has a certain energy, a certain life span, then it will be finished. Every day you are dying; one day you will simply disappear into the grave.Is that all that you have? Is that all that your being is? Is there not something more? There is something more which has never been caused; there is something in you which was before you were ever born, that is going to be there even after you are gone forever. After you have died, that which was before your birth will remain – that is uncaused.That’s why Taoists don’t believe that God created the world, that God created man, that God created souls. If God created souls, then they have been caused, and one day they will disappear – however far off that day is, is not material. If the world has been caused and man has been created, then one day the world will be uncreated and man will be uncreated with it. Taoists say, “That which is, is eternal, uncaused, uncreated” – they don’t have a creator. In fact, nobody else has ever reached that peak, that sublime peak of understanding as the Taoists. All other religions look juvenile. The Taoist maturity is so tremendous, is of such splendor, is of such depth and height, that no other religion can be compared to it; they all look like kindergarten schools – made especially for children. That’s why God is “the father,” children cannot be independent, they need a father. If your real father has disappeared, then you still need an imaginary father in heaven to still control you: you are not mature enough, you cannot be on your own, you have to lean on somebody or other.Taoists have no concept of God – not that they are godless, they are the godliest – but they don’t have a concept of God; existence is enough. There is no creator, there is no creation, there is eternity. This has always been so, this will always be so. Once you have come in contact with this eternal continuity inside your being, the substratum, then there is nothing to be miserable about.You are eternal, you are immortal, there is no death for you because there has never been any birth. You are uncreated, you cannot be destroyed. Whatsoever the outer circumstance, your inner light goes on burning bright and the song continues.Confucius, who was on a journey to Wei, saw him in the distance. Turning to his disciples he said, “That old man should be worth talking to. Someone should go and find out what he has to say.”Confucius was always in search of knowledge. He was always in search of somebody who could say something new to him; he was always ready to borrow knowledge. That’s how the intellectual functions: all that he has is borrowed; he never looks within, he goes on looking outside – “If somebody has it, then I should go and inquire.” The intellectual is imitative, mechanical, parrotlike, for the intellectual, knowledge is something that has to be learned. He never looks within his own being; he never looks into his own inner consciousness; he never tries to understand the knower. He is after knowledge – and there is the difference. The Taoist is not after knowledge, but he wants to know: “Who is this knower? What is this knowing?” He wants to know the source of this knowing, where this consciousness is arising from.You are here, you are listening to me. Now, you can be either a Confucian or a Taoist because these are the only two standpoints possible. If you are listening to me, and you become more and more interested in what I am saying and start collecting it, then you are a Confucian. But if while you are here listening to me – feeling my presence, looking into my eyes – you become aware of the consciousness that is within you, the attention that is within you and you become intrigued by what it is and a deep inquiry arises: “Who am I?”… Not that you have to repeat the words “Who am I?” but a deep inquiry, a quest arises; a passion to know: “Who is this consciousness in me? What is this consciousness in me? What is its nature? What is its quality? Where does it come from? Where is it going?” If this passion to know your own consciousness arises, you are a Taoist. And only a Taoist is a religious person.The Confucian is a scholar, he is a pundit, a professor. If you talk to him, he will talk about great things; but if you look into his being, there is nothing. All that he has gathered is borrowed. Again and again the Taoists write stories in which Confucius is going from somewhere to somewhere, always traveling, accumulating, and always looking for where he can get knowledge – as if knowledge is a commodity, as if knowledge is a thing that you can get somewhere, from somebody.Nobody can give you knowledge. It is not a thing to be transferred. You have to become it, you have to grow into knowing; it is an inner transformation. No university can give you what religions call “real knowing.” Whatsoever you can get from a university is information – stale, borrowed, dirty, because it has passed through thousands of hands; it is like a currency note. That’s why the note is called “currency,” because it goes on moving like a current from one hand to another, from one pocket to another pocket. It goes on becoming dirtier and dirtier. So it is with knowledge: down the centuries, it goes on from one generation to another generation, from one generation of professors to another generation of professors.Knowing is fresh, knowing is from the source. And that source is alive in you, waiting for you to turn in. Don’t look for it on the outside – look within. That’s what Jesus goes on saying: “The Kingdom of God is within you.”Confucius, who was on a journey to Wei… He is always on a journey, seeking, searching for knowledge. He goes to everybody. Wherever somebody says that somebody has attained knowledge, he goes there. This is silly, this is stupid, but this is the stupidity all scholars have. They are basically of the mind that knowledge can be purchased. They are basically of the mind that knowledge is a thing, not an experience; a theory, not an experience. So, one can learn it from somebody else. Remember one thing: that is the difference between scientific knowledge and religious knowledge. Once somebody has discovered the law of gravitation, each person does not have to discover it again and again – that would be foolish. You cannot go to the world and declare: “What Newton discovered, I have discovered again. Yes, the law of gravitation: I have seen an apple falling, and I have again discovered the law of gravitation.” People will laugh. They will say, “That is nothing to discover. Discover something which has not been discovered before.”Science is information. If one man has discovered something, then it can be transferred to everybody. The knowledge that science seeks is of the outside, so it can be learned from the outside. But religion has to be discovered again and again. It is like love: millions of people have loved before you, but unless you love, you will never know what it is. You cannot say, “Millions of people have loved, so what is the point of me loving again? Why get into the same rut? So many people have loved and they have written their diaries, and their love letters are available – we can look into the books and have the knowledge.” But no, you will have to love; you will have to rediscover it. Unless you discover it, it will never be a knowing. Religion is like love, it is not like science. Einstein has discovered the theory of relativity; now it is finished – nobody else needs to rediscover it now. What may have taken fifty years for a scientist to discover, a schoolchild can learn within five minutes. But that is not the way of religion. What Buddha discovered, what Lao Tzu discovered, Lieh Tzu discovered, you will have to discover again. Confucius is on the wrong track. Confucius is used in Taoist tales as a laughing stock.Confucius, who was on a journey to Wei, saw him in the distance. Turning to his disciples he said, “That old man should be worth talking to.” Why? A hundred years old, doing the lowliest job – and still singing? “Go and inquire what the reason is for his happiness – why he is happy, why he is singing, so that we will be able to deduce a law; a technique can be discovered.”“Someone should go and find out what he has to say.”Tzu Kung asked to be the one to go.One of the chief disciples of Confucius.He met Lin Lei at the end of the embankment and, looking him in the face, sighed, “Don’t you even feel any regret? Yet you pick up the grains singing as you go.”Don’t you even feel any regret? To the disciple of Confucius this man seems to have nothing to be happy about. He should be crying; that would be logical. He should be weeping; that would be rational. But singing, picking up grains, a hundred years old, waiting for death – what more do you need to be sorrowful? He should be utterly miserable; that would be logical.This is illogical, but Taoists are illogical people. And I would like you to become illogical because only illogical people are fortunate enough to be happy. Logicians are never happy; they cannot be: they have taken a wrong route from the very beginning. They think that as everything else is caused, happiness has to be caused too – that is the wrong standpoint. Happiness needs no cause, only understanding. Understanding is also not the cause of happiness, understanding simply unveils it; it is already inside you. Understanding simply removes the veil and suddenly it is there – your beloved is inside you. It has to be unveiled, that’s all. Unveiling is not a cause. Cause means it has to be created; unveiling simply means it was already there, but you were foolish enough not to unveil it.This Confucian approach toward life has to be understood because many of you are bound to be in Confucian company. The whole West is Confucian, logical, intellectual. The Confucian approach is based on the idea that truth has to be learned, that it is only a question of learning: if you learn well you will know what truth is. No, the Taoists say truth has to be lived, not learned. Truth has to be experienced: just by becoming more knowledgeable you will not know it. In fact, to have truth you will have to go through unlearning, you will have to wash your mind clean. Whatsoever you have learned is functioning as a block. You will again have to become ignorant; you will have to become innocent. You will have to drop all this nonsense that you are carrying in the name of knowledge. You don’t know anything, but you think as if you know. This “as if” is the problem. Somebody asks you, “Do you know God?” and you say, “Yes.” Have you ever thought over what you are saying? Do you really know? But you pretend. Whom are you deceiving?I have heard a beautiful anecdote:The tough guy sauntered into the dimly lit saloon. “Is there anybody here called Donovan?” he snarled. Nobody answered. Again he snarled, “Is there anybody here called Donovan?”There was a moment of silence and then a little fellow strode forward. “I’m Donovan,” he said.The tough guy picked him up and threw him across the bar. Then he punched him in the jaw, kicked him, clubbed him, slapped him around a bit and walked out. About fifteen minutes later the little fellow came to. “Boy, did I fool him!” he said. “I ain’t Donovan.”Whom are you fooling? You will be fooling only yourself, nobody else. Remember very well what you know and what you don’t know. P. D. Ouspensky, in one of the greatest of his books, Tertium Organum, says that for the seeker the first thing to decide is what he knows and what he does not know – the first thing to decide. Once that decision has been made things become very clear. Do you know God? Do you know yourself? Do you know what love is? Do you know what life is? But man goes on pretending that he knows, because it is very hurtful to know that you don’t know; it is very ego shattering to know that you don’t know. The ego pretends, the ego is the greatest pretender there is. It says, “Yes, I know.” There are knowers who say God is not, there are knowers who say God is, but both are knowers. As far as knowledge is concerned, neither the theist nor the atheist is in any way different. If you go to India and you ask people – anybody – they will say, “Yes, God is.” If you go to Russia and ask anybody, he will say that he knows God is not. But one thing is certain, both know – and that is the problem.The theist and the atheist are not opposite. They are not enemies; they are partners in the same game because both are pretending that they know. A real man of understanding will not pretend that he knows, and then there is a possibility some day to know. Begin with ignorance, and some day you may be fortunate enough to know. Begin with knowledge, and it is certain that you will never be able to know.The Confucian goes on trying to learn. The Taoist goes on trying to unlearn.Lin lei neither halted his steps nor paused in his song. Tzu Kung went on pressing him until he looked up and answered, “What have I to regret?”First he won’t even stop his song to listen to what this man was asking. Taoists are not interested in curious people. They say that curiosity leads nowhere, curiosity is a disease; curiosity is not enough – curiosity is not inquiry. Inquiry means you are ready to put your life at stake. Inquiry means you are not only a student but a disciple. Inquiry means that it is not just a whim that you ask; you are ready to go into it whatsoever the cost. You are ready to pay for it; it is not just entertainment.Lin Lei neither halted his steps nor paused in his song. He didn’t pay any attention to this curious man who was asking, “Why are you singing? What have you got to be happy about?” because if this man really were a man of inquiry, he would not jump upon him so suddenly. He would wait, he would come to the master, sit by the side of the master, and he would wait.In Taoist circles it is an accepted norm that when a disciple comes to the master he has to wait, until the master asks him, “Why have you come?” And the master will only ask when he has tested that you are not just curious; that you have true inquiry; that you have not just come by the way, that your search is not just lukewarm, but intense – that you are burning, that you are ready to explode. Only then will the master ask “Why have you come? What’s your inquiry?”This is no way to approach a master – and to ask such a foolish question! It is foolish to ask, “Why are you happy?” The why is meaningless. If somebody is miserable, you can ask, “Why are you miserable?” But if somebody is happy, you cannot ask, “Why are you happy?” Somebody is ill, ask, “Why are you ill?” The question is relevant; but if somebody is healthy, you cannot ask, “Why are you healthy?” The question is irrelevant. Health is as it should be; happiness is as it should be. If somebody has gone mad, you can ask why he has gone mad, but if he is somebody sane you don’t ask, “Why are you sane? What have you got to be sane about?” That is meaningless. When you approach a happy person, a really happy person, you should look directly rather than create a smoke screen of questions. You should wait on the master, you should help the master, you should drink from the energy that is flowing around the master; you should taste the celebration that is going on there, you should allow his presence to penetrate your being, you should function like a sponge so that you become full of the presence of the master – that will be the answer.Now this is foolish, but I have come across millions of such people. I used to travel around the country and even at railway stations…I was going to catch a train when somebody ran after me and said, “Is there really a God? God exists?”I was going to catch a train and my train was leaving. I said, “Come later on.”He said, “But just a single answer. One sentence will do.” As if my saying yes or no were going to make any difference. Foolish people, stupid people: they think they are religious, think they are making a great inquiry.That’s why Lin Lei neither halted his steps nor paused in his song. Tzu Kung went on pressing him until he looked up and answered, “What have I to regret?” Now look at the change. Tzu Kung asks, “What have you got to be happy about?” and the master says, “What have I got to be unhappy about?” the total change – a one hundred and eighty degree turn. And what he says… These four sentences are tremendous; you cannot find more rebellious sentences than these anywhere.Listen:“A child, you never learned how to behave…”Tzu Kung says, “These are the things that you should look into…”“A child you never learned how to behave;A man, you never strove to make your mark.No wife nor son in your old age,And the time of your death is near.”Try to understand each sentence. Each is pregnant with great meaning: “A child, you never learned how to behave…” Ordinarily, if you never learned how to behave as a child, you would be miserable your whole life. You would repent that you never went to school, you never learned the manners, the etiquette, the ways of society – the formalities; you would repent your whole life. But he says, “There is nothing to regret because when I was a child, I never learned how to behave. I was never a slave. I was free from my very childhood. I never allowed anybody to discipline me. I was never an imitator. I have lived my life as I wanted it. I have never allowed anybody to distract me, so why should I regret? Why? There is no reason to regret. If I had allowed people – my family, my friends, the society, the priest, the politician, the state – if I had allowed them to discipline me, then there would have been much to be miserable about. But I have lived a free life from my very childhood. I have remained free. I have lived in freedom, so what is there to regret?”This is of tremendous significance. When I am saying it to you, this is my own feeling too. I have also lived the way I wanted to live. I have never allowed anybody to distract me. Right or wrong, good or bad, foolish or wise, I have lived the way I wanted to live. I have no regrets. There cannot be any regret. This is the way I wanted to live; this is the way I have lived. And life has allowed me to live the way I wanted to live – I am thankful, I am grateful. Now I know that if I had allowed the do-gooders, then I would have been miserable. Not that they really wanted to harm me, they may have really wanted to help me – that is not the point at all. They may have been well-wishers, but one thing is certain – they were distracting me, they were trying to force me toward some direction which was not coming spontaneously from me. I have never listened to that. I have said to my well-wishers, “Thank you for the trouble that you are taking with me, but I am to go on my own way. If I fail there will be one consolation – that I went on my own way and failed. But following you, even if I succeed, I will always repent: who knows if I had gone on my own way what would have been the result, what would have been the outcome?”I have heard about a great doctor, a great surgeon. He had become internationally known, and when he had become old he was retiring. All his disciples, from all over the world, gathered to celebrate. The day they celebrated, they found that he looked a little sad; he was there but not really. So a disciple asked, “What is the problem, sir? Why do you look so sad? Why? You have lived a successful life – nobody can compete with you; you are unique in your field; you are the top man and nobody will be able to replace you for centuries. You have everything to be happy about, and look at your disciples, your students – they are spread all over the world. Why are you sad?”He said, “Seeing all this success, I am feeling very sad because I never wanted to be a doctor; I wanted to be a dancer. Now my whole life is spent, wasted, because deep down I still repent listening to others. Yes, I have become successful, but that success does not satisfy me because it is alien. It is as if you were not hungry and somebody has forced you to eat – maybe very nourishing food, but you will feel nauseous. You wanted to drink water and somebody has forced you to drink milk – certainly better than water, but you wanted to drink water. You were feeling thirsty and the milk has not satisfied you, it has deceived you.”I can understand the man. He was sad, and his sadness is meaningful; he was sad because now this whole success is nothing but a failure. Deep down he has failed – he has failed himself; he did not trust his own intuition and he allowed others to manipulate him.Look at this old man Lin Lei’s statement: “A child, you never learned how to behave…” “…so what is there to regret? I have lived my life, I have lived my life in my own way.” “A man, you never strove to make your mark.” “And I have never tried to make my mark. I was not ambitious so what is there to regret?”An ambitious man will always regret. Alexander died sad, in great frustration, because ambition by its very nature is unfulfillable. It is said, when Alexander was in India he went to see an astrologer and asked about his future. The astrologer looked at his hand and said, “One thing I have to say to you: you will be able to win this world, but remember there is no other world. And then you will be stuck. Then what will you do?” The astrologer must have been a great wise man and it is said that listening to this, “there is no other world,” Alexander became sad. Now, even this idea “Once you have conquered this world what are you going to do? There is no other world.” … An ambitious mind will simply feel stuck – what to do then?Whatsoever you attain, nothing is attained because ambition goes spreading on and on. Only a nonambitious person can be happy. An ambitious person is bound to be always frustrated. Ambition comes out of frustration; out of ambition comes more frustration, and it is a vicious circle.This old master is speaking a great truth. He says: “A man, you never strove to make your mark.” “I was not worried to succeed in the world, to prove that I am somebody. I was not interested in becoming part of history. I was not interested in leaving my mark because that is foolish – even if you get some place in history, what use is it?”I have heard an anecdote:Moses was leading his people out of Egypt, and they came to the sea, and it was impossible to cross.The parable is a very modern parable.He looked at his press agent and he said, “What do you say? I have an idea. What is your opinion? I can ask the ocean or God to make way for us and the ocean will separate.”And the press agent said, “If you can do that, then I promise one thing. In the Old Testament you will have two pages.”But even if in the Old Testament you have two pages, or twenty, or two hundred, what is the meaning of it? As history grows bigger, those two pages will become smaller and smaller and smaller and one day just a footnote. Then when history will become even longer – and it is becoming longer every day – the footnotes will also disappear somewhere in the appendix, and by and by you are gone. When your life is gone, how long can your mark on life remain? And what is the point of it all?Great is the insight of this old master: “A man, you never strove to make your mark.” So what is there to regret? If you are ambitious, you will regret because ambition is never fulfilled. If you are nonambitious you are happy because frustration will have no entry in you.“No wife nor son in your old age…” And he says, “I have no wife and no son, so what is there to be miserable about?” Try to understand his meaning. He says, “I am absolutely alone – nobody to disturb my aloneness. My solitude is unperturbed. I am alone, free, absolutely my own master. Nobody to drag me here and there, no family, no relations – what is there to be miserable about?”Remember, when you are alone, you are not alone; you are lonely, you miss the company of the other. You miss the company of the other because you have not yet learned how to be in your own company. You miss the company of the other because you don’t know how to be with yourself. Loneliness is negative: absence of the other. Aloneness is positive: presence of your own being. Loneliness is solitariness, aloneness is solitude. Loneliness is ugly; aloneness is beautiful. Aloneness has a luminosity in it.Buddha is alone, I am alone, Lieh Tzu is alone, this old man Lin Lei is alone. When you are sitting alone you are lonely, you are simply missing. Deep down you are seeking some company – where to go, what to do, how to get occupied so that you can forget yourself. You have not yet learned the way to be with yourself. You have not yet created a relationship with yourself. You have not yet fallen in love with yourself.This man says: “No wife nor son in your old age…” What is there to regret? I am alone, like a great peak of the Himalayas, alone. Everything is beautiful and silent and blissful.“…and the time of your death is near.” Death, to the Taoist, is just returning home; the journey is over. Just as you go into a foreign land… For example, when my sannyasins go back, they go into a foreign land. Whenever they can come back – this is their home – they are happy. Death is coming back home, going to the origin, back to the source, returning whence we came.So the old man said: “…and the time of your death is near.” So what is there to regret? I am simply happy, just happy. Everything is simply fine – more one cannot expect.“A child, you never learned how to behave;A man, you never strove to make your mark.No wife nor son in your old age,And the time of your death is near.“Master what happiness have you had that you should sing as you walk picking up the grains?”The Confucian disciple could not understand. He repeated his question again. He missed. He heard but he had not listened – it went above his head. Such a great saying, so full of experience. So utterly revolutionary, but the Confucian missed.The scholar always misses the truth. The pundit is the man most incapable of listening; his mind is so full of his own ideas. While this tremendous saying is being uttered, Tzu Kung must be thinking a thousand and one thoughts in his mind; must be preparing for more questions – what to ask next. He appears to be listening, but he does not listen.“Master what happiness have you had that you should sing as you walk picking up the grains?” Again the question is meaningful: “What happiness have you had?” Remember, if there is a cause to happiness, then the cause is bound to be in the past. Causes are always in the past. If you are happy, the question is “What has made you happy?” and that which has made you happy has gone into the past. So a caused happiness is past-oriented. Past-oriented means that which is no longer; it is fictitious, it is imaginary, it is illusory.Real happiness is present-oriented: it is never past-oriented. Real happiness arises herenow, this very moment; there is no time for it to be caused. It is cause and effect together. Try to understand it. If you say, “I am happy because I was born to a rich father” – now this is seventy years, a hundred years later. Your happiness about something which has passed a hundred years ago is just a figment in your memory. You say, “I am happy because ten years ago I was given the Nobel Prize.” Ten years ago you were given the Nobel Prize? Your happiness is very dusty. Ten years – so much dust has accumulated; it is not fresh, it is stale. You are a very poor man: you are eating food that was prepared ten years ago.Real happiness is herenow. It has no concern with the past; it has no concern with the future. Sometimes you become happy about the future: you are hoping that you are going to win the lottery, or you are hoping that your girlfriend is coming tomorrow, and you are getting excited. For what? For tomorrow, which has not come yet. You are mad. Either your happiness is past-oriented or future-oriented, and both are false because neither the past is, nor the future is. The past has already gone out of existence; the future has not entered yet. Real, authentic happiness is herenow. It arises this moment, out of nowhere. There are not two moments together – that’s why it is uncaused – because for cause and effect to exist, at least two moments will be needed: one to cause it, another to be the effect. But only this moment – total, alone, single, is available.Again the inquirer asks a wrong question:“…what happiness have you had that you shall sing as you walk picking up the grains?”“The reasons for my happiness all men share…”Again the old man says something beautiful: “The reasons for my happiness all men share…” “It has nothing to do with me; everybody has got it, but they don’t recognize it. Not only don’t they recognize it, they seek for that which is already available. Not only do they seek it…”“…instead, they worry over them.”The same reasons, these four reasons: “The reasons for my happiness all men share,” said Lin Lei smiling, “but instead, they worry over them.”You worry about your childhood: because you were not well educated – were not sent to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge – that your parents were poor, that you were not brought up as well as you would have liked, that you were not trained, that you missed many opportunities. You are sorry for it; you worry about it. There should be a cause to be happy – there should always be a cause to be happy, only then can a person be happy. Otherwise the poor person goes on crying and weeping because he was poor, and the rich person also goes on crying and weeping because he was rich.I have known rich people – they say their parents destroyed them because they were allowed so much comfort in their childhood that they never learned anything. You have seen this, you must have observed it, that it is very rare to find an intelligent rich man’s son, very rare. They are all stupid, they are bound to be; what is the point of becoming intelligent? Why bother? They already have all that they need; all that they can get through intelligence is already there, so why bother with intelligence? In the universities they fail, everywhere they fail; they don’t care a bit.When I was in the university, I had a student who failed for five years in his BA class. I asked him – I waited five years; the sixth year, when the examinations were coming again, I asked, “What are your plans? Are you going to fail again?” He said, “Who bothers? My father is rich. Only the poor need bother.” If you are born into a rich family, then you are not happy. If you are born into a poor family, of course, how can you be happy? If you are healthy, you are not happy because if you are healthy you never think about health as something to be happy about. A healthy person never thinks about health. If you are unhealthy, you are unhappy. Look at the logic of your mind. Whatsoever you can find to be miserable about you simply jump on it, and whatsoever you can be happy about you simply forget, you don’t take any note of it.“…but instead, they worry over them. It is because I took no pains learning to behave when I was young…”The old man has to repeat. He has said it, but seeing that the person has not listened, has not understood it, he has to repeat it.“It is because I took no pains learning to behave when I was young, and never strove to make my mark when I grew up that I have been able to live so long. It is because I have no wife and sons in my old age and the time of my death is near that I can be so happy.”This you will find in all the Oriental scriptures again and again: this great repetition. The reason is that the truths are such that the masters have to repeat them. Said only once, they are not understood. Buddha used to repeat everything three times – even small things. He would ask a disciple, “Have you heard me? Have you heard me? Have you heard me?” Three times! Out of great compassion. When the Buddhist scriptures were translated into Western languages people were very puzzled: “Why? Was Buddha talking to very stupid people? Why did he repeat so much?” No, they were as intelligent as you are, as people anywhere ever have been. It is not a question of intelligence; it is a question of awareness. They were not aware; they were as unaware as you are.I have to repeat continuously. My editors get puzzled. You can ask Anurag, you can ask Pratima, they get puzzled about why I repeat myself. They would like to sort it out. I don’t allow them to change it; I say, “Leave it as it is.” Because these truths are such that once, you may miss, twice, I hope that you may pay a little attention, thrice… I have to go on repeating like a hammering on your head. How long can you go on missing? It is a war between me and you.The old man repeated again, but again he was not understood. Tzu Kung said:“It is human to want long life, and hate death – why should you be happy to die?”The basic things were missed. Only one thing had he taken out of the four – the last. But the last can be understood only if the three preceding it have been understood, otherwise not. If the first three have been understood: “A child, you never learned how to behave; a man, you never strove to make your mark. No wife nor son in your old age, and the time of your death is near.” Just see it: the first belongs to your childhood, the second to your youth, the third to your old age, then comes death. It is a very natural corollary, it is absolutely logical – you have to begin from the very beginning. But he had forgotten about the three. He had not listened to the three; he jumped on the fourth. He must have been afraid, a man who was afraid about death. That caught his attention.But unless the three previous are understood, the fourth will be missed.“It is human to want long life, and hate death – why should you he happy to die?” It is not human – maybe it is manly, but not human. You have to understand these two words. In the dictionaries they are synonyms, but they are not in reality. Just as I told you loneliness and aloneness are synonyms in the dictionary, but not in reality, so man and human are two different things. Man is a static concept like dog, like buffalo, like donkey. Man is a static concept, just the name of a certain species, one of the species. One species is of monkeys, another of buffaloes, another of man. Have you noticed? For man we have two terms, man and human. For dog you have only one term: dogs; for buffaloes only one: buffaloes; for donkeys: donkeys. Why? Why this human? It has significance: man means simply a biological species; human has nothing to do with biology. Human is a growing concept, an open concept; man is a closed concept, man means you are a being. Human means you are a process, you are going, you are a journey, you are a pilgrimage, you are ongoing, you are a “going beyond.”Friedrich Nietzsche has said, “The greatest thing that I love in man is that he is not the goal but the bridge.” The most that I love in man is that he is an ongoing process; not an end but a means, a journey.Human means the bridge – a bridge between man and God. Man means just man, there is no opening in it. The word human is open: it goes beyond man. Human is a bridge, human is a journey, a pilgrimage – one is going somewhere, one is seeking something; one is trying to become something. Man is static, human is dynamic. Man is like a thing. Human is a process, riverlike, flowing, reaching to the beyond, groping in the dark. Man is sitting, not going anywhere, crippled, dead, like a grave. Human is a river, not knowing where the ocean is but trying hard to reach it.Remember this: man is afraid of death. Human? No, it is not human to be afraid of death. A person who is on a pilgrimage – he is ready to die if that is needed to go on; he is ready to go beyond, he is ready to use the door of death to pass beyond.The man said: “It is human to want a long life…” No, it is not human to want long life. Yes, it is relevant as far as the concept of man is concerned. Dogs are afraid of death, buffaloes are afraid of death, donkeys are afraid of death – so is man. But to be human, one is so thrilled with the possibility – one wants to know what death is. As one has lived one’s life, one starts feeling, “Now I have known what life is, I would like to know what death is. Life has been known, it was beautiful. Now let us see what death is, let it be another adventure.”Socrates was human when he was dying, when he was being given the poison. His disciples were crying and weeping, and he said, “Stop! You can do it when I am gone, but not now. This is wastage, sheer wastage. Such a great thing is happening, I am dying and you are crying!”And they said, “Master, you are dying, are you not afraid?”He said, “For what? I have lived my life; I loved it, it was beautiful. I have known it, but there is no need to go on repeating it forever and ever. Now something new – death is so new. I am enchanted; I am thrilled, the adventure is so great,” said Socrates. “I would like to see what death is now.”One of the disciples, Crito, said, “But master, everybody is afraid of death.”Socrates said, “I don’t know, I don’t understand why people are afraid of death. If the atheists are right that one dies utterly and nothing is left, then there is nothing to be feared – Socrates will not be there so why be afraid? I was not there before I was born and I don’t feel any fear about it.”Have you ever felt any fear that you were not before you were born? Does any fear grip you? Nothing. You will say, “Nonsense, because then I was not, so what is the point of being afraid?”Socrates said, “I will again be disappearing if the atheists are right, so what is there to fear? There will be nobody to be afraid. Or maybe the theists are true and I will be there. If I am going to be there, then why be afraid?”Now this is a man who has lived a dynamic life, a life of growth, evolution. If you have lived a life of evolution, then death comes as a revolution, a sudden change to some unknown reality. Why should one be afraid? No, it is not human.But all men are not human beings, remember. Very rarely. Somewhere a Socrates, a Lieh Tzu, a Buddha – these are human beings. Ordinarily there are men and women, but not human beings. To become a human being means to become a process, to become an inquiry, to become a passion for the impossible – a seeker, a seeker of truth.The old man said:“Death is a return to where we set out from when we were born. So how do I know that when I die here I shall not be born somewhere else?”The same Socratic attitude:“So how do I know that when I die here I shall not be born somewhere else? How do I know that life and death are not as good as each other? How do I know that it is not a delusion to crave anxiously for life? How do I know that present death would not be better than my past life?”How do I know…? See the insistence. He is not saying, “I know,” he is not claiming any knowledge. No wise man has ever claimed any knowledge. That’s why Socrates says, “Maybe the atheists are right, maybe the theists are right, but that doesn’t matter. Let any of them be right, I remain unperturbed.”Wisdom, real wisdom is always agnostic. Remember this word agnostic. A real seeker is agnostic. He never claims, “I know,” and he never says, “This is the truth.” He is very open, he is not closed. He has no dogma; he has no creed, he is simply conscious and aware, and is ready to face any reality whatsoever. Whatsoever reality comes to be revealed, he is ready to go into it. He trusts life. People who don’t trust life create beliefs, dogmas, theories, to protect themselves. The real wise man is vulnerable; he does not protect. He is open to the rains, to the winds, to the sun, to the moon, to life, to death, to darkness, to light – he is open to all. He has no protection; his vulnerability is total.Remember this man’s agnosticism. A hundred-year-old man starts feeling afraid of death. One starts thinking, “The soul must be immortal.” One starts imagining: “Now I will be received in paradise with great fanfare. God must be waiting, and a great marble palace must be ready for me.” One starts imagining things, one starts dreaming. But this man says, “How do I know?” He does not claim any knowledge. He simply says, “I don’t know, so what is the point of being afraid? I don’t know this way or that way. I am absolutely ignorant; I have not tasted death yet, so how do I know? Let me know! Why should I be afraid from the very beginning? It may turn out to be better than life, who knows?”Let it happen. Remember, real understanding is always waiting for the moment to happen. It never decides beforehand, it never plans beforehand – it is spontaneous.Tzu Kung listened, but did not understand his meaning. He returned and told Confucius.He could not understand because he was a great scholar, the chief disciple of Confucius. He was already stuffed with knowledge; he could not understand. He reported to Confucius, his master, and what does Confucius say? Listen:“I knew he would be worth talking to…”The man of knowledge always goes on claiming. Now he says,“I knew he would be worth talking to…and so he is…”He is trying to say to his disciples: “I am proved right, my inference was valid: this man is worth talking to.” But he cannot accept what the man has said; that is beyond him also. It is beyond his disciple, and it is beyond him also.He says:“…but he is a man who has found it, yet not found all of it.”…he is a man who has found it, yet not found all of it. Now this is absurd. Truth cannot be divided – either you have found it, all of it, or you don’t have it at all. It is impossible to have a little bit of truth. It cannot be fragmented; it cannot be cut into slices. Truth is total, truth is whole – either you have it or you don’t have it. It is not possible to have a little of truth. It is not possible to have a little of God. It is impossible; the very thing is absurd. But when you come to an expert he has to say something to prove that he knows.Confucius says that this man has found it. He says it because he had sent the disciple, now he has to prove that he was right. But he cannot concede that he knows, so he says, “He knows a little bit, but not all of it.”This happens. A man of knowledge always goes on protecting his ego. This statement is as absurd as a statement can be. You ask a Buddha, you ask Lao Tzu, you ask Jesus, you ask Krishna and they will all say: “Truth cannot be divided. It is not a thing that you can divide. It is an experience – when it happens, it happens. When it happens, it happens totally. You disappear into that experience.” But Confucius says, “He has found it, but not all of it.” This very statement shows his ignorance, but the expert always has to protect his expertise.I have heard a beautiful anecdote. Listen to it carefully.The boy was running around with too many women so the old man decided to send him to the leading psychiatrists. It was a long-drawn-out analysis and the bill was very high, but he felt it was worth it if a cure was reached. Finally, when the son returned, he demanded to know what had been covered in the treatment.“Did you tell the doctors how we caught you with the maid when you were ten?”The son nodded.“Did you tell them we couldn’t keep a cook for the last ten years because of you? Twenty-three cooks we ran through!”The son nodded.“Did you tell them about the five models from that place, the thirty-three girls in college and what happened with the superintendent’s wife?”Again the son nodded.“So tell me, what did they say?”“They said I have homosexual tendencies,” said the son.“They said I have homosexual tendencies”! Experts have to say something; they have to show their expertise. Now if this man has homosexual tendencies then nobody can have heterosexual tendencies – impossible! But the experts have to find something; they have to say something, however utterly absurd.Confucius says, “This man has found it, yet not found all of it.” That’s all the comment that he makes, and this old man has spoken such a profound philosophy in these sentences: “A child, you never learned how to behave; a man, you never strove to make your mark. No wife nor son in your old age, and the time of your death is near.” “What is there to regret?” And: “The reasons for my happiness all men share…” Because happiness is not something that you have to achieve, it is already there, it is built in, it is your very nature. All men can be happy, but only if they stop finding causes to be happy. One has to be just happy for no reason at all.He has given the whole message of Tao in these sentences. Be anarchic. Be authentically true to your own being. Listen only to yourself. Don’t allow anybody to discipline you. Don’t allow anybody to make a slave of you. Don’t allow anybody to condition you. Avoid the priest and the politician, avoid the do-gooders. Remember that you have to be just yourself and nobody else. This anarchy, this chaotic freedom… And don’t be ambitious because that is just mediocre. Just live your life as totally as possible. Don’t try to make a mark on the history pages – that is meaningless. And don’t be always concerned with others. By and by learn how to be alone, enjoy solitude – that’s what meditation is all about.And finally, remember that death is not a death, it is a new beginning. Who knows? Maybe it leads you into a higher life. If the cosmos has a rhythm in it, it must be so. It must be leading you into a higher life. You have learned so much, you have become more worthy; naturally death must lead you to a higher plane of being. That seems to be simple: a man who has lived, loved, experienced, meditated, who has gone through so many things in life, has become more worthy – he has to be given a higher life. If this existence has any compassion, then death is going to be a higher plenitude, a higher peak.Wait with thrill, with great adventure. Wait with tremendous joy, delight and celebration. Happiness is very natural: one should not seek it, one should simply enjoy it. Such a great message, and what did Confucius say? That this man had found it, yet not found all of it – as if Confucius had found all of it.These parables are very subtle. They are a great shattering of the Confucian ideal, but their way is very polite. If you don’t go deep you may never understand. Meditate over these parables; they have great messages – decode them. Your life will be tremendously enriched through them.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I see the swamis eat so well and so often, and haven't heard you mention anything about this diet. It is said food quickens the sperm and is a sin to eat for the tongue. It should first be offered to the gods etc.The first thing: I am not a believer in fasting, I believe in feasting. My whole approach is that of celebration. I am not against your pleasures – they are not all there is, one should go beyond them, but in themselves they are beautiful. A man should not deny anything because the denied part will take revenge. The moment you start denying something you go against Tao. Tao is to be natural: a feast and not a fast. A fast can be used only when it comes naturally.Sometimes animals fast. Sometimes you may have observed your dog fasting: you put the food down and he will not eat. He is not a Jaina, he is not a believer in fasting; he does not feel like eating. It is not a question of principle, it is not a philosophy – he is ill, his whole being is against eating – rather than eat, he would like to vomit. He will go and eat grass and vomit. He would like to relieve himself; his stomach is not in a condition to digest any more. But he is not a faster. It is natural.If sometimes you feel that a fast comes naturally – not as a law, not as a principle, not as a philosophy to be followed, not as a discipline to be imposed, but out of your natural feel for it – good. Then, too, remember always that your fast is in the service of feasting, so that you can eat well again. The purpose of fasting is as a means, never as an end; and that will happen rarely, once in a while. If you are perfectly aware while you are eating, and enjoying it, you will never eat too much.My insistence is not on dieting but on awareness. Eat well, enjoy it tremendously. Remember, the rule is: if you don’t enjoy your food you will have to eat more to compensate. If you enjoy your food you will eat less, there will be no need to compensate. If you eat slowly, tasting every bit of it, chewing well, you will be completely absorbed into it. Eating should be a meditation.I am not against taste because I am not against the senses. To be sensitive is to be intelligent, to be sensitive is to be alive. Your so-called religions have tried to de-sensitize you, to make you dull. They are against taste; they would like you to make your tongue absolutely dull so you don’t taste anything. But that is not a state of health; the tongue becomes dull only in illness. When you have a fever the tongue becomes dull. When you are healthy the tongue is sensitive; alive, throbbing, pulsating with energy. I am not against taste; I am for taste. Eat well, taste well; taste is divine.And exactly like taste, you have to look at beauty and enjoy it; you have to listen to music and enjoy it; you have to touch rocks and leaves and human beings – the warmth, the texture – and enjoy all of them. Use all of your senses. Use them to their optimum, then you will really live, and your life will be aflame. It will not be dull; it will be aflame with energy and vitality. I am not for those people who have been teaching you to kill your senses; they are against the body.Remember: the body is your temple; the body is a divine gift. It is so delicate, and it is so beautiful, and it is so wonderful – to kill it is to be ungrateful to God. God has given you taste; you have not created it, it has nothing to do with you. God has given you eyes, and God has made this psychedelic world so colorful. Let there be a great communion between the eye and the colors of the world. He has made everything, and there is a tremendous harmony. Don’t break this harmony.These so-called mahatmas are just on ego trips, and they say that the best way to feel that you are great is to be against the body. Children do it. The child feels that the bowel movement is coming; he holds it, he feels powerful because he feels his will: he will not yield to the body. His bladder is full and he holds it. He wants to show the body “I’m not your servant, I’m your master.” But these are destructive habits.Listen to the body. The body is not your enemy, and when the body is saying something, go accordingly because the body has a wisdom of its own. Don’t disturb it; don’t go on a mind trip. That’s why I don’t teach you dieting; I teach you only awareness. Eat with full awareness, eat meditatively, and then you will never eat more, and you will never eat less. More is as bad as less. Too much eating is bad, just like too much fasting; these are extremes. Nature wants you to be balanced, to be in a sort of equilibrium, to be in the middle, neither less nor more. Don’t go to the extreme.To go to the extreme is to be neurotic. There are two types of neurotics about food: those who go on eating, not listening to the body – the body goes on crying and screaming, “Stop!” and they go on eating. These are neurotic people. Then there is the other variety: the body goes on screaming, “I am hungry!” and they are on a fast. Neither is religious; both are neurotic, both are pathological – they need treatment, they need to be hospitalized. A religious person is one who is balanced: in whatsoever he is doing, he is always in the middle. He never goes to the extreme because all extremes will create tensions, anxieties. When you eat too much there is anxiety because the body is burdened. When you don’t eat enough there is anxiety because the body is hungry. A religious person is one who knows where to stop; and that should come out of your awareness, not out of a certain teaching.If I tell you how much to eat, that would be dangerous because it would be just an average. Somebody is very thin, and somebody is very fat; if I tell you how much to eat – “three chapattis” – then for somebody it may be too much and for somebody else it may be nothing. So I don’t teach rigid rules; I simply give you a sense of awareness. Listen to your body: you have different bodies. There are different types of energies, different types of involvement. Somebody is a professor in a university; he does not exert much energy as far as his body is concerned. He will not need much food, and he will need a different kind of food. Somebody is a laborer; he will need much food, and a different kind of food. A rigid principle would be dangerous. No rule can be given as a universal rule.George Bernard Shaw has said that there is only one golden rule, that there are no golden rules. Remember it: there is no golden rule. There cannot be because each individual is so unique that nobody can prescribe for everyone. So I simply give you a sense… And my sense is not of principles, of laws; my approach is of awareness, because today you may need more food and tomorrow you may not need that much food. It is not only a question of your being different from others – every day of your life is different from every other day. The whole day you have rested, you may not need much food. The whole day you have been in the garden digging a hole, you may need lots of food. One should just be alert, and one should be capable of listening to what the body is saying. Go according to the body.Neither is the body the master, nor is the body the slave; the body is your friend – befriend your body. The one who goes on eating too much and the one who goes on dieting are both in the same trap. They are both deaf; they don’t listen to what the body is saying.You say, “It is said that food quickens the sperm, and is a sin to eat for the tongue. It should be offered to the gods etc.” Have you some antagonism toward the gods? If you offer food… So many people offering food will quicken their sperm! Have you some enmity toward the gods? It will help them to fall into sin! Be kind. Leave the gods alone. In fact, when you eat respectfully, lovingly, meditatively, the food is offered to God because God is within you. All food is offered to the God within. Just be respectful. Eat with feeling, eat with gratitude. Food gives you life, it is going to revitalize you, it will become your blood, your bones. Feel grateful – without it you will not be alive, feel thankful. If you are eating silently, meditatively, and your mind is not rushing here and there, you are totally present, your attention is perfect, this is offering. You have offered the food to God because you are nothing but God’s hand, his instrument. Where are you going to offer the food? God himself is eating through you, so don’t overfeed God otherwise he feels a bellyache; don’t starve God otherwise he feels hungry.All these things are nonsense: “…it’s a sin to eat for the tongue.” Then how will you eat? Then it is a sin to see for the eye; how will you see? Then it is a sin to hear for the ear; how will you hear? Then there is nothing left for you – commit suicide because all of life is of the senses. Whatsoever you do, the senses come into it. It is through the senses that you flow and relate with life. When you eat with taste, God inside is fulfilled, satisfied; and when you eat with taste, the God within food is respected.But your mahatmas, your so-called religious gurus, have been teaching you self-torture. In the name of religion they have been simply teaching you nothing but masochism: “Torture yourself – the more you torture yourself, the more valuable you become in the eyes of God. The more unhappy you are, the more virtue you have. If you are happy, you commit sin. Happiness is a sin; to be unhappy is to be virtuous.” This is their logic. I cannot see the point. It is so absurd, so illogical, so patently foolish. God is happy, so if you want to be in tune with God be happy. This is my teaching: God is happy, so if you want to be in tune with God, be happy because whenever you are happy, you fall in step with God; whenever you are unhappy, you are out of step. A miserable man cannot be a religious man.So if you ask me what sin is… There is only one sin: to be miserable is to be a sinner. To be happy, tremendously happy, is to be a saint. Let your religion teach you how to sing and how to dance and how to delight in life. Let your religion be an affirmative religion, a yes-saying religion, a religion of happiness, joy, bliss. Throw off all the nonsense that you have been carrying for centuries – that has crippled all of humanity. It has made people so ugly and so unhappy and so miserable. And it appeals only to the pathological – those who want to torture themselves; it gives them an excuse.To torture oneself or to torture others are both diseases – the very idea of torturing is a disease. Somebody is an Adolf Hitler, he tortures others; somebody is a Mahatma Gandhi, he tortures himself. Both are in the same boat – maybe standing back to back, but standing in the same boat. Adolf Hitler’s joy is in torturing others. Mahatma Gandhi’s joy is in torturing himself, but both are violent. The logic is the same –their joy depends on torture. Their direction is different, but the direction is not the question, their mind has the same attitude: torture. You respect a person who tortures himself because you don’t understand the logic of it. Adolf Hitler is condemned all over the world, and Gandhi is worshipped all over the world, and I am simply puzzled. How is it possible? Because the logic is the same. Gandhi says, “Don’t eat anything for taste. Taste should not be allowed. Eat as a duty, not as a joy. Eat because one has to live, that’s all.” He reduces the joy of eating to the ordinary world of work: “Don’t eat as play.” Remember, animals eat that way. They eat just to eat, just to exist, to survive. Have you seen animals enjoying food? Not at all. They don’t have feasts and parties, and they don’t sing and dance. Only man has made eating a great feast.The attitude is the same about other things. Gandhi says, “Make love only if you want a child, otherwise never. Let love be only biological. Eating should be only to survive, and love should be so that the race survives. Never make love as fun.” That’s what animals do. Have you looked at a dog making love? Look in his face, you will not find any fun, but a sort of duty. He has to do it; something is enforced from within – the biological urge. The moment he has made love, he forgets the beloved; he goes on his own way; he never says even a “Thank you.” Finished, the job is done! Only man loves for fun. That is where humanity is higher than animals – only man loves for fun; just for the joy of it, just for the beauty of it, just for the music and the poetry of it.That’s why I say the pill is one of the greatest revolutions in the world because it has completely changed the whole concept of love. Now, one can love only for joy. There is no need to be under biological slavery, there is no need to make love only when you want a child. Now sex and love are completely separate. The pill has created the greatest revolution: now sex is sex and love is love. Sex is when it is biological; love is when it is simply a beautiful music of two bodies meeting, engulfing each other, disappearing into each other, becoming lost in each other, falling into a totally new dimension of rhythm, harmony – an orgasmic experience. No problem of children, no biological push-pull, nothing. Now the act in itself is beautiful, no longer a means toward any end – that is the difference. Work is when it is a means to some end. Play is when the end and the means are together. Play is when the means itself is the end – there is no other end to it.Eat for the joy of it, then you are man, human, a higher being. Love for the joy of love, then you are man, a higher being. Listen for the joy of listening and you will be freed from the confinement of instincts.I am not against happiness; I am all for it. I am a hedonist. This is my understanding: that all the great spiritual people of the world have always been hedonists. If somebody is not a hedonist and pretends to be a spiritual person, he is not – then he is a psychopath because happiness is the very goal, the very source, the very end of all things. God is seeking happiness through you, in millions of forms. Allow him all the happiness that is possible and help him to go to higher peaks, higher reaches of happiness. Then you are religious, and then your temples will become places of celebration, and your churches will not be so sad and ugly, so somber, so dead, like graveyards. Then there will be laughter, and there will be song, and there will be dance, and there will be great rejoicing.Religion has suffered very much because of these people who have been teaching self-torture. Religion has to be freed from all this nonsense. Great rubbish has become attached to religion. The essential religion is nothing but joy. So whatsoever gives you joy is virtuous; whatsoever makes you sad, unhappy, miserable is a sin. Let that be the criterion.I don’t give you rigid rules because I know how the human mind functions. Once a rigid rule is given, you forget awareness and you start following the rigid rule. A rigid rule is not the question – you can follow the rule and you will never grow.Listen to a few anecdotes:Benny arrived home to find the kitchen a mess of broken crockery.“What happened?” he asked his wife.“There’s something wrong with this cookbook,” she explained. ‘It says that an old cup without a handle will do for the measuring – and it’s taken me eleven tries to get a handle off without breaking the cup.”Now if the cookbook says that, it has to be done. The human mind is foolish – remember it. Once you have a rigid rule, you will follow it.The mob was meeting the big guy, and what the big guy said, went. The buzzer rang, and the servant went over to answer the door. He peeked through the slot in the frame, and, recognizing the visitor, allowed the panel to swing back.“Leave your umbrella at the door,” the servant told the visitor.“I ain’t got one,” answered the visitor.“Then get back home and get one. The boss told me everyone must leave their umbrella at the door. Otherwise I am not going to allow you in.”A rule is a rule.One of my friends is a professor in the University of Kolkata, a very renowned scientist. He went to Rangoon just to gather a specimen of the urine of a certain person. The disease happens very rarely and the urine changes its composition altogether, so he rushed to Rangoon. He wanted to study that particular disease. He got the urine. He was very happy because the illness happens very rarely. But when he came to Kolkata Airport he was prevented by the authorities from importing the urine. They looked into their files – there was no provision to import urine. So they said, “You will have to leave it. We will have to inquire.”But he said, “This is nonsense!”“This is all we can do. You can look in the file, nobody has ever imported urine, and the government has no idea about it; this is something new! We will have to ask Delhi.”And as things go… So the urine was not allowed; it remained with the airport authorities. The professor was crying, and he said, “This will be destroyed within forty-eight hours and it will be of no use. I need it right now.”“But,” they said, “that is not possible at all, because we don’t even know how much to charge – how much duty to charge. We will have to wait.”After two months the urine was delivered. Because something goes to Delhi, and then the red tape, and… After two months!Rules are rules. And I don’t want you to become government officials, I want you to become intelligent people.It was a desperate chase but the police car was catching up to the bank robbers when suddenly the getaway car swerved into a gas station, at which point the cop driving phoned his chief.“Did you catch them?” the chief asked excitedly.“They were lucky,” replied the cop, “We were closing the gap, only half a mile away, when I noticed our five hundred miles were up and we had to stop and change our oil.”What can you do when the oil has to be changed after each five hundred miles, and five hundred miles are up? You have to change the oil first.I never give you rigid rules because I know how stupid the human mind is and can be. I simply give you a feel, a sense of direction. Be aware and live through awareness.Ordinarily you are living a very unconscious life. You eat too much because you are unconscious – you don’t know what you are doing. You become jealous, you become possessive, because you are unconscious and you don’t know what you are doing. You get mad in anger; you become almost possessed of the Devil when you are in a rage, and you do things that you don’t know you are doing.Jesus said on the cross – the last of his words, but of tremendous import, he said, “Father forgive these people because they don’t know what they are doing.” Now Christianity has never interpreted these tremendous words rightly. Jesus’ message is simple. He is saying: “These people are unconscious. They don’t know awareness at all, so they cannot be responsible. Whatsoever they are doing, they are doing in sleep; they are somnambulists, sleep-walkers. Please forgive them. They cannot be held responsible.”So when you eat too much, I pray to God, “Father, forgive this man. He does not know what he is doing.” When you fast, I again have to pray to God, “Forgive this man because he does not know what he is doing.” The real question is not of doing but of bringing awareness into your being, and that awareness will change everything. You are like drunkards.I have heard…Mike told Pat he was going to a wake, and Pat offered to tag along. On the way Pat suggested a nipper or two and they both got well sloshed. As a result Mike couldn’t remember the address of the wake. “Where is your friend’s house?” Pat asked.“I forget the number, but I’m sure this is the street.”They had walked along for a few minutes when Mike squinted at a house that he thought was it. So they staggered in but the hall was dark. They opened the door and discovered a living room, which was also dark except for the faint glimmer of candles sitting on the piano. They went down in front of the piano, knelt and prayed. Pat stopped long enough to look at the piano. “Mike,” he said, “I didn’t know your friend, but he sure had a fine set of teeth.”This is the situation. This is how man is. The only thing that I would like to give to you is a taste of awareness. That will change your whole life. It is not a question of disciplining you; it is a question of making you luminous from within.The second question:Osho,The Osho Ashram is operated with Confucian and scientific attitudes and processes (planning, budgeting, accounting, rules, regulations). Would it be appropriate to acknowledge Confucius and Western science as part of the Tao, and thereby spiritual?Tao is vast – science can be included in it. But science is not vast and Tao cannot be included in it. Science is a part of the vast mystery of life. If you take science as a part, then there is nothing wrong; but science pretends, claims, that it is the whole, thereby everything goes wrong. Exactly the same is the situation with intellect, calculation, arithmetic. Nothing is wrong with intellect if it functions as a part and does not start claiming, “I am the whole.” When the intellect claims, “I am the whole,” then there is trouble. When the intellect says, “I am just a part of a vast entity, of a huge entity, and I do my work – beyond that I don’t know what is going on,” then there is no problem. I am not against intellect as such. I am against the intellect which claims to be the whole.That is the standpoint of Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu. They are not against intellect. How can they be? They are not against anything. My hand is a part of my body, but if the hand starts claiming, “I am the whole,” and if the hand starts claiming, “I should dominate the whole because I am the whole, everything else is secondary,” then the hand has gone mad, then this hand is dangerous – it has lost contact with the whole.Nothing is wrong with science in itself, but science should be a part of religion, then it is beautiful. Intellect should be a part of the totality of human beings, then it is beautiful. Intellect too is beautiful. I go on using the intellect every day. What am I doing here right now? Intellect is so significant that even when you have to talk about something which is not within intellect, you have to use intellect. Even to talk about Tao, you have to use the intellect, you have to lean on intellect. How can Tao be against intellect, reason? The only thing that Tao wants you to understand is that life is more than reason, vaster than reason. Reason covers a small space, but that is not the boundary of the totality.Lao Tzu is big and Confucius can be included in him, but Confucius is very narrow and Lao Tzu cannot be included in him. Lao Tzu is Tao. Confucius is torah. Torah is a Hebrew word, but I like it because it goes well with Tao. Tao means love, torah means law. In the word tarot is the word torah. Tarot comes from two words: torah rota; it means the wheel of law, the rotating wheel of law. Torah means the law. Law is bound to be rigid and law is bound to be narrow. The law needs to be perfectly defined; if it is not defined, it will not be of any use. The law has to have definitions, clear-cut boundaries, only then can it be of any use.That’s where Jesus entered into the history of the Jews: he brought Tao into the world of torah. Naturally he asked to be crucified – it was only natural, because torah cannot tolerate Tao. The law and the law-oriented mind cannot allow love because when love comes all law is shattered. Love is so vast, oceanic, and it comes into the narrow world of the law and the law breaks down. The Jews could not allow Jesus because he brought a very foreign climate which had never been part of the Jewish mind.Jesus is indefinable; Moses is perfectly definable. Moses will easily agree with Confucius, will not agree with Lao Tzu. The Ten Commandments are the foundation of the law-abiding mind, and of course the law-abiding mind can always find ways and means and loopholes in the law.A woman, a married woman, fell in love with a young man and the young man wanted to make love to her. But she said, “This is not right.” She was a Jew and she said, “This is against the law. And we will be breaking a commandment.”And the young man said, “So what? Nine are still left!”Law is narrow, and so narrow that one has to find loopholes otherwise life would become impossible. Law creates hypocrites, law creates cunning persons, law creates criminals – otherwise life would become absolutely impossible. Law does not allow you to live; it makes life so narrow that you have to find ways and means… And then come the lawyers. They help you, they help you to break the law and yet remain within the law – that’s their whole work. The lawyer is needed because the law creates the criminal on the one hand and the lawyer on the other, and both are the same.I have heard…A priest was saying to a young man, “Listen to this story. There were two brothers. One was very law-abiding and became a lawyer and the other was very rebellious and became a criminal. The one who became a criminal is now in jail for his whole life. What do you say about it?”The young man said, “I can only say one thing: one has been caught and the other has not been caught yet.”The lawyer and the criminal are both by-products of the law, the torah. I am not against torah because such a vast humanity has to exist; torah is needed; the law is needed. You have to keep to the left of the road. If everybody started walking anywhere they wanted – as people do in India – then it would be very difficult, it would be very dangerous. One has to follow the law.But the law is not life. One should remember that the law has to be used, has to be followed, and yet one has to remain available to Tao, the beyond. Tao should be the goal and torah should become just a means. Torah should not claim, “I am the whole.” Once torah claims, “I am the whole,” life becomes meaningless. Once logic claims, “I am the whole,” life becomes meaningless. Once somebody says, “Life is nothing but science,” then it is reductionism, and everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator. Then love is nothing but chemistry – a hormonal thing. When everything can be reduced to the lowest part, then the lotus is nothing but mud.One should remain available for Tao; following torah, one should remain open to Tao. In fact, torah is right only if it leads you in the direction of Tao. Law is really right if it leads you toward love. If it goes against love, then that law is illegal.For example, the law says that you should make love only to your wife. Good, if you love your wife then the law goes toward love. But if you don’t love your wife, then it is immoral to make love to her: then the law is going against love. If you make love to a woman to whom you are not married, it is love not law. And if you can manage to get married to the woman, it becomes law also – but it is not against love. A wise man will see that his life always uses the law for love. Torah is a stepping-stone toward Tao.This ashram, naturally, has to be run according to Confucius, but Confucius here is in the service of Lao Tzu. You see this mad man here? Confucius is in the service of Lao Tzu: torah in service to Tao. Then there is no problem. Vice versa, then things go wrong; then you are standing on your head and something has to be done immediately.The third question:Osho,Yesterday, although sitting in an uncomfortable position, I slept deeply through most of your lecture. I don't find your discourses boring, so why did I sleep?Nothing is wrong. If you enjoy the sleep, perfectly good. Just remember one thing: don’t start snoring because that disturbs other people’s sleep.A man started to snore in his seat at the opera. “Please stop your snoring,” the usher pleaded, “you are disturbing the others.”“Look, kiddo,” the man said angrily, “I paid for this seat and I’ll do as I please.”“Yes, sir” replied the usher. “But you are keeping everybody awake.”Sleep is good – nothing like it. Enjoy it to your heart’s desire.Sometimes it happens… There are two possibilities: listening to me, either the talk becomes boring, then you can fall asleep; or the talk can become like a lullaby, then too you can fall asleep. The talk can become like a song around you, a warm song around you, then too you can fall asleep. Or it can become a jarring note, very boring, so you have to escape somewhere. My guards won’t allow you to escape from here easily, so the only possible escape is to close your eyes and go to sleep. That is an escape so that you need not listen. Both are possibilities.Sometimes what I am saying may look boring to you because whatsoever I am saying is one truth again and again and again. And I have to repeat it because I have compassion for you. Otherwise every morning I could come and sit in this chair, say, “Ditto,” and go away.The great novelist had gone insane, but now there seemed to be some hope for his recovery. For three months he’d been sitting at a typewriter in his room and pounding out a novel. At last he announced that it was completed and brought it to the leading psychiatrist at the institution who grasped it eagerly and began to read: “General Jones leaped upon his faithful horse and yelled, “Giddap, giddap, giddap, giddap, giddap.” Then the doctor thumbed through the rest of the book. “Why there’s nothing here but five hundred pages of ‘giddaps’!” he exclaimed.“Yeah,” said the writer, “stubborn horse!”So what can I do? I have to say, “Giddap, giddap,” every day. Stubborn horse… Unless you listen, I am going to repeat it again and again. It is not going to help you much escaping into sleep; it is not going to help you much. I will hammer you out of it.Sometimes it is boring. I know, because sometimes I myself fall asleep. Then I have to look at the clock.The psychiatrist was late for the appointment. He came barging in and was very apologetic. “Think nothing of it,” said the patient, “I kept busy.”“How?” asked the doctor suspiciously.“I was in the corner talking to myself.”“Was it an interesting conversation?”“Not very. You know me!”Certainly I know myself more than you know me. I know sometimes it becomes too boring, so don’t feel guilty. Just remember one thing: don’t snore. Sometimes it becomes a lullaby. If you love me, and you love me tremendously, then whatsoever I say goes and surrounds you like a warm blanket; you start feeling cozy, comfortable. Maybe the physical posture is not very comfortable. It has been made in such a way that you cannot be physically very comfortable in this Chuang Tzu Auditorium. The marble underneath, cold, hurting, and my guards all around. They don’t allow you anything: they don’t even allow you to cough, sneeze; and you have to be completely alert, otherwise… The posture is not comfortable – even then you fall asleep. Think, if the posture were comfortable then you would fall into a coma! But you love me, and while my words reach you they become lullabies. There is nothing wrong in falling asleep once in a while. Don’t make it a permanent habit.The fourth question:Osho,When I become enlightened, how am I going to know that I have become enlightened?Safari. Africa. Big-game hunting – and the woman was driving the handsome white hunter crazy with her barrage of questions.“How will I know if I trap a tiger?” she asked.“By his yellow coat and stripes, madam.”“And how will I know if I trap a lion?”“By the brown color and his flowing mane.”“And how will I know if I trap an elephant?”“That, madam,” sighed the white hunter, “is the easiest of all. By the slight odor of peanuts on his breath.”Don’t be too worried. This enlightenment is such a big thing – like an elephant – you will not be able to miss it. You will not even be able to escape it! Once it happens it is self-evident: it needs no other proof of what it is.It is like a dead man coming back to life – will he need any proof? He will know that he is alive. It is like a blind man whose eyes are healed – will he ask for any proof? He will know because suddenly he will see all the colors, the sun and the moon and the stars, and the faces all around. The darkness that has always been there will have suddenly disappeared. Everything will be full of light, and color and rainbows. Will a deaf man need any proof when his deafness is gone? Suddenly, so many sounds which he has never heard before will be there; he will be surrounded by them.But even these things are not real metaphors for enlightenment. It is so tremendous; it is so radical that there is no way of missing it. Don’t be worried about such problems. Rather try to become enlightened.The fifth question:Osho,It seems as if you speak only for me, as if you go on answering only my questions. Can I ask how you do it?Mulla Nasruddin was telling me a story:I went to the country on my vacation and the little birds sang so merrily under my window every morning that when I left I went out and thanked them for the beautiful melodies. The landlord came out and said, “I hope you don’t think those birds were singing for you?”“Why, of course I do,” I said.“Those birds are singing for me,” the landlord said, angry like.“I knew I was right. But we got into a big fight over it. So we were brought before the judge. He fined us both ten rupees each. “Those birds,” he said, “were singing for me.”When I am talking to you, everybody will feel that I am talking to them because whatsoever I am saying is so fundamental that it has to be related to everybody. I am not particularly talking to anybody, but I am talking about such fundamental things that it is impossible not to relate with those fundamental things – everybody is related, more or less. When I talk about love, you will all feel that I am talking to you because love is your problem – everybody’s problem. When I talk about the mind, of course you will think I am talking to you because you have a mind as everybody else has, and all minds are mad.So when I touch on a fundamental truth, everybody is bound to feel that there has been a special message for him. But remember, I am only talking about the fundamental truths. They are addressed to everybody here but not to anybody in particular, though I know everybody will feel it. Good, that’s beautiful that you feel directly connected with me.The two hunters sat in their boat, hidden from the view of any ducks that might happen by. They waited and waited. Suddenly they heard a noise in the growth alongside them and upon parting the reeds found another hunter – cockeyed drunk and working on the death of another fifth. “Hey!” they warned, “This is our spot. Get the hell downstream.”The drunk said nothing. He just killed the bottle and then paddled two miles away. A single duck came skimmering by a short time later. The two hunters each fired two shots and missed. Then they watched downstream as the drunk took one shot and bagged it.They paddled down to offer congratulations. “Say,” they told him, “that was pretty fast. How’d you do it?”“Aww…” said the drunk, “with all them ducks up there, how could I miss?”That’s how the situation is here. With so many orange ducks around, I can go on shooting. There is no need to make any target, how can I miss? It is impossible to miss.Good that you feel personally connected – but remember, don’t make it an ego trip. The mind is very cunning, and you have to be constantly alert about its subtle ways, otherwise you will think, “I am somebody special. Osho is talking just to me.” Then you will start fantasizing and projecting, and you will be lost in your fantasy world. Yes, I am talking to you too, but not specially. I am talking in a very general way; I am telling you that which is fundamental – naturally it is your foundation too.The sixth question:Osho,Is there a difference between inner discipline and love?There is none: with the inner discipline a love arises naturally. But there is a great difference between the outer discipline and love – not only difference, but antagonism. If you force an outer discipline on yourself it will kill your love qualities; it will kill your love sensibilities; it will make you dull. You will lose your fine receptivity because any discipline forced from the outside is against your sensibilities, and love is the culmination of all sensitivities.When you fall in love with a woman, you fall in love from all the five senses. You may not be aware because man has become so alienated from his own senses that he is not aware. But watch the animals which are still more rooted in their beings – however unconscious, but still rooted in their beings. A dog is going to smell his girlfriend before he makes love. It is not only a question of seeing a beautiful woman; you should sense the smell too. Sometimes it happens that the face is beautiful and appeals to you, but the smell is not appealing. Then, if you marry this woman, you will be in trouble. One sense will be constantly divorcing and your other sense will be constantly marrying, and there will be conflict.Real love happens only when your five senses are in harmony like an orchestra. Then there is a sort of eternity to your love. Then it is not temporal; then it is not momentary. When you love a woman, you love her sound, you love her touch, you love her smell, you love the way she walks, you love the way she looks at you, you love her totality. And this totality can only be glimpsed through all the senses.Man has become very eye-oriented. No other senses are allowed to say anything; you just look through the eyes – the proportion. In your world beauty contests they don’t smell the body. This is foolish. This is simply foolish. A woman may have a beautiful proportion of the body and may stink! She may have the right proportion, but may not have the right voice, the right sound. Her sound may be unmusical, then she is not beautiful – something is missing. A real world beauty contest will have to be based on all the five senses. Why should the eyes dictate and dominate? This is very dictatorial. The eye is dictating your whole life; naturally you are not happy because one sense has become Adolf Hitler. There should be a democracy in your being, in your body. All the senses should be allowed to say their things, and you should listen to all.If you enforce any discipline from the outside, it is going to kill your love because all disciplines from the outside are bound to dull you. That is the meaning of an outer discipline. That’s what Mahatma Gandhi went on saying. That’s what Adolf Hitler did – imposed a discipline on the whole nation from the outside, and imposed it so perfectly that people started doing things which they could not have even dreamt of. The discipline had dulled them completely, they were no longer sensitive. Millions of Jews were burned, and the people who were in charge of burning those millions of Jews were standing there unaffected. What happened? Their sensitivity had been dulled. A great layer of dullness had been imposed on their being.That’s what is being done in every army. The whole training of the military is nothing but how to dull a person, how to dull his sensitivity and how to dull his intelligence. You will never find army people intelligent – impossible, otherwise why should they be in the army? Can’t they find anything else to be? The army should be the last thing. The whole training is nothing but creating dullness. “Left turn, right turn, left turn, right turn” three, four hours in the morning, continuously.Once a professor became a soldier and he was a man of great intelligence. So, when he was ordered “Right turn!” he stood wherever he was standing. And the general asked, “Why are you standing there when I have said ‘right turn’ and everybody has turned?”He said, “Sooner or later you will say ‘left turn,’ so what is the point? They will come to the same position again, and this is going to happen for three, four hours. Why bother?”Why this continuous, “left turn, right turn”? There is a trick in it: it is a conditioning; you are not allowed to think. “Left turn” means “left turn” – you have to do it. Go on doing something, obeying something, and by and by you lose your intelligence. Then you don’t think, then some day you are ordered to kill the enemy and you kill. It is just like “right turn, left turn.” You don’t think; you don’t ponder: “What has this man done to me? Why should I kill?” The why never arises – you simply do it. You become a robot, a mechanical thing; you are no longer a man.In India, the Sikhs, the Punjabis are the best army people, the best soldiers, and naturally the whole country thinks they are the stupidest. These two things go together. If a race is very perfect as far as war is concerned, then the race becomes less intelligent. It is bound to happen – the two things cannot go together. An intelligent person will have to think before he acts. The soldier has to act before he thinks. That is the whole process: he should act before thinking. Then what is the point of thinking when you have acted already? Then there is no need.Any outer discipline, whether it is of a soldier or of a saint, kills your sensitivity, kills your fineness, your receptivity; and naturally it kills your love because love is nothing but the harmony of all your senses and intelligence. With inner discipline there is no contradiction with love. With inner discipline, love arises. But remember: love that will arise with inner discipline will not be the love that you have known up to now. Your love has been everything but love.The limousine pulled up in front of the madhouse and the aristocratic-looking gentleman got out. “Is this an asylum for the insane?” he asked the gate attendant.“Yes, sir,” said the gateman.“Do they take inmates upon their own recommendation?”“How should I know? Why?” asked the gate keeper.“Well, you see I’ve just gotten hold of a package of my old love letters, and I feel that I must be mad.”Just look at your old love letters, and you will also feel like going to the nuthouse – on your own recommendation. Whatsoever you have called love is a frenzy, a fever, a sort of chemical neurosis; it is not love. How can you love? Love happens only as a shadow to meditation. When you have become so alert, there arises a new quality – that is love. Right now what you call love is jealousy, competition, possessiveness, anger, hatred. Maybe you are fed up with yourself, you cannot be with yourself, so you need somebody else; and you call it love. You cling to somebody, you dominate somebody, you try to manipulate somebody. It is politics, not love; it is ambition to dominate, not love. And naturally it leads you to hell; naturally it makes you more and more miserable.What has your love done to you? Dreams and dreams and dreams. Dreams are when you look at your love somewhere in the future, then it is a dream. When you look back on the love that has happened, then it is a nightmare. All dreams prove nightmares. No, this is not love; otherwise the whole earth would have been happy. So many people loving, everybody is loving: the mother is loving, the father is loving, the son, the sister, the brother, the wife, the husband, the friend, the priest, the politician, everybody is loving somebody, love must be so great… But look into people’s eyes – there is only misery and nothing else. Then something has gone wrong; something else has been named love. It is not love. On the container it says, “Love,” but look at the content: jealousy, possessiveness, anger, hatred, domination, all ugly things are there. Yes, the container is very beautiful, very well packaged, like a Christmas gift. Open, and inside, just hell.This love is not the love I am talking about. When you go inside your being a totally new energy arises. You have so much energy that you would like to share it; then love is a sharing. Then you don’t need love; then you are not in need of somebody to love you. For the first time you have possessed your treasure of love; and a new need arises – to share it, to give it to whomsoever needs it. Share it and give it. When love is a need, and you want somebody to love you, it is going to create misery. It is a beggar’s love, and beggars can’t be happy. When love has been known… That is only possible when you move inward and come to the innermost shrine of your being.When you have known the reservoir of love there, then a new need arises to share it, to give it, to whomsoever needs it. Give it, and you feel thankful that somebody has taken it. Then there is happiness, then love is heaven.Then a need has taken a radical turn: then you need to give. Right now, you need somebody to give to you – you are a beggar. Then, you become an emperor. The inner discipline makes you an emperor.The last question. It is from Sudha.Osho,So be it.So be it.You will not be able to understand the question because the questioner has a long history. Sudha has been asking questions for months together, again and again, and I have not been answering her because I always suspected that her question was not the true question and the true question was hiding behind it. Then, one day, out of desperation, she wrote the real question. The real question was: “Osho, I want you to tell me, ‘Sudha is my greatest sannyasin,’ and you never say it; you never even mention my name.” But I didn’t answer even that. So now, finally, she writes this question: “So be it.”Now the time has come to answer it. Remember, whenever you ask a question, there is always a hidden meaning in it. It may not even be apparent to you; you may not even suspect it. You may think, “This is the question that I am asking,” and there may be something else. You may want me to pat you on your back, to say, “Very good.”There are a few questioners who ask such cunning questions. For example they will say, “Osho, great silence is coming, great energy is arising. What do you say about it?” If I take their question at face value and if I say, “Good,” then I have conceded that they are arriving very close to enlightenment. All that great energy, and all that great experience that they go on writing about again and again in their questions is not happening. If it were happening, they would become more silent. If it were happening, their questions would disappear. If it were happening, they would not be in any need of confirmation; they would not be in any need of approval. So it is not happening.You ask a question; you are in great need somehow: your ego has to be strengthened. I am here to shatter your ego; I am not here to strengthen it. If I strengthen your ego I will be your enemy and not your friend. It hurts: if I shatter your ego it hurts. But finally, you will come to know that that was the only thing to be done. It is surgical, it hurts; but only this surgery is going to transform you.Sudha is beautiful, but as humanly weak as everybody else. As everybody would like to be patted on the back, she also likes to be patted. I am not a miser, I can pat – there is no problem in it. I can say, “Sudha, you are great,” but that will poison you. That is not going to help. That will hinder you. That will inflate your ego more. You will become more solidified in your egoistic projections. No, I cannot say that because I would like you to become really great, and to become really great means to become egoless. The only way to be really happy is to be without the ego.You seek in the world, through money, power, prestige. Then you become a sannyasin, and you start seeking the same old disease in new names. The old politics comes back; you start competing.Drop all these things. Here, at least with me, be plain, be ordinary. And the more ordinary you are, the more extraordinary you will become. The more you efface yourself, the more you will be. The moment you cease utterly, you become divine. Nobody is barring the way except your own ego, except you.Sometimes the ego is such that it can take nourishment from anywhere.“Now, Mistress O’Grady,” the attorney asked, “you say your husband has never said a kind word to you since you were married. Are you sure of that?’“Come to think of it,” she replied, “once in a while he did say, ‘You’re a foine one.’”The ego can get nourishment even where no nourishment is possible. Remember the subtle ways of the ego. My whole work here consists in dissolving you, in dismantling you, in destroying you, so that a new being is born, so that a resurrection becomes possible. I am a cross to you, so that I can also become a resurrection to you.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Tzu Kung grew weary of study and told Confucius, “I want to find rest.”“There is no rest for the living.”“Then shall I never find it?”“You shall. Look forward to the lofty and domed mound of your tomb and know where you shall find rest.”“Great is death! The gentleman finds rest in it, the mean man submits to it!”“Tzu Kung, you have understood. All men understand the joy of being alive, but not its misery, the weariness of growing old, but not its ease, the ugliness of death, but not its repose.”Philosophy is the enemy of truth. And when I say philosophy, I mean all philosophy, mine included because philosophy creates a screen of words, and you cannot see reality as it is. It distorts reality, it interprets reality, it gives a garb to reality, it hides reality, it covers reality.Truth is naked, truth is all over, truth is within and without; and the only barriers are the words, the theories, the theologies that you have learned. They don’t allow you to see that which is, they come in the way, they are prejudices. All philosophy is a prejudice and no concept is a bridge – all are barriers.One day or other, an authentic inquirer comes to that great moment of realization when he feels weary, tired – tired of all this nonsense that goes on in the name of thinking. The word god is not God. How long can you go on playing with the word? The word food is not food. How long can you go on carrying the word food and remain hungry? One day or other, you will become aware that what you are carrying is only a word – it cannot nourish you, it cannot give you life, and it cannot give you peace, and it cannot give you anything. Of course it promises all, that is how philosophy becomes so important – because of its promises. But all those promises are empty; they are never fulfilled. Philosophy has never helped anybody to realize truth.This great moment of realization has come into the life of Tzu Kung. He was the chief disciple of Confucius.Tzu Kung grew weary of study…To look is one thing, to study is diametrically opposite. If I say to you, “Go and see the roseflowers in the garden,” and rather than going to the garden you go to the library and you study about roseflowers – that is study. About and about, around and around it moves; it never touches the real point.Tzu Kung grew weary of study… Enough of the words. Enough of the theories, dogmas. Enough of the doctrines. I call this a great moment in the life of an inquirer. Everybody has to pass through words because we have been trained for words. Everybody has to pass through theories; we have been given theories from our very childhood. We have been brought up according to prejudices, doctrines, churches, schools. Somebody is a Christian and somebody else is a Mohammedan and somebody else is a Hindu, and we have been brought up conditioned. The moment you start asking, “What is truth?” your mind starts supplying words; it knows the answers. Those answers are all false, those answers are all borrowed, but it gives you beautiful answers. They satisfy you for a while, and if your inquiry is not great, they may satisfy you forever. Only a great inquirer sees the point that words are meaningless.Language is not the door toward reality, but silence is. The inner talk must cease; only then will you have clarity. Only then will reality reveal itself to you. You go on chattering inside, and your mind goes on functioning, constantly, obsessively, like a maniac. And the mind is a maniac: it goes on creating new words, new combinations, new theories; it goes on speculating. It is a great inventor as far as theories are concerned and it does not allow you even a single interval, a gap, to look at what is there. The inner talk must cease, then suddenly there is no barrier; there never has been.The Zen monks say: From the very beginning the truth is unhidden; the truth is in front of you. What are you seeking? Where are you running? The truth is in front of you, but your eyes are closed through prejudices.Tzu Kung grew weary of study… He has learned much and now he realizes that learning has not nourished him. It has not strengthened him, it has not delivered anything; it has not made him any more real than he was before. He is not yet anywhere, he is yet hollow. There is no integration. He does not know in fact who he is. He became weary. He must have been a great inquirer – even Confucius could not deceive him.Confucius is a great scholar: he can supply answers for every question possible, and he can invent beautiful answers. All those answers are fabricated, homemade, but they can befool fools. They can make many people feel that they know. They can become consolations. His knowledge, his respectability, his impeccable character… He is a man of virtue, remember, a very moral man, a man of character, of great mannerism, etiquette: a gentleman. The “gentleman” is the goal of all Confucian philosophy: a man must become a gentleman. He is impeccable, you cannot find a loophole in his character; all virtues have become real in him. A moral man with great knowledge, supported by tradition, convention, scripture – respected by the kings and the queens, respected all over the country – but even he could not deceive Tzu Kung.Tzu Kung grew weary of study… When you become weary of study, the great moment has come when a student becomes a disciple. When you are weary of study, then you make a hundred and eighty degree turn. Then you are no longer interested in theories. You want the real; you want the food to eat so that you can be nourished. And you don’t want any more recipes, you don’t want any more cook books; you want the real food.…and told Confucius, “I want to find rest.”Words create restlessness. Doctrines, dogmas, make you more tense because they lead you astray; they lead you away from reality. The further away you are from reality, the more restless you will be. Let that be a criterion. Whenever you feel restless, that means you have gone far away from reality. Whenever you are close to reality, there is tremendous rest, calm, quietude, grace, silence, peace. You are at home because reality is your home. Restlessness simply means you are going away and your whole being is being uprooted from your home, hence restlessness.Tzu Kung said, “I want to find rest. Enough of the theories, and enough of the studies. I have studied all that can be studied. I have become a great learned man, your greatest disciple, but that is not satisfying. Help me to find rest.”Have you noticed? The more you know – of words, scriptures, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gita, Koran, Bible, Vedas – the more you will feel that your mind is getting more and more mad; you are being pulled in all directions. One theory says something, another theory says something else; they contradict each other, they are always at each other’s throats. Great argument and no conclusion. Down the centuries philosophy has not come to a single conclusion. For five thousand years philosophers have been discussing, but there has never been any conclusion – any conclusion on which they all can agree. There has never been any agreement. It has not happened, and it is not going to happen.Two philosophers cannot agree because agreement is possible only when you know reality – then there is agreement. If you know reality, and I know reality, there is agreement because then there is no problem. You know reality, I know the same reality – how can there be argument? But argument is possible if I have my theory and you have your theory, then there is no possibility of agreement. Agreement happens only through experience. Experience is conclusive. Argumentation is inconclusive. One argument leads to another and so on and so forth. When two persons are arguing, both cannot be right. Both can be wrong, but both cannot be right.It happened…Mulla Nasruddin and his wife were arguing one day – the husband and wife argument – and it came to the natural conclusion that by and by Mulla started feeling, “Why did I start at all?”He was feeling hungry, and the wife was not even thinking of cooking food. So he went to the wife and said, “Sorry, I confess I was wrong.”The wife said, “That won’t do. You will have to confess that I was right. Just your being in the wrong does not make much difference; you will have to confess that I was right. Give a positive statement! Because you may be wrong and still you may think inside yourself that I am also wrong, so that is not of much use.”Both persons can be wrong. Remember, truth is one; untruths can be as many as you want. Religion is one – cannot be two because truth is one; but philosophies can be as many as you want. Everybody can have his own philosophy: it is your dream about reality. You can manufacture a theory on your own, you cannot manufacture reality. Philosophy creates restlessness. When you are inconclusive, you are hanging in limbo. And that hanging in the middle, neither here nor there, is what philosophy creates in a man. He starts feeling that he knows, and he also goes on feeling deep down that he doesn’t know. Now this is a very tense state. You know that you don’t know and yet you feel that you know. You feel that you know and yet you know that you don’t know. Now you are becoming split, you are becoming schizophrenic. And in this state of inconclusive mind one always feels incomplete, and incompletion hurts. One wants to know the complete truth, the whole truth.A salesman came into a hotel. The manager said, “It will be difficult for me to find a room for you though there is a room vacant, which I cannot give out.”The salesman said, “What is the reason? Why can’t you give it out if the room is empty?”The hotel manager said, “A great politician is staying just beneath that room. A room is vacant on the second floor, but on the ground floor beneath that room a great political leader is staying. And he gets mad at small things. If you walk around in your room, or if you make some noise, then he will create a great fuss, and I don’t want any trouble. Please go to another hotel.”“But,” the salesman said, “I have looked all around. All the hotels are booked. So please, have mercy on me, and I promise you that I will not even move in the room. The whole day I will be working in the town, and at night I will simply come and go to sleep. By the morning I will be gone to another town, but give me the room.” So the room was given.In the middle of the night, the salesman came back, tired, sat on his bed, took off one of his shoes and dropped it on the floor. Then he suddenly remembered that the great political leader might be disturbed, so he took off the second shoe very silently, and without making any sound he put it on the floor and went to sleep.After an hour, the great politician came and knocked on his door. The man opened the door and saw the politician mad, red with anger, and he could not understand why. He wondered, “What could I have done? I have been asleep for one hour!” And he said, “Sir, have I done anything wrong? Maybe in my dream? Or maybe I have made some sound or said something? But I am sorry, I didn’t mean it.”The politician said, “That is not the thing. What happened to the other shoe? For one hour you have been keeping me awake. I heard the noise – the first shoe fell on the floor and I said, ‘So this man has come!’ And then I was waiting for the second shoe! By and by, I became almost mad. I couldn’t sleep. What happened to the second shoe?”That happens to a mind which remains in an inconclusive state: something goes on hanging, like a sword. You can understand the difficulty of the politician. He must have tried to go to sleep but he must have been visualizing the second shoe hanging in the air. “What happened?”The mind is at rest only when there is conclusion, otherwise never. Philosophy never leads to any conclusion. Only reality is conclusive; only experience, only existence, is conclusive.Tzu Kung grew weary of study and told Confucius, “I want to find rest.”“There is no rest for the living.”said Confucius.The viewpoint that there is no rest for the living is based on a certain philosophy: that life is struggle, that life is action; that life is conflict, that life is a war to survive – how can you rest? The same philosophy has become predominant in the West: Darwin, the philosopher of “the survival of the fittest,” and Nietzsche, “the will to power.” Confucius is deeply understood in the West; he is a Western man. He was born in the East, but he is not Eastern at all. His attitude toward life is that of activity. It is a yang attitude, a male attitude – fight, conflict, struggle, conquer, prove your will. You are here to prove your will; you have to show the world that you are somebody. You have to leave a mark on history; otherwise your life is meaningless. You have to compete, you have to struggle – only then can you leave your mark on history. If you remain silent and restful, how are you going to leave your mark on history?Lao Tzu has not left any mark on history; Tamerlane has left his mark on history. Chuang Tzu has not left his mark on history; Nadir Shah, Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao – they all have left their marks on history. Mao was a Confucian, he believed in Confucius, and he tried hard to destroy all Taoist possibilities and potentialities in China. He destroyed many Taoist monasteries; he wanted to uproot them completely. Why? Because they don’t teach any struggle. If you don’t teach any struggle, how can you teach revolution?The attitude of Tao is of cooperation, not conflict. The attitude of Tao is not to be against nature but to be with it, to allow nature, to let it have its way, to cooperate with it, to go with it. The attitude of Tao is of great relaxation.Remember, it is not of inactivity. It is neither about activity nor about inactivity – it is transcendental. The Taoist term is wu wei: it means action through inaction. That is the goal of Tao: do, but don’t be the doer. Act, but let Tao act through you – simply be cooperative. Then, through Tao, you can be restful in life.But how can you be restful with Confucius? He’s right: he says that as far as his philosophy is concerned: “There is no rest for the living.”You have to struggle hard, you have to prove your mettle; you have to prove your will. Life is here so that you can use the opportunity to prove yourself. It is a competition, a cutthroat competition; everybody is at each other’s throat, and if you relax, you are gone. Fight hard! In every way remain alert and don’t think of rest. The word rest to the Confucian mind is escapist. Don’t ask for meditation; that is escapism. Don’t go to the Himalayas, and don’t sit silently – that is escapism. Do something! Life is for doing and death is for non-doing: that is their logic. Naturally, one day you will be dead, and then you will be at rest, so why worry about it? Their division is clear-cut, and to logical minds it appeals.He said:“There is no rest for the living.”“Then shall I never find it?” asked the disciple.Naturally, if there is no rest for the living, then when? “When am I going to get rest? Am I not going to find it ever? Is this nightmare to continue forever and ever? And is there no end to it?”Confucius said:“You shall. Look forward to the lofty and domed mound of your tomb and know where you shall find rest.”“You shall.” Mind these words. This is the greatest deception ever invented by man: “You shall. Not now, somewhere in the future, not here, somewhere else.” All the so-called religions have used this deceptive device. They promise. They say, “You will find everything that you want, but not now. Tomorrow.”And tomorrow never comes – it cannot come by its very nature. The future never comes because whenever it comes, it is the present. It is always now, and now, and now. Wherever you will be, it will be now and here.The promise is: “You shall.” The promise is very cunning. That’s what all the religions have done. “In heaven you will find peace, rest, happiness. In moksha, in nirvana, somewhere far away there exists the land of peace and happiness. You will reach there one day, but not now. And if you want to reach there, sacrifice your present-day happiness for it. The price has to be paid,” they say. And the price is this: “Sacrifice your present for the future. Sacrifice the real for the imaginary. Sacrifice life for afterlife, or death.”They have convinced humanity, and almost all have sacrificed their lives. Nobody comes back from heaven to relate whether it happens. Nobody comes after death to say, “Yes, Confucius, it is true.” So the deception remains because it cannot be contradicted. It is very clever – it is impossible to contradict it. You cannot disprove it, though you cannot prove it; but you cannot disprove it either.“You shall.” Just listen to these words: “You shall.” This is your whole conditioning. In childhood the parents say, “Not now. When you are older you shall. When you are older.”When you are young, they start saying, “Not now. When you are old, retired, with a good bank balance; all is done and the time to rest and to relax has come – then.” When you are old, they say, “After death.” They go on postponing. The carrot of the future goes on dangling in front of you, and the closer you come to it, the more it goes on receding. Meanwhile, you go on missing all that was possible.A future-oriented philosophy is poisonous. A future-oriented philosophy is like opium: it drugs you, and it does not allow you to live your life right now, herenow. And this is the only life. Now look at Confucius’ answer. The disciple wants to find rest; he is told: “There is no rest for the living.” “Life is struggle, so don’t ask for rest. Rest happens, certainly, but not now, never now. You shall. Look forward… Always look forward, don’t look herenow. Don’t look right in the moment; live for the future and sacrifice the present.”This, I say, is the greatest deception ever invented by any man. It has worked well. The priest and the politician both live on it – the future. The communist goes on saying, “Wait! Sacrifice for the future. Sooner or later there is going to come a society, a classless society; then everybody will be happy.” You are unhappy, you are miserable, you want rest now and they say, “Don’t be worried. Rest will be possible. Look forward. Let the revolution happen, and then things will be good. If you want the future to be happy, sacrifice. Sacrifice!” The Fascists say, “Sacrifice, so that the Fatherland can win. And once the Fatherland has won and once the Nordic race has proved that it is the superior race, then there will be peace on earth.”The politician lives and exploits in the name of the future. The present is ugly, miserable, horrible. He creates imaginary goals, utopias – he decorates them very beautifully, he makes them very colorful – and you become enchanted, so you won’t look around yourself. It is ugly, it is horrible, it is miserable – within and without. You are simply tears and nothing else; only anguish, hell. They say, “You shall. Look forward. That great day is coming.” The politician lives on it, and the priest lives on it. The politician and the priest are not very separate: they are partners in the same business. The business is not to allow man to be herenow because once a man is herenow, he’s so happy that he won’t listen to any politician, and he won’t listen to any priest.If man is allowed to be herenow, he will be so peaceful and so restful that he will not bother about any heaven. He has achieved it – who bothers about your paradise? Your paradise seems meaningful because man is miserable. For paradise to remain meaningful, man has to remain miserable. The priest exists because of the idea of paradise: he will show you the way; he holds the key, he has a direct line to God. You don’t have this connection, so you have to persuade and bribe the priest so that he will take care of your interests and persuade God that you should be given happiness. You have suffered enough, and you have suffered very righteously; you have sacrificed all – for your religion, for your country, for humanity. “Sacrifice for anything, but sacrifice!” that is their slogan. Anything will do, any nonsense ideal will do, but sacrifice.Old ideals are dropped because they become rotten, and man becomes fed up with them. Then new ideals are invented; then we sacrifice for them – that’s what has happened down the ages. Only ideals change, but the sacrifice continues. Sometimes it is God you have to sacrifice for. The Mohammedan priest goes on saying that if you die on the field fighting for your religion, your paradise is absolutely certain. So die courageously, knowing well that you will be received well in heaven. The Communist says that if you are dying for the revolution you are great. Your name will resound down the ages; you will be remembered as a martyr; you will be respected. Just do one thing: don’t live, sacrifice.A very absurd situation. Your parents go on sacrificing for you. Your father, your mother, sacrifice for you. They say, “I am sacrificing for my children.” Naturally they take revenge because when the mother sacrifices for the child she is destroying her own life. She will take revenge. She will say again and again – she will make it clear to you again and again, “I have sacrificed for you. Know well, remember well, that I sacrificed my life, my youth – everything for you.” And she will try to persuade you to do the same for your children. So you will sacrifice for your children, and then you will persuade them to do the same with their children – so nobody ever lives.One generation sacrifices for another, and if you don’t sacrifice, then you become disrespected. Nobody respects you; then you are a criminal. If you don’t sacrifice for others, they say, “What are you doing? You are not a good man, you are immoral. Sacrifice is good. To live for oneself is selfish.” Just look at what these people have been doing: to be happy is selfish, to sacrifice is good. By sacrificing you will be unhappy, and an unhappy man creates unhappiness around himself. An unhappy man will take revenge – he can never forgive; his life has been destroyed. They say that the wife has to sacrifice for her husband and the husband has to sacrifice for his wife. What for? Both sacrifice, so both miss life.I teach you pure selfishness. Never sacrifice for anybody. Just live your life authentically and then you will never take revenge on anybody. You will never have any grudge against anybody. A man who has no grudge against anybody is a loving man; compassionate, kind, sharing. And a man who has no grudge against anybody – against his children, his wife, is tremendously beautiful. He creates a milieu of happiness around himself. Whosoever comes into his milieu shares his happiness.Be selfish.Just look at these trees. No tree is trying to sacrifice for another tree, hence they are green. If they start sacrificing, no tree will be green, and no tree will ever flower. Look at the stars. They are very selfish – they shine for themselves; they don’t sacrifice. Otherwise, all of existence would become ugly and dark. Selfishness is natural. And the self that I am teaching to you is what Tao is: your very nature. Listen to it, follow it. Your nature is saying to you, “Be happy.”If Tzu Kung had asked Lao Tzu this, he would have said, “Great! Congratulations! You are tired of study? Very good. So drop all thinking; now meditate. You want rest? It is possible right now.” Lao Tzu would not say, “You shall.” The future is meaningless, it is a trick – a trick to console you. You don’t have what you need right now, but you shall. You can hope, and through hope you can poison your whole being.The priest and the politician want you to become martyrs, and martyrs are not good people because they are very angry people. They have missed their life, they are bound to be angry – it is natural. You have forced them to destroy their life, you have persuaded them, you have bribed them to destroy their life – how can they be happy? And how can they ever be able to forgive you? Impossible.Live for yourself and you will live for everybody else, but it is not a sacrifice. Live for yourself, be really authentically selfish – that is the way of nature. Take care of your happiness, your rest, your life. You will be simply surprised that when you are happy, you help others to be happy because you understand by and by, that if others are happy you will be happier. Happiness can exist only in an ocean of happiness. It cannot exist alone.Remember the logic, the deep logic, of selfishness. Happiness cannot exist as an island, no. If everybody were unhappy here, then it would be very difficult for you to be happy – almost impossible because an ocean of unhappiness all around would go on crashing on your shores. The misery all around you would affect you; it would penetrate your being. So a happy person by and by comes to understand the basic, the fundamental law: if I want to be happy, it is good to make people happy around me. But he is not serving others, remember. He is not sacrificing himself. He is simply selfish. He wants to smile, he helps you to smile too because a single smile cannot exist; it will look very absurd. Just think: you are sitting here, only one person smiles and all are serious. He will look a little embarrassed. He will start feeling guilty: Why did he smile when nobody is smiling? Something has gone wrong. He should be more careful next time; he will think. No, when you all laugh then it is very simple to laugh; the whole creates the possibility of laughter. We depend on the whole; we are part of the whole.By being happy you create a possibility for others to be happy. This is real service – this is not sacrifice at all; you are not becoming a martyr. A mother is happy; that’s why she loves the child. She is so happy that she wants to share her happiness with the child. She will never have a grudge. In fact, she will feel grateful to the child: because of the child she had so many beautiful moments. She will always feel grateful to the child. “Because you came to me, because you chose me to be your mother, you chose my womb, you have made me so happy. You have given me such beautiful moments which would not have been possible without you. I am grateful.” The child will feel grateful to such a mother who is grateful to him, and he will never be against his mother – it would be very difficult. Ordinarily, I never come across a person who is not against the mother or against the father. It is very rare.Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples, “Unless you have forgiven your fathers and mothers you cannot grow.” You will say, “What nonsense! What is he saying?” “Unless you forgive…” He had it written on his door: Unless you forgive your fathers and mothers don’t enter here. Nobody has been able to forgive their father and mother because the father and mother sacrificed too much.The father and mother have been so miserable because of their children. They go on saying how much they have suffered. No mother says, “I have enjoyed your being my child so much.” No father says, “By coming to our house you have brought light to us, love to us, God to us.” If they had, the children would be able not only to forgive, they would be able to love, they would be able to be grateful.Once Tao is understood, the whole business of psychoanalysis will disappear because the whole business of psychoanalysis depends on the fact that you cannot forgive your mother and your father. Lying on the couch of a psychoanalyst, what do you do? You just rage against your mother and your father. What do you do in primal therapy? Janov would be meaningless if Tao were understood. What do you do when you kick and scream in Primal Therapy? Whom are you kicking? Your mother and your father. Whom are you screaming at? Your mother and your father.If you listen to a patient on the psychiatrist’s couch, all that he talks about is ninety per cent concerned with his mother. Mother seems to be the problem. It is, but the reason is that the politician and the priest have contaminated the mind of humanity. They always say, “You shall… Look forward… You will be happy in the future.”The present moment is all that you have. Use it intelligently, don’t be deceived by anybody.Confucius says: “You shall. Look forward to the lofty and domed mound of your tomb…” “The lofty and domed mound of your tomb…”? A tomb is a tomb, and an ugly thing – however beautiful you make it. You can make it a marble tomb, and you can write the name in golden letters, but it doesn’t deceive anyone; it is meaningless. Inside is just death, and an ugly death because of a life unlived. A life never lived is ugly. Life postponed is ugly; life lived is beautiful. There are very few people who live their life; only they have a beautiful death. Then death too is beautiful because they become so capable of living that they, one day, start living their death too. They live their life; then they live their death.Unlived life cannot lead you to a beautiful death. Yes, you can make a marble tomb and you can write the name in gold letters and put beautiful poetry on it; and you can burn candles, and you can offer flowers, but this is all phony. Whom are you trying to deceive? For all this marble and gold letters and the flowers and the candles, the man cannot live; the man is dead. And he never was allowed to live – because of you. Look at this dangerous sentence from Confucius: “Look forward to the lofty and domed mound of your tomb and know where you shall find rest.”Unless rest is achieved in life it cannot be achieved in death. Let this be an absolute rule: whatever you achieve in your life, you will be able to keep in your death, not otherwise. If you have achieved meditation, your death will be meditative. If you have achieved love, your death will be full of love energy. If you have achieved godliness, your death will be divine.Remember: death cannot achieve anything; the achievement comes through life. Death is just the final reckoning, the final judgment. Death simply closes your life, and the judgment becomes final. If a man was a great lover and he loved, and loved unconditionally, and his life was a flame of love, a light of love, then death will close the chapter with this flame burning bright. But if the death closes your life and it was just a misery and nothing else – just a hoping for the future, never any authentic experience – then you die hollow; then you die in a futile way. That’s what Gurdjieff calls, “the dog’s death.” Then you simply die, but you don’t achieve anything; there is nothing.Nobody achieves anything through death unless he achieves it through life. Death is a single moment. What can you achieve in a single moment? You missed a seventy-eighty-year life, and you hope that you will attain something in a single moment? For eighty years you lived unconsciously, in turmoil, in madness, in nightmares, and then suddenly in death you will become restful? No, sir, you will be turning and tossing in your tomb; you will not find rest.Confucius is wrong, absolutely wrong. He is giving a consolation. This is criminal. To give such consolations is a crime against humanity because you can distract somebody. And he succeeded in distracting this disciple.“Great is death! The gentleman finds rest in it, the mean man submits to it!”…Said the disciple. Confucius succeeded in distracting him. The great moment was destroyed. Tzu Kung arrived very close to the door through which he could have escaped, but Confucius pulled him back. And the disciple started talking again in terms of philosophy, dogma, study. That’s what he had learned through scriptures: “Great is death!” He did not know. He did not even know rest – how could he know death? Death is ultimate rest, absolute rest. He did not even know relative rest. He did not know what life is; he was in turmoil, split. And he started saying, “Great is death!” Listening to the master he was again clouded by words.Confucius was a great teacher, very charismatic, his impact was great: he has ruled China down the centuries. He is still influential, he still dominates Chinese thought. In India there was a man, Manu, who can be compared to Confucius. Manu still dominates India, and he is the same type of man – nothing different. Indian society is based on the laws of Manu, and Chinese society is based on the laws of Confucius. And both men have destroyed their countries.“Great is death!” Listening to the master, to his teacher, the disciple was again befogged; the master’s charisma functioned – he was deceived. He forgot that he had said, “I want to find rest, and I have become weary of all the studies.” He was just at the turning point where the student could become a disciple. He missed again. He again fell back into the old trap which is always easy to fall into because one knows it very well, it is familiar. “Great is death!” Not knowing anything about life, not knowing anything about rest, he asserted a profound truth: “Great is death.” He must have read it. Yes, in the scriptures it is written: “Great is death.” But death is great only when life is great.Remember, your death is your death; my death is my death. My death will depend on my life; your death will depend on your life. If your life is great, your death will be great because death is a culmination of your life. If you have lived well, totally, you will attain to a great peak, a Himalayan peak. But if you have just been crawling on the ground, you have not lived at all. You were just dreaming and hoping and desiring, and never a single moment of life came to you, never a single moment of authenticity. You were always playing roles and hiding yourself behind masks; you were never a real person, you were always phony – your death is going to be phony; it cannot be great. The end can be great only if the whole journey has been great. Each step of the journey contributes to the end. It is simple, obvious. If you have been dancing your life, your death will be a great dance. If you have just been crying and weeping, your death will be just a crying and weeping – it cannot be otherwise; it concludes your life.So remember: everyone lives his life and everyone dies his death. Death is as unique and different as life is unique and different. When Buddha dies, of course Buddha dies. When Lieh Tzu dies, of course Lieh Tzu dies. Their death has a glory, a fragrance – it is a flowering. In a single moment their whole life comes to the ultimate flame. They have achieved, they have arrived home. Your death is nothing but a beginning of another weary life. Here you die; there you are born. From one door you enter, from another door you are back to life again – and of course the same rut, the same wheel moves.“Great is death!” But not on the lips of Tzu Kung. Yes, if Lao Tzu were saying it, it would be okay. Death is not great even on the lips of Confucius because the whole approach is wrong. “The gentleman finds rest in it…” Remember the word gentleman. That is the highest value in Confucian ethics: the gentleman. And who is a gentleman? – a phony person. Who is a gentleman? – a hypocrite. Who is a gentleman? – one who is masked in manners, etiquette, character; a man who is conventional, traditional. A gentleman is not an individual; he is just a member of a society. He does not exist on his own; he has no life of his own. He exists only as a part of a society, so whatsoever the society allows is his life, and whatsoever the society does not allow he denies himself. He chooses society instead of nature. That is what a gentleman does: he chooses man-made law against God-made law. A gentleman is one who has betrayed God, a gentleman is one who has chosen society. Society is neurotic, and society is ill, and society is not normal at all. No normal society has yet existed on the earth. Only rarely have a few individuals been normal. Society is abnormal – a great crowd of mad people. A gentleman is one who follows this crowd. A gentleman has no soul. Of course, society respects him tremendously; society has to respect this man; society calls him a mahatma, a saint, a sage. Society respects him because the gentleman has sacrificed his life for society.A real man is rebellious, a real man does not bother about respectability, a real man lives his life naturally. He does not bother about what society says or does not say. Society is not a consideration for a real man. If you want to be phony, then society has to be considered at each step: what to say, how to say it, when to say it, when not to say it; how to live, how not to live. Society has determined everything. You have just to fit in; you have just to be a cog in the wheel. A real man can never be a cog in the wheel. A real man is not respected. How can the society respect the real man? Hence Jesus was crucified; hence Buddha was stoned; hence Socrates was poisoned.Society accepts these people only when they are dead. Then there is no problem because a dead Jesus cannot be rebellious; a dead Socrates cannot be rebellious; a dead Buddha becomes an avatar. An alive Buddha is dangerous, but a dead Buddha can be worshipped in a temple. Remember, whenever these great real people die, only then do people worship them. When they are alive, people are very much against them. The same people who crucified Jesus have become Christians – the same people. The people are all the same. Jesus was intolerable, but a dead Jesus is perfectly okay – what can he do? A dead Jesus is in your hands: you interpret him; you put theories around him. He cannot have his own say, you speak through him. It always happens.If you really want to be an authentic person, never bother too much about what society says about you. I am not saying to go specifically against society, no – that is not rebellion, that is reaction. You go according to your nature. If it fits with the society, perfectly good, there is no need to go against it. If it does not fit with society, perfectly good, there is no need to follow society.There is a difference between the rebellious person and the reactionary. The reactionary is one who will go against society whatever the case may be; he has decided to go against the society even if the society is right. Sometimes society is right because society cannot be absolutely wrong all of the time, even a mad person is sometimes right.It happened…A great political leader was addressing the inmates of an asylum, and he had spoken for only five, seven minutes when a madman stood up and said, “Stop this fool! He is mad! He does not know what he is talking about.”Of course the politician was very angry and he said to the superintendent, “Throw this man out!”The superintendent said, “For the first time in seven years, he has said something significant, something meaningful. I cannot throw him out. For seven years he has been uttering nonsense, and now, for the first time, he said something which is not nonsense! I cannot throw him out. But don’t be worried. The doctors say that this man can say only one thing in seven years which will be right. So don’t be worried, he will not disturb you again. In seven years, only for a single moment does he become sane; otherwise he remains insane.”Even mad people sometime say right things. Even this mad society is sometimes right, otherwise it would not exist. To exist, at least something must be right, otherwise life would become impossible. A reactionary is just the same traditional person who has moved to the other extreme. The traditional person follows the society right or wrong. “Right or wrong this is my country. Right or wrong this is my religion. Right or wrong this is my priest. Right or wrong this is my scripture.” That is the traditional man. Then one day somebody turns to the other extreme. He says, “Right or wrong I am not going to follow society.” This is the reactionary. They are both the same person, no difference.Who is a rebellious person? The rebellious person is one who does not bother about the society at all – he simply lives through his innermost core. He follows his Tao. If society fits with his inner Tao, good, he goes with society; he is not reactionary. If society does not fit with his inner Tao, he goes alone. He is not a traditional, conventional person. His constant criterion is his inner soul.Gentleman means one who has been persuaded by society to sell his authentic being and to borrow from society a false mask.“Great is death! The gentleman finds rest in it…” Now what has a gentleman to do with rest and death? A gentleman cannot find rest even in life; a gentleman is very repressed. A gentleman must not allow his whole being free play; he denies a thousand and one things, and those boil within him – how can he find rest? If you cannot find rest in life, how are you going to find it in death? Then don’t befool yourself, this is opium. Your hope that something will happen in death which has never happened in life is a drug.A gentleman has never loved as he wanted to love, a gentleman has never been angry, he has never hated anybody – not that he has not hated, he has just not shown it. All that a gentleman can do is change his expressions; the inner being is never changed. Anger arises in him, but he does not show it – he represses it. So he goes on and on accumulating a thousand and one things inside him which create chaos, which are boiling inside. He can burst any moment – a gentleman is a dangerous person to live with. Never live with a gentleman, or with a lady. A woman is beautiful, a lady is ugly. A woman is natural, a lady is fabricated.One bum arrived at the office of a psychiatrist, very beggarly, hungry, dirty, and the psychiatrist said, “I can see that you will not even have enough to pay the fee, but I feel sorry for you. What do you do for your living?”And the bum said, “I have fabricated three million houses.”And the psychiatrist shouted, “This is a lie!”And the bum laughed and said, “Didn’t I say they were all fabricated?”Fabricated – the gentleman, the lady, are fabricated people, just cultivated, painted, not true, not honest. When they feel anger, they smile; when they hate you, they embrace you. You can never depend on them; you can never decide when they are really smiling and when they are pretending. In fact, after long practice, even they cannot decide whether they were really laughing or pretending to laugh, whether they really loved this woman or they were just pretending.Many people come to me, and they say, “We cannot decide whether there is really love or not.” One has lived in lies so long, maybe for so many lives, that one has lost track. One cannot even feel what is right and what is wrong, and what is true and what is untrue. It happens every day: somebody comes and says, “I am in love with this woman, but I cannot decide whether I really love her.” What does it show? You have lost all contact with your own being; you have become alienated from yourself. You have become a stranger to yourself. This should be a simple thing. It is as if somebody says, “I cannot decide whether this rose is a real rose or just painted. I cannot decide.” What does it mean? “I cannot decide whether these trees are green or somebody has just thrown green paint on them.” But these trees are outside you. Maybe sometimes you can be deceived – maybe the tree is false, is made of plastic – but you cannot decide about your own inner feelings. What does it show? It simply shows that you have forgotten the language of truth. You have lied for so long, so long, that lies have almost become your truth.A gentleman is an inauthentic person. Never be a gentleman, never be a lady. Those are roles, acting. Be human beings. Be true – it is your life. Be authentic so that you can grow because all growth happens only when you are true and authentic. Maybe this will cost you much – one has to pay; maybe there will be pain – all growth is through pain; maybe you will always be in difficulties, but there is nothing to be worried about – they are worth it.Socrates died, was poisoned, don’t you ever feel jealous of him? You are alive; wouldn’t you like to exchange your life for Socrates’ death? His death was truer than your life. Jesus was crucified. He was only thirty-three; he had not known much of life but wouldn’t you like to exchange… Wouldn’t you be on that cross instead of living your bogus life? At least he was true – on the cross, but true.You are untrue. An untrue life is worse than a true death: a true death is better. An untrue happiness is worse than a true unhappiness – let this be remembered always. True tears are better than false smiles because growth comes through being true. Growth never comes through falsity, and the ideal of the gentleman is the ideal of the false man.“Great is death! The gentleman finds rest in it, the mean man submits to it!” Remember this too: Confucius is always comparative. He always creates this distinction between the gentleman and the mean man, the superior and the inferior, the extraordinary and the ordinary. Tao says that nobody is superior and nobody is inferior. Nobody is great and nobody is mean because we belong to one reality, to one Tao. How can we be mean or superior or inferior? That is impossible – we are made of the same stuff. It is God that pulsates in you; it is God that pulsates in me; it is God that pulsates in the trees and in the rocks. Nobody is superior and nobody is inferior. The very idea is egoistic, but the Confucian philosophy is centered on the ego.Now Tzu Kung says: “Great is death! The gentleman finds rest in it, the mean man submits to it!” Now he is enjoying that he is a great man, a gentleman, so he is persuaded by Confucius through his ego: “You are a great man, a gentleman, a superior being. You will find rest in death. You are not mean, so don’t be worried – only mean persons don’t find rest in death. And don’t hanker for rest in life,” because that too is meanness according to Confucius. Rest is not possible, rest is escapism.Confucius was always worried about Lao Tzu and his teachings. Once he went to see Lao Tzu. Of course, he was older than Lao Tzu so he wanted Lao Tzu to behave in a mannerly way, as an older man expects. Lao Tzu was sitting, and he would not even stand to greet Confucius. He did not even say, “Sit down, sir,” and he didn’t pay much attention to him. Confucius became very angry. “What type of master is this?” He asked, “Don’t you follow any manners?”Lao Tzu said, “If you feel like sitting, sit; if you feel like standing, stand. Who am I to say anything about it? It is your life. I don’t interfere.”Confucius was shocked. Then he asked something about the superior man, the gentleman, and Lao Tzu laughed. He said, “I have never come across any superior or inferior men. Men are men as trees are trees, and everything participates in the same existence. Nobody is superior and nobody is inferior. That is all nonsense and rubbish!” Confucius became very afraid. Lao Tzu had tremendous silence around him; he was a pool of silence.Confucius came back. His disciples asked, “What about Lao Tzu?”He said, “Never go near this man, he is dangerous. If you come across a tiger, you can save your life in some way. If you come across a lion, you can save yourself. But this man is very dangerous. He is like a dragon, a flying dragon! He will kill you! Never go. Whenever you hear that Lao Tzu is around, escape.”Confucius was very worried about Lao Tzu’s teaching. The teaching is so utterly different, so utterly true, so utterly amoral, so utterly rebellious and so utterly individual. It believes in no man-made laws, only in nature. To trust in nature is Tao.Lao Tzu says, “You can rest in life; even while you are walking you can remain unmoving. Your innermost center can remain unmoving; you can become the center of the cyclone. The wheel moves but the hub remains. The wheel goes on moving, but it moves on something which is not moving. Act, do, but remain a non-doer deep within. Talk, speak, but remain in silence deep within.”Lao Tzu says, “Let contradictions meet. Let paradoxes dissolve. Be paradoxical because life is paradoxical. Live, and yet live as if you were dead. Then, when you die, die as if you were entering into another life – a higher life, a greater life. Let paradoxes meet, mingle, fuse, into one unity.”Confucian thought consists of division, classification, categorization: Life is life, life is struggle. Death is death, death is rest – clear-cut divisions.Lao Tzu says that there are no distinctions, no clear-cut distinctions. Life is death, death is life. A man can live tremendously and yet deep down remain absolutely transcendental, away, far away, distant, not involved at all. You can walk through the river and your feet can remain untouched by the water; you can be a lotus flower. That is the true life. You speak and yet you speak not. Something in you remains far away. You touch the earth and yet something in you remains high in the skies.Confucian life is a very ordinary life; very logical, mathematical, classified, but very ordinary. Taoist life is really extraordinary, very rich because it contains both the negative and the positive, both the yin and yang, both conflict and cooperation, both love and hate, both life and death.Always remember, let there be a harmony in the contradictions within you, then you will reach the highest point and the highest peak. Don’t choose one, choose both together. Be courageous. Don’t be miserly in choosing. When life gives you a paradox, choose the whole paradox; swallow it all whole, and digest it completely and you will become a flying dragon.“Tzu Kung,” said Confucius, “you have understood.”Of course, Confucius must have been very happy. He has converted the disciple back to the old rut: “Tzu Kung, you have understood.” He has missed the opportunity to understand, but Confucius says:“…you have understood. All men understand the joy of being alive, but not its misery, the weariness of growing old, but not its ease, the ugliness of death, but not its repose.”Again the same division: there are few people who understand the beauty of life, but not the ugliness of it. Then there are some who understand the ugliness of life, but not the beauty of it. There are some who understand the ugliness of death, but not the repose of it. And then there are some who understand the repose of death, but not the ugliness of it – but both are the same. You choose one category, somebody else chooses another category.Confucius is saying: “Tzu Kung, you have understood. All men understand the joy of being alive, but not its misery…” Again a split. He says: “…men understand the joy of being alive, but not its misery…”“You understand the misery of it. The weariness of growing old all men understand, but not its ease; you understand its ease. The ugliness of death all men understand; you understand its repose.” This is again choice. Both should be chosen together. Both should be chosen so together that there is no choice. Life is ugly and life is beautiful; and death is ugly and death is beautiful. Existence exists through dialectical processes.Your left leg moves because your right leg stands still: the movement becomes possible because one leg is standing still. Then your left leg stands still and your right leg moves: the movement is possible because of no movement.I can speak to you because something deep inside is always silent. The word is meaningful, significant, only because of the silence. If there were no silence, then the word would be meaningless, then it would be gibberish. When the word is meaningful, always remember that the meaning comes through silence; silence pours into the word and the word becomes luminous.Love is beautiful because there is the possibility of hate, otherwise love would be so sweet that it would create diabetes! Just sugar, sugar, sugar… No, the salt is also needed; hate gives salt to life. Activity is good, but if there is no inactivity in it, it will create neurosis – obsessive action. Inactivity is good, but if there is no activity in it, it will be a sort of death, a lethargy, a dullness. Both are good, the whole is good.Tao says: the whole is good. Don’t choose. Let it be as it is. As it is, it is a wise arrangement. There cannot be a better world than this. There is no possibility of any improvement. You accept both, and through that acceptance, you transcend.Tzu Kung was close to the door through which he would have escaped into the open sky. He was misled again. Remember, in your life there will also be many moments when you can escape, but your past is heavy – it pulls you back. Confucius could succeed because Tzu Kung’s whole past was nothing but theories, words, philosophies, doctrines; and they understand each other’s language. He pulled him back. Again that great moment was missed. And these great moments come very rarely.Sometimes I see somebody come to me; he wants to be initiated into sannyas, but then he says, “But I am hesitating.” And I watch. He is just standing at the door through which he can escape, but he is hesitating: the past pulls him back. Now it depends. If you are courageous, you take the step because you know your past – it has not satisfied you – so what is the point of falling back into it again?This Tzu Kung knows that he has become weary of study, now what will he do with Confucius? There is study and study and study – nothing else. Confucius knows no meditation, he believes in no ecstasy; he is just a moral teacher – very earthly. He does not know anything greater than society, bigger than society; he has a very narrow outlook. Now what is he going to do? He will be studying again; he will be pondering again over the books, he will be studying the old, traditional, rotten books, again. Repeating again what he has already been doing.Always remember that when a new moment, a new insight, hovers around you, choose the new because the old has not done anything for you; what is the point of going back? Even if the new proves wrong, then too, choose the new. At least it will be a new adventure; you will come to know something. Even if you don’t reach the goal, at least you will have learned some courage to move into the unknown, to embrace the unknown. That will be your gain. But never choose the old. Whenever there is a possibility for the new, go into the new. And go fast because the old is very heavy – it will pull you back.Again and again I see a few people just sitting before me, hanging between their past and their present. Remember, the present is very small and the past is very long, so of course its weight is big. Unless you are very courageous you will never get out of it. It is very comfortable and convenient to remain with the past, but comfort and convenience are nothing. Growth is all.Grow.If growth comes through discomfort, inconvenience – good. Then inconvenience is good, beneficial; then discomfort is good, beneficial. But always remember one thing: go on growing. Don’t become a rut. Don’t start moving in the same vicious circle again and again and again.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Can one believe in Tao, not interfering with other people's lives, accepting what is now, and by profession be a psychotherapist? What, or how, is a Tao way of doing therapy?This is of tremendous significance.The first thing: “Can one believe in Tao…?” Tao does not depend on belief. You cannot believe in it. Tao knows no belief system. It does not say: “Believe.” That’s what other religions do. Tao drops all belief systems. A totally new kind of trust then arises – trust in life. Belief means believing in concepts. Concepts are about life. Trust is not concerned with concepts. Trust is immediate, direct, in life; it is not about life. Belief is far away from life. The stronger the belief, the greater the barrier. Tao is neither a belief nor a disbelief but the dropping of all beliefs and disbeliefs. When you drop all beliefs and disbeliefs and you are immediate, in contact with life, a trust arises, a great “yes” arises in your being. That “yes” transforms, transforms totally.So the first thing you ask: “Can one believe in Tao…?” No, it is not a belief. Don’t approach through the door of belief otherwise you will be in a philosophy, in a religion, in a church, in a dogma, but you will never be in life. Life simply is. It is not a doctrine preached by somebody. Life is simply there all around you, within and without. Once you don’t look through words, concepts, verbalizations, it reveals truth to you; everything becomes so crystal clear, so transparent. In that transparency you are not separate from it; how can you believe in it or disbelieve in it? You are it. That is the way of Tao: to become Tao.The second thing: “Can one believe in Tao, not interfering with other people’s lives…?” Once you have stopped interfering with your own life, you have stopped interfering with others’ lives. If you continue to interfere with your own life, you are bound to interfere with others’ lives. That is just a reflection, which is just a shadow. Stop interfering with your own life; then suddenly all interference disappears because it is absurd. Life is already going where it needs to go, why interfere?The river is already flowing toward the ocean, why interfere? Why direct it? If you start directing the river, you kill it – it becomes a channel. Then it is no longer a river, then its life has disappeared, then it is a prisoner. Then you can force it anywhere you want to take it, but there will be no song and no dance; it will be carrying a corpse. The river was alive, the channel is dead. The channel is just a river for the name’s sake. It is not a river because to be a river means to be free, to flow, to seek, to follow one’s own intrinsic nature. Not being directed, not being pulled and pushed, not being manipulated, is the very quality of being a river. Once you have understood that you grow when you don’t interfere in your own life, when you understand that you grow when nobody interferes in your life, how can you interfere in anybody else’s life?But if you interfere with your own life, if you have some ideal of how it should be, the ideal brings interference. The “should” is the interference. If you have some ideal: that you have to be like Jesus, or like Buddha, or like Lao Tzu, that you have to be a perfect man or a perfect woman, that you have to be this and that, then you will interfere. You have a map, you have a direction, you have a fixed future. Your future is already dead, you have converted your future into a past. It is no longer a new phenomenon: you have converted it into a dead thing. You will carry the corpse, you will interfere in everything because whenever you feel you are going astray – and by astray I mean astray from your ideal… Nobody has ever gone astray, nobody can go astray. It is not possible to commit error. Let me repeat it: It is impossible to go astray because wherever you go is godliness and whatsoever you do culminates in divinity. All acts are naturally transformed into the ultimate – good and bad, all. Sinner and saint, all end in godliness.Godliness is not something that you can avoid, but if you have some ideal you can postpone it. You cannot avoid this: sooner or later, godliness is going to take possession of you, but you can postpone it. You can postpone it infinitely – that is your freedom. Having an ideal means you are against godliness.Gurdjieff used to say that all religions are against God, and he had something – he had a great insight. All religions are against God because all religions have given ideologies, ideals. No ideal is needed, no ideology is needed. One should live a simple, ordinary life; one should allow God to do whatsoever he wants. If he wants you to be this way, good. If he wants you to be that way, good. Let his kingdom come, let his will be done – that is the Taoist attitude. Then there is no interference. When there is no ideal there is no interference. Once you enjoy the freedom that comes when you don’t have any ideals, how can you interfere in anybody’s life?You interfere in the lives of your children. You interfere in the life of your wife, your husband, your brother, your friend, your beloved. You can interfere only because you think that by interference you are helping them. You are crippling them. Your interference is like what Zen people say – they have the right expression – they say: “Putting shoes on a snake.” You are helping; you may be making a great effort, doing great things – putting shoes on a snake thinking, “How will the snake walk without shoes? There may be difficulty and the roads are rough, and there are also thorns. Life is full of thorns, so help the snake – put shoes on the snake.” You will kill the snake.All effort to improve upon people is just like that, but it is a natural corollary: if you are trying to improve yourself, you will try to improve others. Your own disease goes on overflowing onto others. Once you stop improving upon yourself, once you accept yourself as you are unconditionally, with no grudge, with no complaint; once you start loving yourself as you are, all interference disappears.The third thing: accepting what is now, can one be a psychotherapist? He will be a therapist, but in a totally different sense – not in the Freudian sense – he will be a therapist in the real sense. What is the real sense of “therapist”? He will allow freedom; he will simply be a presence, a light, a joy. He is not going to change the patient, though the patient will be changed. He will not make any effort to make him well. He will not make any effort to make him normal. He will not make any effort to help him to be adjusted to this neurotic society. He will not try to do anything. He will simply be a presence, a catalytic agent. He will love. He will share his energy with the patient; he will shower his energy on the patient. And remember, love is real therapy; everything else is secondary.In fact, there are so many psychiatric patients in the world because they have not been loved, nobody has loved them – that’s why they have gone berserk. They have lost contact with their center because it is only in love that one becomes centered. Their illness is not the real problem; the real problem is that deep down they have never been loved, that they have never known the milieu of love. So a Taoist therapist will simply give his love, his understanding, his vision. He will share his energy and he will not in any way interfere.The healing is going to happen. Healing will happen, not by any effort of the therapist but by his no-effort, by his inactivity, by his tremendous passivity. Have you seen it happen? Sometimes you are ill and you call the doctor. The doctor comes, and suddenly just by his entering the room, you are no longer as ill as you were before. He has not given you any medicine, just his presence, his care, his love. He just puts his hand on your head, takes your pulse, and suddenly you feel a change is happening. He has not done anything, no medicine has been given; he has not even diagnosed. Even before diagnosis, if the doctor is a loving person, fifty per cent of the illness has disappeared. For the remaining fifty per cent, he has to do something because he too does not know that man cannot heal anybody. It is always God who heals. Man can only become a passage for the healing energy – that’s how healing works. Three or four people – loving people – just sit around the patient holding his hands, singing a song, chanting, and suddenly the patient feels a tremendous upsurge, a transformation happening. What is happening? These four people, in love, have become vehicles of God, for Tao.Somebody can be a therapist. Tao is not against therapy, but the therapy will have a different quality. It will be wu wei; it will be action in inaction, it will be feminine. It will not be aggressive, it will not force the patient to be healed; it will simply persuade. It will simply seduce the patient to be healthy, that’s all. There is going to be a great seduction. The therapist is centered, grounded, is flowing; his presence, his light, his love, will help the patient’s energy to come up, to surface in his being. It is always there – he has just lost contact.In Zen temples they treat mad people. They don’t do anything. They take care. When they pray, the mad person comes and sits, and they are not praying for the mad person at all, that is not their concern. They are praying as usual, they are chanting as usual, and the mad person sits there. One hundred Buddhist monks chanting, and the beautiful chant, and the vibe, and the atmosphere, and the silence of a Zen community; the trees, and the rock garden, and the whole atmosphere of it… The patient simply sits. In fact they don’t even call him a patient because to call a patient, a patient, is to fix the idea in his mind that he is ill. It is a suggestion; a very dangerous suggestion. They don’t call him a patient – a person who needs prayer, a person who needs meditation, a person who needs relaxation, yes, but not a patient; not that he is ill, not that something has gone wrong, that he is a nut, no.The very idea that somebody is a nut fixes the concept in him that he is a “nut.” He goes on repeating it, and he tries hard not to be a nut. There is a certain law discovered by hypnotists; they call it the law of reverse effect. If you try too much not to be a nut, you will become a nut. You can try it and see. Try for seven days not to be a nut – continuously remain conscious: “Don’t be a nut.” Watch every act that you do, and within seven days, you will go nuts. The continuous repetition will create the reverse effect. In a Zen monastery, they think that the person needs relaxation, that he was too much in the world and has become too tense, that he is too tired – that’s all. No devaluation of the person in it, just compassion. He is not hospitalized, he is sent to a temple.Temples used to function in the old times as the places of therapy. The temple is still the right place for therapy because the very idea is different. You are not a patient, you are not to be hospitalized, you are not to lie down on the psychiatrist’s couch; you go to the temple. You go to the temple to renew your contact with God. Renew your contact with God because he is the source of healing and health and wholeness.Yes, a person can be a psychotherapist. In fact, only a Taoist can be an authentic psychotherapist. But he will not be the doer. He will be just a vehicle, a medium.The second question:Osho,I imagine you can talk about all the “traps” of growth because you experienced these problems in your life. Would you be willing to talk about your real life experiences rather than just the abstracted, impersonal concepts?The real cannot be talked about. The moment you talk about the real it becomes an abstract concept. The moment something is expressed it becomes a concept. That’s why Lao Tzu says: “The Tao that can be spoken is no longer the Tao.” The truth that can be uttered becomes a lie. The real cannot be talked about; the real can only be experienced. And it is good that the real cannot be talked about, otherwise people would simply gather words about the real and forget about experiencing it. By its very nature reality is elusive, it never comes into words.All that I can do is to show you the traps so that you can avoid them. If you can avoid all the traps, you will fall into the real. That is the most ancient method; the Upanishads call it neti-neti, “neither this nor that.” They say, “Show the disciple that this is not true, that is not true. Go on showing him what is not true. When you have covered the whole field, when you have shown him everything that is not true, then suddenly he will become aware of truth because now only truth is left.” So all that I can do is to talk about the traps.The question is very relevant. Many people say, “You should talk only about God, about truth, about moksha, nirvana. Why do you talk about jealousy, hatred, anger?” If you go to other ashrams in India, you will not find therapies there. You will not find encounter groups; you will not find gestalt groups; you will not find bioenergetics; you will not find Rolfing and Structural Integration. No, they simply read the scriptures; they talk about truth. Here the whole approach is totally different because to go on talking about truth is meaningless unless the traps are broken. My whole effort here is to break all the traps. Once the traps are broken, the blocks are removed, the stream of truth flows. It is not a question of the stream; it is only a question of the rocks that are blocking the path.The whole approach has to be understood, and that’s what I go on doing while I am talking. You may be surprised because for all of these few days I have not been talking about Tao, rather I have been criticizing Confucius. He is the trap; he has to be broken, demolished completely, with no compassion. He has to be smashed to pieces and bits, and thrown away. Once Confucius is gone, Lao Tzu enters. You would like to invite Lao Tzu, but Confucius is sitting on the throne; he has to be dethroned first. Once he is dethroned, suddenly you will see that Lao Tzu has always been there – the presence of Confucius was hiding him.Neti-neti – the negative approach: my approach is negative. I will never talk about reality because it cannot be talked about. I only talk about what is unreal, what is wrong. Once you understand the false as the false, you will become capable of knowing the real as the real.The third question:Osho,When am I going to become enlightened?Please don’t be in such a hurry because I will be left without business. This is not fair. If I have so much compassion for you, you should have at least a little compassion toward me too. Go slowly. Let me also enjoy the masterhood.The psychiatrist leaned heavily on the bar and began to drink long, hard doubles. His face was wreathed in sorrow, and he was, at the same time, ominously sad. Another psychiatrist happened by.“John!” he exclaimed: “John! My good fellow. You don’t seem to be yourself tonight. Care to tell me about it?”“There isn’t much to tell,” John replied. “Remember that rich nut I was treating for years? The one who practically kept me in business from the start?”“I certainly do. You mean the one who kept dreaming for thirty years that he was still in high school?”John nodded.“What happened?”“Last week he graduated.”Don’t graduate so fast. Go slowly. Even if you want to be in a hurry, remember: there are things which cannot be done in a hurried way, and enlightenment is one of those things.If you hurry, you will never arrive. If you go slowly, there is a possibility of arriving. And if you don’t go anywhere at all, if you simply sit where you are, you have arrived. It is not a question of any distance that has to be traveled; it is not a goal far away. Naturally, if the goal is far away you can go faster.Mulla Nasruddin works in an office, and he just lives across from the office but is always late. The boss, tired of it one day, said, “This is too much. I have been telling you again and again and again. Don’t you see? The other person who works with you and lives three miles away is always on time, but you just live across the street from the office but are always late.”Mulla Nasruddin said, “It is simple; it is logical. If he is late, he can hurry – three miles. If I am late, I am late – there is no way to hurry. He can run; he can take a taxi. But what is to be done? If I am late, I am late. I am just across the street from the office – there is no way to hurry.”Remember, enlightenment is not somewhere else, neither in space nor in time; it is herenow. If you hurry too much, you will go astray; you will go far away. The whole thing is to slow down – to slow down so deeply that one day nothing moves in you. In that very moment, in that moment of no movement, you will become enlightened.Particularly for the Western mind, speed is an obsession. They think that from the bullock cart they have come to the jet, so why can’t speedy methods be developed for enlightenment? If coffee can be instant, then why can’t nirvana be instant? They don’t understand that nirvana is not somewhere else. Otherwise it would be possible to go with speed. But enlightenment is already the case. You have only to come to where you are. You have to be that which you already are. The faster you go, the further away you will get – far away from enlightenment. It is not a question of getting someplace, it is not a question of arriving – you have to simply slow down. That’s what the whole teaching of Tao is, and my teaching too.Slow down. Relax. Forget ideals. Forget that there is any future. Let this moment be all. Relax. Enjoy the small things of life, so that you are not always going, so that you are not always projecting some desire into the future. You don’t have any future.Then one day it happens: you have fallen tremendously into the present moment – nothing moves. In that moment of no movement one simply recognizes who he is. All these meditations that you are doing here are only to help you to relax, to forget the future, to be herenow. Singing, dancing, chanting, humming: it is a present moment activity; you get absorbed in it. Listening to me is a meditation: you get absorbed in it. You are not worrying about going anywhere; you are simply here with me.In the East, satsang has been one of the most valuable methods for enlightenment. The East has said that if you are in the presence of the master, nothing else is needed. Just be in his presence, just sit silently with him, just be with him and enlightenment will take care of itself. Whenever the right moment comes it will happen. You need not worry about it, you need not plan for it, otherwise you will be in turmoil: “When is this enlightenment going to happen?” Then enlightenment has also become a desire, a greed, a lust.The fourth question:Osho,You said the other day that duty was a four-letter word, but I have also heard you say many times that you want your sannyasins to be tremendously responsible. Please tell me, are not a sense of duty and a sense of responsibility the same thing? I hope that I am not confusing you!You cannot because I am utterly confused. You cannot confuse me anymore. I am absolutely confused.Duty and responsibility are synonyms in the dictionary, but not in life. In life they are not only different, they are diametrically opposite. Duty is other-oriented, responsibility is self-oriented. When you say, “I have to do it,” it is a duty. “I have to go and sit by my mother’s side because she is ill.” Or, “I have to take flowers to the hospital. I have to do it, she is my mother.” Duty is other-oriented: you don’t have any responsibility. You are fulfilling a social formality – because she is your mother. You don’t love her. That’s why I say that duty is a four-letter, dirty, word. If you love your mother, you will not say, “This is a duty.” If you love your mother, you will go to the hospital, you will take the flowers, you will serve your mother, you will be by her bedside, you will massage her feet, you will feel for her, but it will not be a duty – it will be responsibility. You will respond out of your heart.Responsibility means the ability to respond. Your heart vibrates, you feel for her, you care for her; not because she is your mother – that is irrelevant – you love the woman. She is your mother – or not, that is secondary – but you love the woman, you love the woman as a person. It is a flowing from your heart. You will not feel that you have obliged her, and you will not go advertising all around that you are such a dutiful son. You will not feel that you have done something. You have not done anything. What have you done? Just taking a few flowers to your mother who is ill, you feel that you have done a great obligation? That’s why I say that duty is dirty. The very word is dirty; it is other-oriented.Responsibility has a totally different dimension: you love, you care, you feel; it comes out of your feeling. Duty comes out of thinking that she is your mother: “that’s why,” “therefore,” it is a syllogism, it is logical. You somehow go, dragging yourself; you would like to escape, but what can you do? Your respectability is at stake. What would people say? Your mother is ill and you are enjoying yourself in the club; and you are dancing, and your mother is ill? No, your ego will be hurt. If you could avoid this mother without your respectability being affected and your ego being affected, you would like to avoid her. You will go to the hospital, and you will be in a hurry to rush away; you will find some reason: “I have to leave because there is an appointment.” There may not be. You want to avoid this woman; you don’t want to be with her, even five minutes are too much. You don’t visit out of love.Duty I am against, but responsibility – yes, I say that my sannyasins have to be tremendously responsible. And once you drop duty you are free to be responsible.In my childhood, my grandfather used to like his feet to be massaged and he would call anybody – whoever was passing. He was very old, and he would say, “Will you massage my feet?”Sometimes I would say, “Yes,” and I would massage them, and sometimes I would say, “No.” He became intrigued. He asked, “What is the matter? Sometimes you say yes, and nobody massages my feet as lovingly as you do – but sometimes you simply say no.”I said, “Whenever it is a duty I say no. Whenever it is a responsibility, I do it.”He said, “What is the difference?”I said “This is the difference. When I feel love, when I would like to massage your feet, then I do it. When I feel it is just a formality – because you have asked, and I have to do it – and my mind is not here because the children are playing outside, and they are inviting me… I will not be here at all, then I don’t want to do it because that is ugly.” So sometimes it would happen that I had to say no to him when he wanted a massage, and sometimes I would simply go to him and ask, “Would you like a little massage? I am in the mood. I will really do a beautiful job. Would you allow me?”Do whatever comes out of your feeling, out of your heart; never repress your heart. Never follow your mind because the mind is a social by-product, it is not your reality. Move from your reality. Function from your reality. Don’t function from principles, etiquette, patterns of behavior, what Confucius calls “being gentlemanly.” Don’t be a gentleman; be a man – that’s enough; be a woman – that’s enough. And be truly a man, truly a woman. Sometimes you will feel like doing something, do it; pour your heart into it; it will be a beautiful flowering. Sometimes you won’t want to do it, so say so, be clear about it; there is no need to camouflage it.The fifth question:Osho,Why does one cling to the old? Why is one afraid of the new?There is a natural reason in it. With the old, one is efficient; with the new, one is awkward. With the old, you know what to do; with the new, you will have to learn from ABC. With the new you start feeling ignorant. With the old, you are knowledgeable. You have done something again and again; you can do it mechanically, you need not have any awareness. With the new, you will have to be alert, aware, otherwise something may go wrong.Have you not noticed? When you learn driving, you are so alert. When you have learned it, you forget about it. You sing a song, you listen to the radio, you talk to a friend or you think a thousand and one thoughts, and driving continues as a mechanical thing, robotlike – you are not needed. The old becomes mechanical, habitual. That’s why with the new comes fear. That’s why children are capable of learning. The older you grow, the less is the capacity to learn. It is very difficult to teach an old dog new tricks. He will repeat the old tricks again and again; those tricks he knows.I have heard…The foreign diplomat was unable to speak English. When the lunch bell rang at the United Nations Assembly he stood behind a man at the food counter and heard him order apple pie and coffee. So he ordered apple pie and coffee too. For the next two weeks he kept ordering apple pie and coffee. Finally he decided he wanted to try something else so he listened attentively while another man ordered a ham sandwich.“Ham sandwich,” he said to the counterman.“White or rye?” the counterman asked.“Ham sandwich,” the diplomat repeated.“White or rye?” the counterman asked again.“Ham sandwich,” the diplomat repeated.The counterman grew very angry. “Look, Mac,” he roared shaking his fist under the diplomat’s nose, “do you want it on white or rye?”“Apple pie and coffee,” answered the diplomat.Who should make such bother? It is getting too dangerous, that’s why one goes on with the old. But if you live with the old, you don’t live at all; you live in name only.Life is only with the new. With the new, and only with the new is life. Life has to be fresh. Remain a learner, never become a knower. Remain open, never become closed. Remain ignorant, go on throwing away the knowledge that accumulates – automatically, naturally. Each day, each moment, free yourself from all that you have known, and become a child again. To become innocent, like a child, is the way to live and to live abundantly.Osho,Is the childishness of senility anything to do with awareness? Is senility a disease of the West only? What is senility?It has nothing to do with East or West. East and West may differ on the surface – deep down there is no difference. Man is man. There may be a few different patterns in the East and in the West, but the differences are on the surface; they are only skin deep. Just scratch a little and East and West both disappear. Deep down humanity is one.This question is significant. “Is the childishness of senility something to do with awareness?” And, “What is senility?” Senility is becoming old without becoming mature. Senility is growing old without growing up. Then, as the end result, the senile person becomes very childish because his child has never become a grown-up; he has been hiding the child inside. He was occupied with a thousand and one things of the world, and the inner child was waiting and waiting. Now he has become retired; now all those occupations are gone and his energy is weakening. All those controls are also gone. When you control yourself, and you pretend to be something that you are not, and you hide that which you are, great energy is needed. The old man is naturally losing energy; his control is gone, he cannot control so much any longer, and that which is hidden inside him surfaces: he again becomes childish.However, that is not what Jesus meant when he said: “Only those who are like children will be capable of entering into the Kingdom of God.” Childlikeness is not childishness. Childlikeness comes only when a person is not only growing in age but is growing up, is becoming integrated inside. It is not only a physiological phenomenon that he is sixty, but psychologically, spiritually, he has become a grown-up person, mature, ripe. Then, in the end, the person becomes childlike, innocent.Childishness is not a value, it is of no value. Childlikeness is of great value. To be childlike means that the circle of life is complete: the man has lived life, lived and loved, experienced all that was available and has come to conclude that there is nothing more valuable than innocence. He has known that knowledge is futile, so he has dropped knowledge. He has known all the cunning ways of the world – he has been cunning, he has been deceptive, he has been deceived. Others have been cunning toward him – he has known all that, but he has grown up, and he has come to conclude that all that is just useless, meaningless. Deceiving, deceived – all is a game; it does not lead you anywhere, it is a dream. He has dropped all those games.A really mature person is one who no longer has obsessions with any game. He lives simply, innocently, without any pretensions and without any masks. That is the innocent person: a grown-up person becomes innocent, childlike. Simply getting old in age, one becomes senile, ugly, rotten; and one day, when your energies are gone, your childishness surfaces and the old person starts behaving in foolish ways.Remember, to be foolish is one thing and to be innocent is totally another. Sometimes they look similar, but they are not. An innocent person may sometimes look foolish, but he is not foolish. You can cheat him, but he is not foolish; and while you are cheating him he is feeling compassion for you. One day you will understand that you were a fool; he was not a fool. A foolish person looks innocent, but is not innocent. He is also cunning, though his cunningness is not a very developed quality; his cunningness is not very complex. He is also cunning, but other people are more cunning than him; he is relatively less cunning, so he looks foolish. An innocent person looks similar to the foolish one, but he is not.Childishness is foolishness, stupidity: it is idiotic. Childlikeness is totally different: it is a flowering of innocence. St. Francis is childlike, Jesus is childlike, Lao Tzu is childlike.The seventh question:Osho,The last time I was here I saw myself as a beggar; this time a thief. Please comment.You are growing well! This is the spiritual path. A disciple, when he first comes to the master, is naturally like a beggar. He is begging; he is tremendously desirous, greedy; he goes on asking this and that. When you have grown a little into the world of discipleship, you become a thief. Then you start feeling that truth cannot be given, it can only be stolen.Yes, this is the way in which a disciple grows. Truth has to be stolen from the master, it cannot be given. You will have to be very, very intelligent, aware, to steal it away. If I could give it to you, it would have been simple, but I cannot give it. You have to become very, very alert.Do you know that the art of the thief is the art of awareness? When a thief enters into somebody’s house in the dark night – no light – he may not have entered the house before, he may not know the topography of the house at all, but still he functions well. He moves around in somebody else’s house, where he has never been, as if it were his own house. He has tremendous confidence. He is so alert that he does not make a single sound; his breathing is very quiet; he moves as if he were not there. This is great art.It is said about one Zen master that he used to send his disciples to learn the art of stealing. He used to send them to a master thief, telling them, “Go to the master thief and learn such self-confidence as a thief has, such awareness, such cautious alertness, such mindfulness – because a thief has to be very, very mindful, he needs presence of mind.” You cannot rehearse it – it is not acting; you cannot prepare for it. Nobody knows what is going to happen. You cannot arrange for it, you cannot prepare for it – anything is possible. It is very accidental.It is said about a master, a master who was well-known all over Japan and was a master thief, that his son asked the old man, “Now that you are getting old, teach me your art.”The old man said, “Okay, but this is an art which cannot be taught. It is more like a knack than like knowledge, but I will try. Come with me tonight.”The young man was very afraid, but the old man – who was very old, seventy years old – the old man went and broke open a wall. The young man was perspiring although it was a cold night, and he was trembling. But the father was working so at ease, as if this were his own house. He broke open a hole; he entered and called the son. The son went in, but his breathing was so chaotic that he could not control it. The father was as if he were not breathing. Then the father took his son in. He opened many doors and they went to the main chamber of the house where he opened a cupboard and told the son, “Go in and bring the best dresses there are.” And the son went in and the father locked the door, made a loud noise and ran away.The whole house was suddenly awake and everybody started searching – where was the thief? The wall had been broken, certainly. And this young man – inside the cupboard and the cupboard locked – started thinking, “Has my father gone mad? Is this the way to teach me?” And he started praying to God saying, “This is my first and last. I will never even think about it again.” Then a servant came with a candle and looked around, and suddenly the young man found that he was making a noise like rats make. It was very intuitive.The servant opened the door and looked in. The young man blew out the candle, rushed out with the whole household, the servants and the neighbors following him. He came to a well, and he threw a big rock in it and stood back, behind a tree. The household and the servants and the neighbors all gathered around the well. They thought that the thief had jumped in, and they said, “Now there is no problem. In the morning we will see, either he will be dead or he will go to the jail.” And they went to bed.The son came back home, and the father was fast asleep and snoring. The son pulled off his blanket, threw it back and said, “Have you gone mad?”And the father said, “Now there is no problem. You are back, so you have learned the art. Now go to sleep and from tomorrow you start on your own.”But the son said, “Tell me why you did this!”The father said, “It is not a question of teaching – it is an intuitive art. Such things happen, so I left you in a very accidental situation. Such things happen! This is no ordinary art, but now you have come back home so I know you are a born thief, you are my son.”Last time you were a beggar, now you are a thief. Be a really master thief.The eighth question:Osho,What is rationalization?Rationalization is pseudo reasoning – it looks like reason, but is not. In life you use it every day. You come from the office angry, the boss was nasty but you could not be angry there; there you had to smile. He was shouting at you, screaming at you, and you were smiling; you were as soft as butter, you swallowed anger. You wanted to kill the man then and there, but that is not economical and can lead you into danger. So now you come back home, now you start searching in a very unconscious way to find some excuse so that you can justify your anger. And your small child comes in dancing and singing, and you are angry, and you shout, “Not a single moment’s peace! Stop it! The whole day I have been tired, and I come home, and there is no peace even here.” And you get angry.Now, rationally, you can manage if the child disturbs you. Your child has always been that way, but today you are angry, now you rationalize. Or you don’t like the food that your wife has prepared – not that the food is bad, but you are searching for something to become angry about; you are groping in the dark for some excuse. And then, if the food is not good – or you can prove that the food is not good, which is very easy – then you explode at your wife and you rationalize. But you don’t look at the real reason.If you really want to be awake and alert, and if you really want to be a religious person, you will have to drop all rationalizations. These rationalizations are very tricky: because of them you never look deep inside yourself. You find a thousand and one ways to persuade yourself, to pretend. These pretensions have to be dropped. If you are angry, let it be clear to yourself that it is anger. Better go to the wife and say, “Do something wrong please. I am angry, and I want to throw something.” That will be better, more alert. Tell your son, “Shout! Jump! Break something! I am very angry, and I would like to blame it on you. Help me.” That will be more conscious.If you start living consciously, by and by you will see in your life that you have been rationalizing and rationalizing. You have not done anything else.Let me tell you few anecdotes that will give you some different angles on rationalization.There was a row in a small town between a Christian group of citizens and the Jewish community. The Christians were unveiling a statue of Jesus, when a Christian started a fight with a Jew. The Jew picked up a large stone and threw it at his enemy, but it struck the statue instead, knocking off its head. He had not intended that, but he could not let the incident be a loss of face – a Jew never allows anything to be a loss of face.“There you go!” he shouted triumphantly. “If that had been Moses, he would have ducked.”Now this is a rationalization. One has to find a way to escape, and one has to use it for one’s own benefit. You never allow anything to become a loss of face. Good, bad, nectar, poison – whatever it is, you try to use it for your own profit. But by and by this becomes such a deep-rooted habit that you completely forget about the real reasons.The fighter had a good chance at the championship if he trained diligently, but he couldn’t break the habit of indulging in New York nightlife. Finally his manager was forced to lay down the law. “Either you quit the night life until after the bout,” he ordered, “or I’ll cancel the bout on the grounds that you’re out of condition.”The fighter agreed to behave himself and all went well for about a week. Then the manager found the fighter sneaking into an all-night bar at four in the morning. “Well, what’s your alibi this time?” the manager asked in disgust.“I heard a noise in the alley,” the fighter explained, “so I got up to investigate.”“Yeah, well how come you’re all dressed up in a tuxedo?”“I thought it might be a lady burglar.”One goes on and on defending oneself, creating more and more lies around oneself. If you look at yourself honestly, you will find nothing but a bundle of lies. That’s why people don’t look at themselves because it is horrible to look at: the whole thing is just a lie. Socrates said, “Know thyself.” The Upanishads say, “Look within.” Jesus and Buddha and Lao Tzu all went on teaching: “Close your eyes and go within.” But you cannot go within because whenever you look within there are lies and lies, queues upon queues of lies. It is horrible to look at those lies that you have lived, that you have pretended to live.A man who is really in search of truth has to drop all these rationalizations.Three textile merchants were seated in Feuerstein’s, the Lindy’s of the Lower East Side, discussing the finer things life has to offer.“The best,” said Nat Pincus, “is a nice juicy steak, smothered in onions and mushrooms with crisp french fried potatoes.”“I don’t agree,” answered Lou Goldberg. “The best is borscht, a boiled potato and a good piece of herring.”Sharfman shook his head. “I’m sorry, gentlemen, to me the best is a date with Lana Turner, Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe.”“Aha,” replied Pincus and Goldberg, “and who’s talking about the very best?”Immediately – they were talking about the best and now they say “Who’s talking about the very best?” You can always find a loophole to protect yourself; and the mind is very cunning. If you really want to get out of the cunningness of the mind – which is not deceiving anybody but yourself, you will have to find out how the mind has become trained in finding rationalizations, loopholes, false reasons, pretensions, masks, lies. It has really become a great inventive force in your life.And it is not only about big things. About small things too – your smile, the way you look at people, the way you walk, are all lies. You never walk as if you were alone on the earth. You never smile as if the smile were coming from your inner being. It is always a pretension; it is always a language, a gesture. Look at people and you will find a mess. Their eyes say one thing, their lips say another thing; their words say one thing, their hands are expressing something else. But nobody looks because everybody is so drowned in his own lies – how can you look at others?Gurdjieff took his disciples far away to a Russian town, Tiflis, for three months. They kept absolutely silent for three months; silence was really absolute – not even through gestures could they to communicate, not even through their eyes could they recognize that somebody else was present. Thirty people in one, simple, small house. And each had to live as if he were alone. Twenty-seven left – only three remained in the house by the end.After three months, Gurdjieff brought these three persons to Tiflis, the town, and said to them, “Look around.”Ouspensky was one of these three disciples. He wrote in his diary, “I could not believe it. I saw dead people walking – lies and lies and lies. Nobody was true.” “And on that day,” Ouspensky said, “I recognized Gurdjieff and his truth. Only he alone was standing there; in that whole town of thousands of people, he was the only one who was true.” Ouspensky said, “Before that I had never imagined such a situation. I had never thought that all these people were just lies.”The day your meditation enters your being you will be surprised: you will find millions of somnambulistic people just moving in deep sleep, living lies, corpses. Only then will you be able to recognize a buddha, only then will you recognize who is enlightened. Before that it will be impossible. The way toward enlightenment is to throw away all rationalizations. Next time you start rationalizing something, stop immediately, then and there. The moment you catch hold of yourself red-handed, stop it immediately, even if it feels awkward. You were just going to smile, a friend came to meet you, and you were just about to smile, and you know it is a lie; stop it. Let it disappear immediately from your lips, and tell your friend, “Excuse me. I was just going to smile and it was false.” He will feel more love from you because how can love flow through such falsity? You were just going to say something which is false – stop immediately, even if you catch hold of yourself in the middle of the sentence. Then and there, don’t complete the sentence, ask forgiveness. Watch out. It will take a little courage and a little time and a little patience to get rid of rationalizations, but it’s a must.Once rationalizations are gone, suddenly you are vulnerable. The Wall of China has disappeared.Finklestein was frantic. For five weeks now he hadn’t been able to do anything in the way of business because he’d forgotten the combination to the safe. His partner, Kanubowitz, had gone away on an extended road trip and there was no word from him. Then one day the phone rang. “Izzy,” Finklestein shouted into the phone, “thank God you called. I can’t do any business. I had to lay off the whole shop, fire the salesman, refuse orders from our biggest accounts and just stay here in the office and wait for your call.”“What happened?” asked the partner.“It’s the safe. I forgot the combination.”“That’s simple. Turn once left and twice right.”“But how about the numbers?”“It doesn’t matter?” said the partner. “The lock is broken.”It is as simple as that. Once rationalizations are dropped – in fact there is no lock – you are open, you can enter your being. Sometimes it happens that there is no lock, but you think there is a lock, and you go on finding keys and inventing keys, and you are wasting your time.It happened in the life of Houdini. He was imprisoned in many jails, chained many times, but within seconds he would come out of the chains, out of the prison cells; nobody had been able to keep him in jail. In Italy once it happened that for three hours he could not get out of a cell, and there were thousands of people waiting for him to get out. What happened? It had never happened before. Had the police succeeded? Had they created a situation from which Houdini, the great magician, could not escape? When he came out, he was perspiring and tired and exhausted. He simply fell out, and they asked, “What happened?”He said, “They fooled me, they tricked me. There was no lock! I was trying to open the lock for three hours, and there was no lock. The door was not locked – they tricked me. So after three hours of strenuous work on the lock, when I stumbled and fell against the door, it opened.”On your inner being there is no lock. There never has been. No key is needed, no truth is needed – but lies have to be dropped and truth will assert itself. It is burning right this moment inside your being, but there are great layers of lies – layer upon layer – and you cannot see the light. Rationalization is one of the very cunning tricks of the mind to create a Great Wall of China around you. You are imprisoned in your rationalizations. If you want to be liberated, drop rationalizations.Nobody else can do it for you – only you can do it for yourself. It is your responsibility. If you want to be miserable, then it is good. If you don’t want to be miserable, start dropping the lies in your life. There is no need to go to the Himalayas, and there is no need to go to any temple or church, and there is no need to go into the scriptures: the Bible, the Koran and the Vedas. If you can only do one simple thing by dropping lies, falsehoods and inauthentic gestures, you will arrive.The ninth question:Osho,Why do sannyasins have to change their names and wear a mala? The spiritual jet set talks about all these “enlightened masters.” “Osho is more enlightened than Oscar,” “Oscar is more enlightened…” How can we tell what it means?First: there is no reason why sannyasins are in orange and wear a mala except that I am eccentric about it. I am a little in love with the orange and I am also in love with myself, hence the mala. This is the truth, if you understand it. If you need some rationalization, you can ask my disciples.And the second question: “‘Osho is more enlightened than Oscar,’ ‘Oscar is more enlightened…’ How can we tell what it means?” Enlightenment is never more or less: either one is enlightened or one is not. It is not a question of more or less. How can you be more enlightened and less enlightened? This is absurd. Enlightenment is not a relative concept: either one has arrived or one has not arrived. How can you partially arrive? You have come back home. Can you say, “I have come partially back home – only one leg, but my head has not come yet”?It happened in a jail. A man was imprisoned and then immediately, the second day, he started saying that his teeth were aching, so the teeth were removed. After a few days, he started saying that his appendix… So the appendix was removed. Then he said the tonsils… And the tonsils were removed. The jailer came, and he said, “I know what you’re doing. Bit by bit you’re getting out of prison!”You cannot be more or less enlightened. Either one is enlightened, or one is not. There is no partial enlightenment.One thing to remember always: enlightened people cannot be compared. This foolishness has persisted down the ages. Jainas will say, “Mahavira is more enlightened than Buddha.” Buddhists will say, “Buddha is more enlightened than Mahavira.” Hindus will say, “Krishna is more enlightened than either of them.” So on and so forth. But the whole idea of more and less is absurd. Those who are enlightened are simply enlightened. Nobody is superior and nobody is inferior.The second thing: “How can we tell what it means?” You cannot, and there is no need to. Whatsoever you say will be wrong – you are not yet enlightened. It would be as if a blind man were talking about light: all that he says is meaningless. He may have heard much about light, he may have even read much about light through Braille, he may have consulted great physicists who know about light, he may have talked to painters and poets who are deeply in love with light. But still, a blind man is a blind man; whatever he says is going to be wrong because he is not in a position to say.So please, you have enough worries as it is. Don’t take on these worries: who is enlightened and who is not. Rather, become enlightened and you will know.The last question is a few short questions:Osho,Why could you not speak for a year and a half after your birth?I was so surprised at my birth, that’s why. I had to get over that surprise and it took one and a half years.Second…Osho,What were you doing when you were a kid?I did nothing when I was a kid. I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up and I practiced for it.And the third:Osho,What do you say about drinking?A difficult question – don’t take it seriously. A drink in time is fine.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Someone asked Lieh Tzu“Why do you value emptiness?In emptiness there is no valuing.”Lieh Tzu said,“Value is not the name for it.Best be still, best be empty.In stillness and emptiness,we find where to abide;Taking and giving,we lose the place.”Truth is one – it cannot be otherwise because existence is a universe, it is not a “multiverse.” It is one. It is glued together. It is a togetherness. It is a cosmos. That which keeps the universe glued together is what we call truth, or Tao, or God. Tao is not a person; neither is God a person, but the unity that runs through everything, like a thread running through a garland. The universe is not a heap of things, separate, individual, like islands. No, the universe is one, together, and something keeps it together; it is not falling apart. That which keeps it together is God, Tao.Man can approach this truth from two ways. Those two ways have to be understood. Truth is one, but the paths are two. The first path is via affirmativa, the positive path, the “yes-sayers” path. The path of the devotee. Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna, have followed the path of affirmation. The path of affirmation seems to be the path of effort, of great effort: one is trying to reach God, one has to make all the effort that is possible, one has to do the utmost, one has to put oneself to the stake. In modern times, Gurdjieff, Ramakrishna followed the path of affirmation, via affirmativa.The other path is the via negativa, through negation, through the “no.” Lao Tzu, Buddha, Nagarjuna followed the path of negation. In modern times, Ramana Maharshi, J. Krishnamurti follow the path of the “no.”These two paths have to be understood as clearly as possible because much will depend on it; some day or other you will have to choose. They move in different dimensions; they reach to the same goal, but they move in different directions.The positive path is a positive approach toward God, a reaching toward God, a seeking, an inquiry. The negative path is a waiting for God, not seeking. The negative path just keeps the door open, not going, seeking; not inquiring, just being receptive, womblike. The first is yang, the second is yin. The first is the male-oriented path; the second is the female-oriented path. One has just to be in a let-go in the second: no will, but surrender. One has just to allow God to be; no reaching for him, let him reach you. You are simply silent, empty. You give space so that if he comes, you are available; you remain available.On the path of will you have much to do; on the path of surrender you have nothing to do – exactly nothing to do, only nothing to do. These paths can be named in different ways too. The first path can be said to be the path of the ascetic. The word ascetic comes from a Greek root ascesis which means exercise. Many methods, many exercises, Yoga, techniques, are possible. The second path can be called the path of the mystic: no exercises, no methods, no technology.On the first path, time is a must. You cannot be immediately enlightened – methods take time, exercises take time, preparation takes time, and you will have to wait for many lives. Enlightenment will be gradual, it cannot be sudden. On the negative path it can be absolutely sudden, it can happen this very moment. Time is not needed because exercise is not needed. You are not to go anywhere; you are just to sit silently, you have just to be in a let-go. One need not wait.The path of the mystic is mysterious – cannot be explained. The path of the ascetic is explainable: it is very scientific, very logical. It can be explained step by step; it can be analyzed, divided into easy steps. The steps can be made so small that everybody can take them, even a small child – there are possible degrees. But the path of the mystic is very mysterious; hence it is called the mystic path. No degrees are possible, no small steps – but a quantum leap, a jump into the unknown, sudden, like lightning. Naturally it cannot be explained logically. The logical mind will be at a loss. It needs great understanding. Not based on logic, but based on intuition; not based on intellect, but based on intuition. It needs an illogical, adventurous mind: one who can forego all steps, one who is ready to go into the unknown, one who is courageous enough to take the jump.On the first path you go step by step, moving upward. On the second path you simply take a jump into the abyss. It is a bottomless abyss, it is emptiness, it is absolute nothingness. You disappear.These are the two paths, and everybody has to decide in his innermost core of being what appeals to him or to her. It is difficult to decide but it has to be decided, otherwise you can go on doing things which will not have any meaning. If you can take the jump, then there is no need to train yourself for Yoga. If you cannot take the jump, then there is no point in just sitting and waiting.On the first path, the greatest danger is of the ego because you have much to do, and if you are too egoistic, you will become a doer, and then ego will become your barrier. One has to do, yet not strengthen the ego. On the second path, lethargy is the problem. You are not to do anything; one can become lethargic, one can become dull and dead. That is the very natural danger: sitting silently, doing nothing, by and by you relapse into dullness, into a sort of unintelligence. You lose sharpness, you lose aliveness, you become idiotic. That’s possible; one has to be very alert about this.On the first path, one has to watch that the ego does not arise. On the second path, one has to watch that lethargy is not settling. If these two pitfalls are avoided, then you can reach realization either from the affirmative or from the negative. People have reached enlightenment from each. So there is no question about reaching enlightenment, the question is which is going to be easier, more in tune with your inner nature – choose that.A few things have to be understood about the path of nothingness because Lieh Tzu is a follower of that path – the path of via negativa, the mystic path. On the mystic path you have to be alone – no possibility of being together. It is a deep inactivity, so deep that the very idea of action has to be dropped and renounced. No desire, no action; one has just to be. Aloneness has to be experienced. Solitude has to be experienced.On the path of affirmation, God is always with you, you are never alone. You can always talk to God, always pray to God; you can always hope that he is with you. He surrounds you; he holds your hand. And he is very much on the path of affirmation. His hand is almost in your hands. It is not just imagination – remember, it is not hallucination; it is so. When you have done all that you can do, suddenly he becomes available. You cannot do more: you have not been withholding, you have done all that you can do, you have put yourself totally into the work, you have come to your optimum – from that moment he takes over. But one has to do the optimum, less than that will not help. One has to boil to a hundred degrees, then suddenly – the evaporation.On the path of the ascetic, God is with you; you are never alone, you can always pray. But on the negative path, prayer is not possible, prayer is not allowed – prayer is a hindrance. Remember this too: something may be a help on one path and may become a hindrance on another path. Prayer is a hindrance. If you ask the follower of the negative path, he will say: “Prayer means that you are still not capable of being alone; you are still attached to the other.” You may have dropped your attachment to your wife, to your husband, to your children, to your friend, to the society. Now you have projected a God and now you keep company with him; but you cannot be alone. Prayer means that you are still afraid of being alone, so you create a bridge with the other, you seek the other. Prayer simply means that whenever you are alone, you are not alone but lonely: you miss the other. On the path of the negative, aloneness is simply the greatest splendor there is.If you ask the mystic, he will say: “Being lonely is just a pause.” Being alone is an ultimate condition. Being lonely or together is accidental. Being alone is essential. Being lonely implies an evolution or continuity of experience, while being alone means a radical, total, one hundred and eighty degree change, a mutation, a metanoia. Being lonely is a way back to others: whenever you feel lonely you are seeking the other in some form or other. Being lonely is a way back to others. Being alone is a way back to oneself.This has to be remembered. That’s why on the negative path meditation is more significant than prayer. Meditation is a help, prayer is a hindrance. On the path of affirmation, prayer is a help, meditation is not talked about at all. That’s why in Christianity, in Islam, in Judaism, in Hinduism, meditation has not been developed. Meditation has been developed utterly by the Buddhists and the Taoists – that is their secret key.You can divide all the religions into two: Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity are all on the path of via affirmativa. Buddhism and Tao are basically negative, on the path of via negativa. Hinduism and Islam have flowered to their utmost in Sufism. That is the meeting of the Hindu and the Mohammedan and a really beautiful flower has come out of the meeting – it is a crossbreeding – Sufism. It is higher than anything that is in Hinduism and higher than anything that is in Mohammedanism; it is higher than both, it has transcended both the parents. The child is more beautiful than the mother and the father – has to be because both mother and father have been dissolved into it. So Sufism is the peak of the affirmative. And Buddhism and Taoism met and gave birth to Zen: that is the optimum on the path of meditation. Again more beautiful than Buddhism and Taoism, better than both the parents: again a crossbreeding.The meeting of Islam and Hinduism happened in India. Islam came to India, met with Hinduism and a beautiful child was born. The meeting of Taoism and Buddhism happened in China. Buddhism went to China, met with Taoism and a beautiful child, Zen, was born. If everything disappears from the world and only two things can be retained, Sufism and Zen, nothing will be lost. They are the highest crescendos, but of two different paths. Sufism is nothing but pure prayer, zikr, remembrance of God, and Zen is nothing but meditation.The word Zen comes from the Sanskrit root dhyana. First the word dhyana became jhana because Buddha used to speak Pali – dhyana is jhana in Pali. Then from jhana it became ch’an in China. Then it became Zen when it reached to Japan. But it is dhyana, it is the essential dhyana: just to be alone, absolutely alone, not even a thought to keep company with. In that aloneness all disappears. One is just spacious; one is just a space, pure, transparent. In that purity which one achieves, God comes in. When you are ready to be so empty, God enters. The Sufi seeks God. The Zen disciple waits, God comes.Now this beautiful parable:Someone asked Lieh Tzu“Why do you value emptiness?In emptiness there is no valuing.”Naturally, what value can emptiness have? It is condemned all over the world. Except for the Taoists and the Buddhists, nobody understands what emptiness is – it is condemned. In the West you say, “The empty mind is the Devil’s workshop.” Now what more condemnation can there be? Devil’s workshop? The empty mind? The Taoists and the Buddhists say that the empty mind is the goal.When you are totally empty, godliness comes in. The Devil can exist only with an active mind, never with an inactive mind. The Devil can exist only with an occupied mind, not an unoccupied mind. The Devil can ride only on thoughts, he uses thoughts and desires. How can he use emptiness? It seems to be true. Hitler is not empty, neither is Genghis Khan, neither is Tamerlane; they are very active people. The Devil has entered through them into the world. Bodhidharma is empty; Lieh Tzu is empty; Nagarjuna is empty – the Devil has not even come close to them. Nothing wrong has ever come out of these empty people, only good; and only good has flowered. Great has been their fragrance. Centuries have gone by, but their fragrance is as fresh as ever.Ordinarily, emptiness has never been thought of as a value, so the questioner seems to be right. He says:“Why do you value emptiness? In emptiness there is no valuing.”What type of value? What can you do with emptiness? Value comes with use. Try to understand it: value comes when something is useful. How can you value something which is not? Not only is it not useful, it is not – how can you value it? But that is the approach of the negative.Lao Tzu says that the room is valuable not because of the walls, but the emptiness within. You use the room not the walls. Of course, when you make the house you make the walls, not the emptiness; nobody can make the emptiness. Emptiness is eternal, it is of God; it is not man-made. Houses are made by man, not emptiness. But what do you use? Do you use the walls or do you use the space inside? The word room is good: room means space. You use the room, the space, the roominess. What do you pass through in the wall to come in and out? The door. The door is empty. Door means the emptiness, that which is not – hence you can come in and out. You use the door, you don’t use the wall. You use the room; you don’t use the wall. What do you use when you use an earthen pot? The earthen sides, or the emptiness within? When you go to the well to draw water, and you bring water home, what do you use? The emptiness of the earthen pot. That emptiness is valuable and that emptiness is not created by you.Taoists say: that which is not created by man is valuable. That which is created may have a relative value, a market value, but really it is not valuable – it has no value. A man-made thing is a commodity. Of course if you go into the marketplace, and you start selling emptiness, nobody will purchase it. There is no value in it and people will laugh.Lao Tzu was passing through a forest, and the forest was being cut down. Thousands and thousands of carpenters were cutting down the trees. Then he came to a big tree – a very big tree, one thousand bullock carts could have rested underneath it – and it was so green and so beautiful. He sent his disciples to inquire of the carpenters why this tree had not been cut down yet.They said, “It is useless. You cannot make anything out of it: furniture cannot be made from that wood; it cannot be used as fuel – it makes too much smoke. It is of no use, that’s why we have not cut it down.”And Lao Tzu said to his disciples, “Learn from this tree. Become as useless as this tree then nobody will cut you down.”Uselessness has great value.He said: “Look, and notice this tree. Learn something from this tree. This tree is great. Look! All the trees are gone. They were useful, hence they are gone. Some tree was very straight, that’s why it is gone. It must have been very egoistic, straight, proud of being somebody – it is gone. This tree is not straight, not a single branch is straight. It is not proud at all. Hence it exists.”Lao Tzu said to his disciples: “If you want to live long, become useless.” However, his meaning of the word useless is this: don’t become a commodity, don’t become a thing. If you become a thing, you will be sold and purchased in the market and you will become a slave. If you are not a thing, who can purchase you, and who can sell you?Remain God’s creation. Don’t become a human commodity and nobody will be able to use you. If nobody is able to use you, you will have a beautiful life of your own, independent, free, joyful. If nobody can use you, nobody can reduce you to a means. You will never be insulted because in this life there is no greater insult than to become a means that somebody or other is going to use – your body, your mind, your being.Lao Tzu said, become a nonentity so that nobody looks at you and you can live your life as you want to live it. Nobody comes to interfere with you.It happened that Lao Tzu’s disciple, Chuang Tzu, became very famous and the emperor sent his ministers to invite Chuang Tzu to become his prime minister.Lao Tzu was very angry. He said, “You must have done something wrong, otherwise why should the emperor become interested in you? You must have proved yourself of some use. You must have missed my teaching, otherwise how is it that the emperor has become interested in you? Now you will never be at rest.”Be a nonentity so nobody comes even to think that you can be of any use. There is a uselessness which is of tremendous use. Lao Tzu calls it “the use of uselessness.” But certainly there is no value in it, no market value at least. Ordinarily, you want to become of some value – a doctor, an engineer, a painter, a poet, a mahatma – you want to become somebody who is valuable, who becomes indispensable to the world. You feel very happy if people come and say, “When you are gone we will never be able to replace you.” You feel tremendously happy, but what are they saying? They are saying, “You are a thing we are using.”The more indispensable you become, the more you are reduced to being a thing, the more your freedom is lost. If you can die as if nothing had happened, if you disappear from the world and not even a trace is left, then…It happened that a great Taoist died and Lieh Tzu went to show his respects, but thousands of people had gathered there. He was puzzled, and without paying his respects to the dead man and his dead body, he came back. A few people followed him, and they asked, “Why? You had come to pay your respects – why are you going back?”He said, “This man cannot have been a man of Tao. So many people are crying and weeping, somehow he must have become indispensable to their lives. Look at their insight: he must have become indispensable to their lives. He must have proved of some use, otherwise why are these people crying and weeping as if their father had died or their mother had died or their son had died? Why are these people crying and weeping? He must not have been utterly useless. Some use must have been there – that’s why I am going back. He has not followed the master rightly.”Their approach is that there is a value, an ultimate value, in being nobody, in being empty, in being of no use. When you are of no use to humanity, you become of tremendous use to God. Then he starts flowing through you: then you become a vehicle – because you are so empty he can flow through you. You become a hollow bamboo; he can sing his song through you. When you allow human lips to sing a song through you, God is denied.“In emptiness there is no valuing,” said the man, “Why do you value emptiness?”Lieh Tzu said,“Value is not the name for it.”It is invaluable. It is so valuable that you can only call it invaluable. Value is not the name for it: value means commodity, value means that which can be defined in terms of human use, that which can become a means and is not an end. The end cannot be valuable in the ordinary sense of the term. For example, if somebody asks you, “You love, but what is the value of love?” what would you say? You would say, “Value is not the name for it.” Love is not a value in the same sense that a car has value, a house has value. Money has value; health has value, but love? Love is the ultimate, the end. You love for love’s own sake. It is not a means to anything else; it is its own end. Its value is intrinsic, its value is in itself; it is not outgoing.If somebody asks, “What is the value of life?” Certainly you will say, “Value is not the name for it.”“Why are you living?” You will say, “Because I enjoy being alive.”“But what is the value?” “Value? There is none.”All that is ultimate is valueless in the ordinary sense of the word, but because of the ultimate, everything else is valuable. So value is not the name for it, although all values exist because of it.You go to the office, you work, it is valuable: you will get one thousand rupees per month. And then you come and give one thousand rupees to your wife because you love the woman. You work for her, you work for your children – you love them. Love has no value. Your work has value, but finally all that has value comes at the feet of that which is valueless, or invaluable.Remember, the goal cannot have any value. That’s why Taoists say that life has no purpose. It shocks people.One day a man came to me and he asked, “What is the purpose of life”?And I said, “There is no purpose. Life simply is.”He was not satisfied. He said, “I have come from very far.” He had come from Nepal, and he said, “I am an old man, a retired professor. Don’t send me away empty-handed. I have come to ask only one thing: What is the purpose of life?”And I said, “If I can send you away empty-handed, then your journey has been purposeful because to be empty-handed is the goal.”He said, “Don’t talk in puzzles. Just tell me, in clear-cut language, what is the purpose of life?”Now he could not understand that he was asking an absurd question. Life cannot have any purpose because if life has any purpose then something will become more valuable than life, and again the question will arise: “What is the purpose of that?” If we say that life is to attain truth, then truth becomes the real purpose. But then what is the purpose of truth? If we say that life is to seek God, then the question arises: “What is the purpose of God, or of achieving God, or of realizing God?” In the end you have to drop the word purpose, finally you just have to drop it.Yes, value is not the name for it; purpose is not the name for it; and if you understand this insight, great light will arise in you. Life has no purpose and no value. Love has no purpose and no value. God has no purpose and no value. Truth has no purpose and no value. That means that God, life, truth, love, are just four names for the same thing. They are not different because there can be only one thing which has no purpose – everything else has purpose because of it. It is the topmost, the very peak.Just the other night, a woman said, “It is very difficult for me to understand what you mean when you say God because I don’t believe in God. I have never believed in God. I would like to understand, but the moment you use the word God something goes wrong in my head – I become closed.”I said to her, “Do a simple thing: whenever I say God, hear it as life – that will do. Whenever I say God, hear it as life – immediately translate it into life.” She was happy.How we are fixed in words! If I say God, it creates negativity in somebody; if I say life, it will create negativity in somebody else. I am only changing the name. “A rose is a rose is a rose,” by whatsoever name it is called. You can call it jasmine – the rose remains the rose. You can call it by any name you choose, but the rose remains the rose.There is only one which is the ultimate. Different people have given different names to it. That one is valueless because it is the ultimate value. Beyond it nothing exists, so it cannot be valuable for something else. You cannot use it as a stepping-stone because there is nothing beyond it; it is the beyond.Lieh Tzu said“Value is not the name for it.Best be still, best be empty.In stillness and emptiness,we find where to abide;Taking and giving,we lose the place.”“Best be still…” Now, rather than answering what a value is or why emptiness is a value, Lieh Tzu insists on experience. The Taoist approach is basically existential. They don’t believe in abstract speculations and concepts. They say: “If you can experience it, why borrow secondhand knowledge?” In fact, godliness can never be secondhand; it has to be experienced firsthand. You cannot borrow my God – my God is my God. You will have to come to your own God. Of course when you have come to your God, you will find that my God and your God are the same, but you will have to come to it on your own; it has to bloom in your own being.There is a Taoist story:Duke Huan, seated above in his hall was once reading a book, and the wheelwright P’ien was making a wheel below it. Laying aside his hammer and chisel, P’ien went up the steps and said, “I venture to ask Your Grace what words you are reading?”The duke said, “The words of the sages.”“Are those sages alive?” P’ien continued.“They are dead,” was the reply.“Then,” said P’ien, “what you, my ruler, are reading are only the dregs and sediments of those old men.”The duke said, “How should you, a wheelwright, have anything to say about the book I am reading? If you can explain yourself, very well; if you cannot, you will have to die. I will kill you.” He was very angry. This is too much! A wheelwright coming to the prince and saying, “Whatsoever you are reading is nothing but the dregs and sediments of those old dead men!”The wheelwright said, “Your servant will look at the thing from the point of view of his own art. In making a wheel, if I proceed gently, that is pleasant enough but the workmanship is not strong; if I proceed violently, that is toilsome and the joinings do not fit. If the movements of my hand are neither too gentle nor too violent, the idea in my mind is realized. But I cannot tell how to do this by word of mouth.”Neither too violent, nor too gentle – just in the middle, balanced…And the wheelwright said, “But I cannot tell how to do this by word of mouth, how to attain this absolute midpoint between effort and effortlessness, between doing and non-doing. I cannot say how to do this by word of mouth; there is a knack to it, but still I cannot say it. I know it, still I cannot say it. I cannot teach the knack to my son, even to my son – nor can my son learn it from me. There is no way to teach it, and there is no way to learn it. Learning and teaching, teaching and learning, can be only of the outer things – it is an inner feel. Thus it is that I am in my seventieth year, and am still making wheels in my old age. But these ancients, and whatever it was not possible for them to convey, are dead and gone. So then what you, my ruler, are reading is but their dregs and sediments!”He is saying, “I am alive, I know the knack of it, still I cannot convey it; I cannot transfer my knowledge. And I am alive and I know, and I love my son and I would like… And I am so old, in my seventieth year, and still I have to work. If I could teach my son, I would retire. But if while alive I cannot convey it, how can these old sages who are dead convey something that can only be experienced? It cannot be conveyed when the sage is alive, so how can it be conveyed when the sage has been gone for centuries? You are just wasting your time, sir,” he said. “This is all rubbish.”This old man is a man of Tao. Taoists have beautiful parables like these: an ordinary man, a poor man, a wheelwright – nobody knows about him, but he has an insight. The whole approach of Taoism is that only experience can give you the clue. Questions can be asked, questions can be answered, but they are of no ultimate value. You have to eat to know the taste; you have to love to know what love is. There is no way to convey it, that’s why, rather than answering, Lieh Tzu said: “Best be still…”Yes, value is not the name for it. Be still. What does he mean by “…be still…”? You are continuously wavering; you are never still. Even when you sit like a statue you are wavering. Your mind is continuously running in all directions; your inner flame is never unwavering. It is continuously going from this side to that side; through one desire or another, you are being pulled and pushed. When there is no desire, then one is still, without even the desire to achieve God. When all desires are negated, that is the meaning of via negativa. When all desires are negated, suddenly you are still. Nowhere to go, nowhere to move to. No wind is blowing. Desire is the wind that goes on blowing inside you and keeps your inner flame wavering, that’s why you are not still. Even in your sleep you are not still. Even while you are sitting in meditation, silently, you are not still.Just the other day somebody was saying, “In meditation thoughts don’t stop; they continue – in fact, they come more.” When you are engaged in your ordinary, day-to-day life they don’t come so much – you are engaged, involved. But when you are sitting, doing nothing, then your whole energy moves into thoughts. Then a great storm arises in your being: thoughts and thoughts, and sometimes you cannot even believe what type of thoughts! Memories of the past: thirty years before, something had happened, suddenly it bubbles up. Or thoughts of the future: your wife may not even be pregnant and you start thinking, “When the child is born, what college do we have to send him to?” Impossible things go on pulling you, pushing you, and you know that it is nonsense. Many times you recognize it, and you want to drop it, but you simply feel impotent.Thoughts cannot be stopped directly – let it be very deeply understood. Let it sink into your being: Thoughts cannot be stopped directly because thoughts are nothing but the servants of desires. When desire is there, you cannot stop thoughts. The master is there, the servants are bound to follow.You want to stop this thought. This is foolish, silly: your wife is not even pregnant, and you are thinking about the child who will become a grown-up and will be going to the university – which university to send him to – Cambridge or Oxford? You are so puzzled – where to send him? Which will be the best thing? And suddenly you recognize: “What nonsense! This is silly.” Then why is it arising?It is not a question of the thought itself. You have a desire, you have ambition; many things have remained unfulfilled in you – you would like to fulfill them through your son. The son is nothing but a personification of your ambition. You wanted to go to Oxford, and you could not; you would like to go in the form of your son – that’s why the idea has arisen, the thought has arisen. Thirty years have passed and something suddenly surfaces. Nothing is sudden; nothing is uncaused in the mind. If it arises, that means that something is there in it; you cannot simply call it stupid and drop it. Thirty years ago somebody insulted you and it is still green; the wound still hurts. Sitting silently, the hurt comes to the surface. Occupied with the thousand and one things of the world you forget about it. But when you are unoccupied, the wound opens; the wound starts giving you messages: “Do something about me. I am still green. I have not yet healed. Do something about me!” How many times has the wound revealed itself to you, and how many times have you decided to take revenge or do something? Again and again it comes, and still you have a desire to take revenge on the enemy who has insulted you.It is not a question of the thought; it is a question of the desire. Just analyze your thoughts and you will always find that thoughts are the servants, and hidden somewhere is the master, protected by the servants.Thoughts never stop on their own. They stop only when the desiring mind disappears. That is the meaning of “Best be still…” That is the Taoist way of saying: “Be desireless.” Hence they say that even the desire to know God, to reach God, is a barrier. Just be still, with no desire, as if nothing has to be done, as if nothing is going to happen. Be absolutely hopeless because hope is nothing but a new name for desire. Hope is a beautiful name for desire. Desire is an ugly, little name; desire is a little naked, nude. Hope is dressed up desire. Be hopeless. Nothing is going to happen. Nothing ever happens. There is no future, so drop all ambition. Only this moment exists, so don’t rush hither and thither; it is pointless, it is neurotic, it is mad. Just relax in this moment; just be. That is the meaning of “Best be still…”The difference has to be understood. If you go to a Yoga master, he will tell you how to be still. He will tell you what posture will help you to be still, how to breathe, in what rhythm stillness will be easier, whether to close the eyes completely or just to look at the tip of your nose. He will give you indications, hints, he will supply you with a map.Taoists don’t have any maps. They say that if you try a particular posture and you look at your nose and you breathe in a certain way, you will impose a certain stillness which is not true. It is cultivated, it is a practiced thing; it is false. The true stillness has nothing to do with any practice. The true stillness does not come out of exercise. The true stillness comes out of understanding that desire is futile.Try to understand this. In Tao there are no exercises. They don’t have anything like Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. They don’t have the “eight limbs of Yoga.” They don’t tell you what posture, what discipline, what type of morality to live – what to eat, what not to eat, when to go to bed and when to get up in the morning. They don’t tell you anything because they say that all these things can give you a false experience of stillness; they can force it. This has to be understood. When you sit in a certain posture you can help the mind to become a little more still. If the body is completely still, the mind becomes a little still because mind and body are not two things; the division is not clear-cut. Mind and body are joined together. Rather than say that you are mind and body, say that you are mindbody – one word. The “and” is not right – drop it: mindbody, psychosomatic. The mind is your innermost body, and the body your outermost mind. So when the body is still, naturally some vibrations of stillness reach to the innermost mind: it creates a physical base and you feel a little still.Try in another way. When you are angry, what do you do? You clench your teeth; you clench your fists. Why? Can’t you be angry without clenching your teeth and your fists? Try one day: just be angry without clenching your fist, without clenching your teeth. Remain relaxed in the body and try to be angry and you will find it is impossible. How can you be angry if you don’t use the help of the body? Another day try, without any anger, clench your fist and your teeth – just show the gesture of anger, and suddenly you will see some sort of anger arises in you. You can become angry just by creating the actions – that’s what actors do. The actor has to act in moments when he may not be feeling angry and he has to be angry. What is he supposed to do? He will do the bodily part, and the mind part lingers with it. He is not feeling happy, but he has to do the bodily part; he shows happiness, and a sort of happiness follows after it.Body and mind go together. Taoists say this has to be understood; otherwise you will create a false stillness. The stillness that is created by body posture is not the real stillness; it is a trick. It is almost as chemical as when you take a tranquilizer; it is a drug.If you go on a fast, you will feel very quiet because the chemistry of the body changes: the body has less work to do, is more relaxed. The stomach has nothing to do, is more relaxed. And when the stomach has nothing to do, more energy is released from the stomach toward the head. You know this. When you eat too much, you start feeling sleepy because the stomach uses all the energy possible to digest the food. The head is not very important – it is a luxury – so when the stomach needs the energy, the energy goes to the stomach and immediately has to leave the head. That’s why you start feeling sleepy, and your eyes start closing and you start yawning: that simply says that the energy has been taken from the head to the stomach. You fall asleep. Have you noticed? When you have not eaten well, sleep becomes difficult because when the stomach has nothing to work on, the energy is released. Immediately the energy goes to the head and there it starts working and fantasizing and thinking.So when a person is on a fast, after the third or fourth day he feels very quiet. But this is chemical change; it is not a real quietness. Give him food and it will disappear. So what type of change is this? If a person goes on fasting for many days, he will feel a certain non-sexuality arising in him, brahmacharya. That is false because food is needed to supply sex energy. If food is not given to the body, sex energy is not created, sex energy disappears. After three weeks of fasting, a man will not be interested in women and a woman will not be interested in men. That’s what has deceived many religious people. Then they think they have attained brahmacharya. This is not brahmacharya – it is a sort of impotence. They have lost vigor, they have lost vitality. And when they become afraid of food, then they cannot eat well because the moment they eat well, immediately the energy is supplied to the sex organs and again sexuality arises.Tao is a totally different approach. It does not say to cultivate, it says to understand. “Best be still…” Through understanding. Through awareness.“…best be empty. In stillness and emptiness, we find where to abide…” In emptiness and stillness… What is emptiness? Emptiness means you are not. Ordinarily the idea that you are, is nothing more than an accumulation of all your actions. You have done this, you have done that, you have won a prize, you have become successful in business, you have a big bank balance, you are famous, you have authored so many books; you have done many things. Those things together make you somebody. Emptiness means: drop all that you have done, forget all that you have done. Forget the past, it is because of the past that you feel that you are somebody. Just think. If your past can simply be washed away this very moment, who will you be? If this very moment, by some miracle, your past can be dropped, who will you be? You will not know who you are. So whatsoever you are is your past. And by emptiness Taoists mean: drop the past. That’s what I mean when I give you sannyas.You ask me, “What is sannyas?” It has a thousand and one meanings. One of the most important meanings is dropping out of the past, getting out of your own past as the snake slips out of the old skin. Forgetting the past, starting anew, being reborn – hence the new name because with the old name the past is associated; hence the new color because with the old clothes the past is associated. Have you not noticed? When you dress in a certain way, you behave in a certain way; when you wear certain clothes you walk in a certain way.No country has yet allowed its soldiers to use loose clothes because to have loose clothes and fight is contradictory. Only sannyasins, fakirs, have used loose clothes because they are not going to fight. The soldier has to be in tight clothes, so tight that he wants to jump out of it, so tight that he becomes so angry that he would like to crush somebody’s head; so tight that he cannot be at ease – restless. It creates violence.Pune has a military camp – you can go see them. They don’t allow their soldiers to come here; they have an order: Never go to see the Osho Ashram. A few people have come – they came like thieves. And I understand. They were right because when you come here you will not be a soldier; you will become a sannyasin and these are contradictions. They are right, the people who have given the order from Delhi are right because this is a totally different world. I am teaching you to be loose, and they are teaching you to be tight. The more uptight you are, the better soldier you will be – more dangerous, of course because you are ready to explode any moment. You can go to the military campus; you can see how they are dressed in uncomfortable clothes. That is needed. If they were comfortable, they would relax and go to sleep. They have to be kept in tension, and their inner tension brings such a state of turmoil that they would like to throw it onto anybody.Changing your clothes, changing your name, is just a gesture that you are being disconnected from your past. Once you are disconnected from your past, you are empty. Then you don’t know who you are because all ideas that you have about yourself come from the past and are past-created. Just meditate on this fact. If the past is not there, who are you?Shree Ramana used to tell his disciples to meditate only on one thing: “Who am I?” If you go on meditating on this simple mantra: “Who am I?” sooner or later you will understand that you are nobody. You are not the body, nor are you the mind; nor the son of somebody, nor the father of somebody; nor rich, nor poor. You are just nobody.The day you become a nothingness you come to know who you are. You are that nothingness.“…best be empty. In stillness and emptiness, we find where to abide…” In emptiness is your home. You become a temple, a shrine. In that emptiness burns the flame of your consciousness, and that flame is that of God, of Tao. This is via negativa.“Taking and giving, we lose the place.” The moment you start taking and giving – do this, don’t do that, relate, connect with people – you lose your place, you lose your inner flame, you lose your inner contact. This is only so in the beginning. Lieh Tzu is talking to a new inquirer when he says this. In the beginning it will happen. Whenever you are alone, still, quiet, silent, suddenly you will be centered, grounded; you will feel the tremendous joy of nonbeing, of being nobody. Your nothingness will be luminous; it will be full of light, fragrance, benediction and beatitude.In the beginning it will happen again and again that the moment you relate to somebody it will be lost; you will lose your inner space. The danger is that you may become afraid of relating. In the beginning it is right to be afraid, but if it becomes a habit and the fear becomes ingrained, then it is dangerous. That danger has happened in the past in the East. Many people became afraid of relating: Buddhists escaped from life, Taoists escaped to the Himalayas or to the mountains so as not to be in contact because: “Taking and giving, we lose the place.”But that is not the meaning of Lieh Tzu. He says: “Yes, taking and giving, when we come to the marketplace, the meditation is lost.” So, first attain to meditation, then go again and again and become more and more alert, so that you can become capable one day of relating and remaining alone together; of being in the marketplace and yet not being there; of being in the crowd and yet being alone. That is the highest. It cannot be said to a disciple. That happens only when one has become a master.For the disciple, Lieh Tzu says: “Then you will know who you are, and then suddenly you will see that taking and giving you lose again and again the sense you gained in meditation.” You gain, then the moment you connect, relate – in relationship with the wife, with the husband, with the children, the market, the customer, the boss – you lose it. Again and again gain it; whenever you find time, again reconnect yourself with yourself. By and by, by and by, slowly, one day you will see you can stand in the marketplace and you remain as alone and silent as anywhere else. Then you have become a lotus: you are in the water and the water touches you not.First develop, evolve, the shunyata – the zero, the emptiness and then bring it to the world. Again and again you will lose it, that’s true, but don’t try to escape from the world because of that; don’t become an escapist. It is a challenge. The highest peak is attained only when nobody can disturb your inner space – nobody, no situation, can disturb it. Then for the first time you have become the possessor of it. Then you are a possessor and you are possessed by it. Then it is yours, really yours. But if something can take it away, then it is still not totally yours. You have touched it, but you have not yet been a possessor.I would like to tell you one anecdote:In a far country, there lived an ingenious inventor who had gone slightly cuckoo tinkering with television. In the course of his experiments he worked out a sort of mind mirror, which he called a psychoscope, by means of which a person could see his mental self as clearly as he could see his physical body in a looking-glass.After the instrument was perfected, a company was organized to manufacture it, and the country was flooded with advertisements about it. The factory was soon swamped with orders. Wives bought them for their husbands – mind you, wives bought them for their husbands, and husbands bought them for their wives and their in-laws. Parents bought them for their children, and children even bought them for their parents. Employers ordered them in quantities for their employees. It is known, or maybe it is just a rumor, that only one very conscientious individual in the whole country, so it is said, confessed to buying one for his own use. The elated inventor saw himself rolling in wealth; millions of those devices were sold.Then, with almost equal suddenness, sales slumped, and presently dropped to zero. Investigators who were sent out to scour the country reported that pawnshops were glutted with psychoscopes, while thousands had been accidentally broken, or had mysteriously found their way into trash bins.In desperation the inventor set himself to a new task. He reversed the principle of the instrument in such a manner that it would idealize the reflected self. In it the individual saw himself not as he was, but as he wished to appear, his faults gilded and rose-tinted, and their ugliness glossed over with innocence. At the end of the year, so it is said, the company declared a fifty per cent dividend.Most of us do not want to see ourselves as we are, nor want to take a second look into a mind mirror. But he who will confirm us in our pet delusions we cherish about ourselves, can have just about anything we’ve got.Remember, to be empty is to move into a space where you will see yourself as you are. That’s why people are afraid: they don’t want to go into that inner space. They have their ideal images, their self-images, beautiful, decorated. They are afraid that if they go into themselves, those images will fall down. They are bound to fall and disappear because they are false and they cannot be a reality. Hence nobody goes inward. All the masters of the world, whether on the path of via affirmativa or on the path of via negativa, all the masters have insisted on one thing: that you have to come to your reality as you are. But nobody listens to them. Even when people want to know who they are, they are really hoping that they will be the same self that they project. Once they start their work it becomes difficult – ugliness arises; nastiness, horrible anger, hatred, jealousy, is felt. All hell breaks loose and one becomes afraid, and one rushes out and again clings to an ideal self. That is cheap.Remember, one has to know oneself as one is. Drop all your ideals. They are beautiful, but they are poisonous; they are delusions. Unless you drop your ideals about yourself, the images that you have created out of your impotence, to hide, to mask, your reality… Drop those masks, be still, be empty, and look into your being – whatsoever it is. In the beginning it will be almost an experience of hell, but that is the price we have to pay. If you are courageous enough and if you can persevere, soon the hell disappears, the clouds are gone, and the sun shines in a cloudless sky. Then you have come to your inner paradise.Hell and heaven are both within. Hell is just your circumference; heaven is your very center. You are the center of the cyclone. Tao says that nothing really has to be done. One has just to penetrate into one’s own being.I have come across a very beautiful parable. The parable is by Ken Reed. Listen to it very attentively and meditate over it.Once there lived a very wise and venerable sage. From one end of the land to the other, learned men began to hear of the old sage and soon many sought the visage of his wisdom. But the sage remained silent to all who came with questions. Instead, with his bamboo staff he wrote these words upon the ground: “One who has contentment in his heart finds good everywhere and at all times.”Or sometimes he would write: “Where discontentment exists, all effort is in vain.”Or sometimes: “Be silent, be still and you will know.”But those who visited did not seem satisfied with these answers. They were too cryptic and there was no guidance given – no map delivered. And they could not understand why the sage refused to answer them directly. Why? Surely he knew the answers, but why did he choose to scratch in the sand such babblings? The other sages gave advice and prescribed paths, and talked of austerities to be observed, why not this one? The sermon he gave could not be heard by the ear, or for that matter seen by the eye.He was a real mystic. He was not an ascetic; he had no exercise to give you, but only understanding – a silent understanding, a transmission beyond scriptures.Yet it is written that during the feast of the Christ a young man appeared. He bore no staff, nor scrolls of wisdom, nor were there questions on his tongue. In his eyes there was only purpose and great passion. He strode straight up to the sage. Neither sitting, stopping, nor prostrating himself as others had done, he gazed upon that ancient and tranquil face without word. And soon, to the amazement of the others he took the staff from the hand of the sage and drew upon the dusty earth these words: “How does thy brightness dispel the darkness?”Patiently the sage took back his staff and scratched beneath the young man’s ply: “What darkness? Are you lost in the darkness?”To which the young pilgrim countered: “Is getting lost losing the way? Is getting lost really getting lost?”The silent sage contemplated the face of the young pilgrim for some time and then he drew upon the ground these words: “Only forgotten.”A roar of laughter went up from those who had gathered, and the sage erased what he had written and wrote again: “What desire brings you here?”Eager eyes watched the staff change hands: “Desires? I have none,” the young man wrote.Observing the pilgrim closely, the sage took the staff, rose to his feet, extended his right foot, tapped it three times, then became as still as the breath of those who watched. Whereupon the young visitor broke his silence and asked “Why did you do that?”The sage quickly scratched: “Curiosity is a form of desire.”Back and forth the staff continued until the frustrated pilgrim cried back with the point of the staff: “It has been said that there is a sacred mantra one may recite that will join him to the universe in oneness.”The sage quickly scratched again: “Have you ever been apart from the universe?”And, with that, the old sage swiftly raised his staff and thrust it down upon the head of the seeker, sending him into a deeply blissful trance. Days passed. And in those days the young pilgrim truly began to savor the sweetness of the great sage, as he sat surrendered before him. Not once did he question in the presence, and a fathomless love grew between them. On the third day, the sage broke his long years of silence. “So you have come at last!” the hoarse voice came.The young man replied not, but looked deeply into the sage’s eyes for some time, then taking once again the staff from the old bony hands, wrote:“Only remembered.”Nothing else is to be done. You have forgotten who you are. The only thing that has to be done is that you have to remember who you are. Forgetfulness is the world, remembrance is God. To forget is to be lost. To remember is to be back home.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Do you have favorites? Am I one of them?I am reminded of an Arabian proverb.It is said that whenever God creates a person he whispers into his ear, “You are my favorite. I have never made such a beautiful person before and I am not going to make such a beautiful person again. You are simply unique.” But this he has been doing to everybody, and everybody deep down in his heart thinks, “Whatsoever God has said, I believe.”You are my favorite. And this is not addressed to anybody in particular, but to everybody. In fact, to choose as a favorite or not is not possible for me. It depends on you, you can become my favorite, you may not become; it is a one-way traffic. If you allow, you will become; if you don’t allow, you will not become. As far as I am concerned I am not.The second question:Osho,Please explain the difference between rationalization and bullshit.Bullshit is a far better word than rationalization but they mean the same. Rationalization is a clinical word – a word to be used by the professors, bullshit is more alive. Rationalization is bloodless; bullshit is very young, alive and kicking. But the meaning is the same, they are not different things.The henpecked husband and his wordy wife were walking down the country road having one of their arguments in the usual way. She was winning. Suddenly she turned and saw a bull charging down the road. There was no time to warn her husband so she jumped into a hedge. The bull caught the man on its horns and sent him spinning fifty feet into the air. He came down in a ditch. When he finally managed to crawl out, he saw his wife standing on the road.“Maria,” he said, “if you hit me like that again you’ll really make me lose my temper.”Now this is bullshit. If you ask a psychoanalyst, he will call it a rationalization.The culture society was organizing a group to be comprised strictly of virgins, when a young lady carrying a baby appeared.“But, Madam,” protested the president, “that is evidence that you are not eligible for this society. Why do you think you will be able to join?”“I was only foolin’ around when this happened,” she explained. “So I thought I could get in as one of those foolish virgins.”This is bullshit. Rationalization is a philosophical term. Bullshit comes from the ordinary man, from the masses, people who live on the earth, with the earth, whose hands are muddy. The word bullshit is also muddy as it is being used by people who are working, living an ordinary life. It does not come from the ivory towers of a university. But remember, it is more authentic, it says much more than rationalization. Always remember that words that are coined by professors are always anemic. They are dead words – clinical, but they do not say much; rather than saying, they hide. Let me say it in this way, the very word rationalization is a rationalization: It is being used to avoid the word bullshit.The third question:Osho,Why do you make so many mistakes when you quote other people or refer to Biblical events or to scientific discoveries? I have answered this question many times myself in various ways. Now I would like to hear your answer.So allow me to commit a few more mistakes.First: my memory is marvelous.Mulla Nasruddin was talking to a man, and he said, “My wife has a very bad memory.”And the man asked, “Do you mean she forgets everything?”Mulla Nasruddin said, “No, she remembers everything!”If Mulla Nasruddin’s wife has a bad memory, I have a marvelous memory. I forget everything. And I enjoy this forgetfulness; I am not worried about it.Secondly: I am an ignorant person. I am not a scholar. I enjoy reading books, but I read the Bible, the Gita, the Koran just as one reads novels; they are ancient, beautiful stories. Krishnamurti says that he never reads any scriptures; he reads only detective stories. I read the scriptures, but I read in the scriptures just a detective story and nothing else. And I would suggest to Krishnamurti that it would be good if he looked into the Bible; you cannot find a more beautiful story, full of suspense. Everything is there: love, life, murder; everything is there. It is very sensational.The scriptures, to me, have nothing special. The scriptures are as sacred as the trees and the rocks and the stars – or as secular. I don’t make a distinction so I am not very serious about the scriptures. The only thing I am serious about is jokes. So when I quote the scripture, I quote from memory; when I quote a joke, I have it written here in front of me. I never want to make a mistake about the joke – I am really serious. About everything else I am absolutely nonserious.It is very obvious. Listening to me, you must have understood that my emphasis is not on what the scriptures say – that is not the point. My emphasis is on what I am saying. If you go to a Christian priest, he quotes the scripture; his emphasis is on the scripture. He is very literal, he has to be – he himself is secondary, the scripture is primary. He is a witness to the scripture. With me it is just the opposite: the scripture is just a witness to me. Whatsoever I have to say, only that have I to say. If I feel the scripture can be a witness to it, I use it.I go on playing with the scriptures, sometimes in one way, sometimes in another. Remember always: I am not trying to prove the scripture – that the scripture is right, I am simply using it as an illustration. It is secondary, you can forget about it: nothing will be lost. Whatsoever I am saying is direct. Just to help you because you are not capable of listening to the direct truth, you need a few witnesses. So Jesus, Krishna and Buddha and Lao Tzu and Lieh Tzu are just witnesses to me. I am not adjusting to them; they have to adjust to me.This should always be so: the dead should exist and adjust to the living and for the living. Why should the living adjust to the dead? Lieh Tzu has to adjust to me because only in adjusting to me can Lieh Tzu again have a little life. Jesus has to adjust to me; I am not to adjust to Jesus. The past has to adjust to the present, not otherwise. So I go on playing…These are all just stories to me, and deep down, this is the approach: all of life is a fiction, it is maya – it is a dream. Jesus and Buddha and Krishna and I and you are all parts of a big dream – God is dreaming. Don’t be too serious about it. Scholars become too serious. I am not a scholar and I have no respect for scholars. In fact my attitude is exactly the same as Mulla Nasruddin’s.Once it happened…A man came to Mulla Nasruddin and said, “Nasruddin, have you heard? The great scholar of the town has died and twenty rupees are needed to bury him.”Mulla gave him a hundred rupee note and said, “Take it, and while you are doing it, why not bury five? Remember, these scholars are very calculating and cunning people – bury them as deep as possible, otherwise they will come back. And if you need more money, come to me, don’t be shy about it!”I am neither a scholar, nor am I in any way respectful toward scholars or scholarship. That is all bullshit.I was reading a beautiful poem by E. Y. Harburg. A few lines are of tremendous import. Meditate over them.Poems are made by fools like me,But only God can make a tree;And only God who makes the treeAlso makes the fools like me.But only fools like me, you see,Can make a God, who makes a tree.I am tremendously ignorant, and I am happy as I am, and I have no idea to improve upon myself. So if sometimes you are in an awkward situation – somebody says that Osho has said this and this is not correct – it is your problem. Then your master is found faulty; you feel a little disturbed, your ego is hurt. As far as I am concerned, I am perfectly okay. And I will continue to create problems for you! Now you find the answers. Invent something; be a little imaginative or inventive. When I can invent so much, why can’t you? You can find some esoteric, occult meaning in it. It is always easy: when you cannot find anything else, always try to find some esoteric, occult meaning in it – there must be.The handsome, well-dressed man handed the poor beggar a fifty dollar bill. “Here, my good man,” he said, “eat your fill, and there’s enough there for a drink or two.”The beggar entered Tony’s restaurant, where he ate the biggest dinner of his life and then topped it off with a bottle of wine and a big tip to Luigi, the waiter. “Ah,” said the handsome, well-dressed stranger, “it’s a good world. Everyone is happy. The poor beggar because he is no longer hungry, Tony because he has made a big sale, the waiter because he has received a nice tip. And me? I’m happy too because the bill was counterfeit.”So make everybody happy. Create a few fictions, a few counterfeit bills; make everybody happy. The world is really beautiful.Don’t be bothered too much about facts; there are none, all are fictions. Remember, all are fictions, even my being here and your being here is a tremendous fiction. Nothing ever happens. Truth is. All that happens is fictitious. History is a fiction because whatsoever is, is; nothing ever happens there. God has no history, and God has no biography. God only is, there is no “was,” and there is no “will be.” There is no past and no future.All history is fictitious. That’s why in the East we have never been bothered by history, we have not written history at all – instead of history we have written myths. If you ask when Rama was born, Hindus cannot answer. Ask Hindus, and you will find as many answers as the persons you ask. Nobody knows, in fact nobody knows exactly whether he was born or not. The fiction is that the story writer, who wrote the story of Rama, wrote it before Rama was born: Balmiki wrote it before Rama was born. Look at the Eastern approach. You cannot conceive that the Christian apostles could have written the story of Jesus before he was ever born. But Balmiki wrote the story of Rama before he was born, and then Rama had to be born to prove that Balmiki was right; otherwise people would laugh at this old man. He had written, “So do it!” So Rama had to do the things that Balmiki had written already. He had prophesied it; it was a prediction, and then Rama followed. Look at the approach: history is thought of as fiction. Only novels are written first, then you can play, you can make movies out of them.In the secret traditions of the Essenes it is said that Christ never existed, that in fact it was a drama, a Christ drama, that had been played for centuries before Christ was ever born. In fact he was never born, it was just a drama. By and by, people became so much attached to the drama, they started loving the drama so much, that it turned out to become a reality; it started looking like a fact. That’s why there are so many versions. If you look into the four gospels, all are different, sometimes contradictory. Four persons writing the same story are bound to be different.The Eastern way of looking at things is that whatsoever is, cannot be seen by the eyes. And whatsoever can be seen by the eyes is just a fiction. Enjoy while you are seeing it, love it – it is leela, God’s play. So whatsoever surfaces in me, I tell you; and I am not worried whether it is proved by history or not because history itself is meaningless to me.The fourth question:Osho,Why has there never been a single woman enlightened master?A woman cannot be a master – it is not possible. When a woman arrives she becomes a mistress, not a master. The fulfillment of a woman is love. The flowering of a woman is love. Mastery is not the goal of the feminine mind; they don’t become masters, they become mistresses. To be a master is basically a male effort.Awareness is the way of man; love is the way of woman.On the path of awareness it is possible to teach; one can become a master. On the path of love, how can you teach love? You can flower, you can bloom in love, but how can you teach it? Yes, if somebody wants to learn from you, he will learn it, but you will not be a master. And such women have existed: Rabiya, Meera, Mallibai, Magdalen, Teresa. Such women have existed: Sahajo, Daya, Lalla. Many women have existed, but they were not masters. They were so surrendered to God that they became mistresses.Meera says ,“I am a mistress to you. My Lord” – a mistress to Krishna, to God himself. She sings the song of the glory of her Lord, she dances. If somebody can catch something from her, it is overflowing; but she cannot be a teacher. She is surrendered, her surrender is absolute. Yes, if you are in her company, you will learn what surrender is. But you will have to learn, she will not teach. A woman cannot be a teacher.To teach, a certain different quality of energy is needed. Let me say it in this way, this is my experience: it is very difficult for a man to become a disciple, very difficult for a man to become a disciple. Even if he becomes one, he becomes so reluctantly. Surrender is difficult. How to surrender the will? Even if he surrenders his will, he only surrenders conditionally, in order to become a master one day. He becomes a disciple in order to become a master. It is difficult for a man to surrender; it is very simple for a woman to surrender. It is very simple for a woman to become a disciple; it is very difficult for a woman to become a master. Even after she has arrived, she remains surrendered. And for the man, even when he has not yet arrived, he remains deep down unsurrendered. On the surface he will show surrender, but deep down somewhere the ego persists.A man can become a good master. A woman can become a good disciple because to become a disciple means to become a receiver, to be receptive, to become a womb. To become a master means to become a giver.The same phenomenon continues: as it is there on the biological level, it remains on the spiritual level. Biologically, a woman is ready to receive the sperm from the man she loves. The man cannot become a mother; he can only become a father. He can trigger the process: the woman will become the mother; she will carry the child in her womb for nine months; she will nourish the child with her blood and her being; she will be carrying the pregnancy. The same happens on the spiritual level too.When a woman comes to a master she is immediately ready to surrender. If sometimes it happens otherwise – sometimes there are women who are very reluctant to surrender, that simply shows they have lost contact with their womanhood. They don’t know who they are; they have become distracted from their center. They don’t know how to surrender because they don’t know how to be a woman. If you know how to be a woman, if you are a woman, surrender is so simple, it comes so easily.All the great disciples in the world were women. Buddha had thousands of disciples, but the proportion has always been the same: three women to one man. So was the proportion with Mahavira. He had forty thousand sannyasins: ten thousand men, thirty thousand women. And so was the case with Jesus.The really devoted people around him were not the men but the women. When he was crucified, all the men escaped; there was not a single man who stayed. All those so-called apostles had all disappeared, but the women were there. Three women were there: they had no fear; they were ready to sacrifice themselves. When Jesus was taken down from the cross, it was not by men – those disciples had gone far away. One or two were there, but they were hiding in the crowd. Women took down the body. And it is very significant that when Jesus appeared after three days, resurrected, he appeared first to Mary Magdalen, not to a man. This is very significant. Why? What about those twelve apostles? Why to Mary Magdalen? She immediately recognized him, and she rushed to him and she said, “So, My Lord, you are still alive!” And when Jesus appeared to the disciples, male disciples, they did not recognize him; they thought, “It seems tricky. How can this man come back?”It is said that when he appeared before two disciples, male disciples, he walked with them for hours, and they did not recognize him. They continued talking about Jesus, and Jesus was walking by their side. They were a little puzzled about the appearance of this man – he looked like Jesus but how could he be? Just the appearance? One should not be deceived by appearance alone. For two hours they walked together. When they went to an inn, all three sat there to eat their dinner, and when Jesus broke his bread, then they recognized him. Their very materialistic minds suddenly saw; because Jesus’ every act, his every gesture, was his, authentically his. Now they recognized him because he was breaking the bread in the same way that they had seen Jesus break bread for years – then they recognized him. But for two hours, his presence was not recognized. Magdalen recognized him immediately. When she went to tell the male disciples that Jesus was resurrected, they laughed. They said, “Woman, you are hallucinating.” They laughed and they said, “This is how women always are – imaginative, dreaming, romantic. Now look at this foolish woman. Jesus is dead. We have seen him die on the cross with our own eyes.” But she cried and she said, “Listen to me. I have seen him.” But they would not listen.A woman can be a perfect disciple, and this is how it should be. Woman is receptive, an opening, a womb. They have never been masters in the sense that men have been masters – like Mahavira, Buddha, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu. No, they have never been masters like that. But there have never been disciples like women; no man has ever been able to equal them as far as disciplehood is concerned. Let me tell you this, that as far as this division of male and female is concerned, the female mind is more blessed. Because the real thing is to receive the truth; the real thing is not to give it – that is secondary. A woman is always more total than a man. Whenever she receives the truth, she becomes luminous: her whole body, her whole being shows it; she carries an aura. Have you not seen a woman who is pregnant, how beautiful she becomes? Her face glows, she is carrying a new life within her. And this is nothing compared to a woman who really becomes a disciple. She is carrying God himself within her. Her glory is infinite.So don’t be worried about why women don’t become masters. There is no need. If you can become disciples, that is natural and you will always remain true to nature.The fifth question:Osho,Yesterday you said that Zen is the beautiful result of melting Tao and Buddhism, and Sufism the flower that blooms out of Islam and Hinduism. Is your teaching the super flower, the crossbreeding between Zen and Sufism?It is not a flower; it is just a meeting of two fragrances. Zen is a super flower, so is Sufism. Nothing can be added to them; they are perfect. As far as flowers are concerned, they have attained to perfection; nothing more can be added to them – they have bloomed. What I am doing here is trying to fuse their fragrances.A rose has flowered and so has a lotus. Both are spreading their fragrances to the wind. What I am doing here is trying to fuse their fragrance, which is a very subtle phenomenon. A flower is gross; fragrance is subtle. A flower is visible, fragrance is invisible. A flower is material, the fragrance is simply spiritual. That’s what I am doing here – trying to bring together all the flowers of Tantra, Yoga, Tao, Sufism, Zen, Hasidism, Jews, Moslems. Hindus, Buddhists, Jainas. I am trying to bring together all the fragrances that have been released down the centuries. This is a great experiment which has never been done before. Buddha is concerned only with the path through which he has attained, so is Mahavira, so is Jesus. Never before on the earth has this been done.You are blessed; you are fortunate. You may not realize this right now; nobody realizes it when the moment is alive. Have you ever thought about it? Were Jesus’ disciples aware of what was happening when it was happening? Were they aware that something of tremendous import was happening in their lives, which was going to decide the destiny of humanity for centuries to come? No, they were not aware. Were Buddha’s disciples aware that something of great import was happening? You are also not aware. Something of tremendous import is happening which has not happened ever, which is going to be decisive because now the old religions cannot survive in the future; their days are gone.In the future a few things will disappear. Nations will have to disappear because the earth has become a small village; now they are meaningless. India and Pakistan and China and America and Canada and England and Germany are meaningless; the earth has become one. The day man became capable of going beyond gravitation, the earth became one. The first man in a spaceship started crying when he saw the whole earth as one. Nobody had ever seen the whole earth as one. As he looked at the earth he could not believe how there could be any division of America and Russia and China, and this and that. He could not think about himself as American or Russian. He could think about himself only as an earth dweller. He could not see any divisions on the earth because divisions are only on the political maps; the earth remained undivided. The day man crossed the barrier of gravitation, became free from gravitation, the earth became one. It is now only a question of time… Nations will have to disappear, and with nations will disappear the world of the politicians and the world of politics. A great nightmare will disappear from the earth.The second thing to disappear with nations will be Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, Judaism. Just as politics have divided the map of the earth, religions have divided the consciousness of man. Certainly the divisions of religions are more dangerous than the divisions of politics because politics can only divide the earth, religions have divided the consciousness of man. Man has not been allowed total access to his being. One has to be just a Mohammedan – a very narrow thing. One has to be just a Hindu – just a very narrow thing. Why, when you can have the whole world’s heritage? When our entire past is yours and our whole future is yours, why should you divide it up? Why should I call myself a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian? One should claim the total. By claiming the total you become total: you lose all narrow divisions, distinctions, you become whole, you become holy. That is going to happen, that is bound to happen. That has to happen; otherwise man will not be able to grow any more.It is very crucial that man has to drop all barriers of nation and religion and church. That’s what I am doing here: trying to bring together all the fragrances released in different centuries by differing flowerings of human consciousness. Lao Tzu is a flower, so is Buddha, so is Jesus, so is Mohammed, but now we have to melt all their fragrances into one – a universal fragrance. Then, for the first time, man will be able to be religious and yet undivided. Then the church is yours and the mosque too and the temple too. Then the Gita is yours, and the Koran and the Vedas and the Bible – everything is yours. You become vast.No, I am not trying to create a new flower – flowers have happened. I am trying to create a new perfume out of all those flowers. It is more subtle, more invisible; only those who have eyes will be able to see it.The sixth question:Osho,The danger of your talks on Taoism is that there are a lot of lazy, irresponsible people around who rationalize their bad habits by claiming to be inactive Taoists. Please clarify the difference between a Taoist and a lazy escapist.The first thing is that there are two dangers I have talked about: one is of egoism, another is of lethargy, laziness. Remember, if you have to fall into a trap, the trap of laziness is better than the trap of egoism. Egoism is more dangerous because the lazy person has never done anything wrong; a lazy person cannot do anything wrong. He will never do any good – okay – but he will never do any wrong either. He will not bother to kill anybody, to torture anybody, to create concentration camps, to go to war – he will not bother. He will say, “Why bother? When one can rest, why?” A lazy person is naturally not a danger. The only thing that he may miss may be his own spiritual growth, but he will not interfere with anybody else’s growth; he will not be an interference. He will not be a do-gooder, and these are the greatest, most mischievous people in the world, the do-gooders. A lazy person is almost absent. What can he do? Have you ever heard of any lazy person doing anything wrong?No, the real problem comes from the egoist, and that is your possibility. Don’t be worried about a few people here getting lazy – let them get lazy, nothing is wrong. The real problem is from the egoist; one who wants to be spiritual, one who wants to be special, one who wants to become a siddha, one who wants to attain spiritual powers. One wants to prove something spiritually in the world: that is the real danger. If you have to fall into a trap, choose laziness. If you cannot fall into laziness, if you have to avoid, it is best to avoid both.Laziness is just like the common cold – nothing much to worry about. The ego is like cancer. It is better not to have either. But if you have to choose, and you would like to have something to cling to, the common cold is good – you can depend on it, it never kills anybody. But never choose cancer, and that is the greater possibility.Now you say, “The danger of your talks on Taoism is that there are a lot of lazy, irresponsible people…” The first thing: the moment you start worrying about others you are getting into an ego trip. Who are you to think about others and their life? It is their life. If they feel like being lazy, who are you to interfere? Anand Prem has a do-gooder in her being; she is very worried about others – that is a dangerous thing. And of course she is condemnatory. This question has a condemnation: “The danger of your talks on Taoism is that there are a lot of lazy, irresponsible people around who rationalize their bad habits by claiming to be inactive Taoists.” Who are you to tell them that their habits are bad?Laziness is a better habit than being obsessed with activity. Being obsessed with activity is madness. A lazy person can be sane. Sometimes the laziest people have been found to be the sanest. I have the feeling that if Anand Prem comes across Lao Tzu, she will think he is lazy. He will look lazy to all purposes. If she comes across Diogenes, she will think he is lazy. If she comes around Buddha, she will think he is lazy. Sitting under the Bodhi Tree? “What are you doing? At least you can run a primary school and teach children, or you can open a hospital and serve ill people. So many people are dying, starving. What are you doing here sitting under the Bodhi Tree?”Anand Prem would have jumped on Buddha and taken him to task. “What are you doing? Just sitting, meditating? Is this the time to meditate? Is this the time to be just sitting silently and enjoying your bliss? This is selfish!” This condemnatory attitude is really dangerous: it gives you a holier-than-thou idea that: “I am better than you. You, you lazy people!” She goes on writing questions every day that I have not been answering; every day: “These people are hippies, these people are useless.”She is in search of a lover, but she cannot find one here because she thinks that nobody here… She wants a “straight person,” and she cannot find a straight person here. These are all “hippies and yuppies,” and she wants somebody who is well-established. She wrote a letter. “…well-established, has a bank account, is a gentleman, a squire, has prestige, respectability. Here these people are just hobos, wanderers, vagabonds.” She would have refused Buddha; she would have refused Lao Tzu: they were not straight. She writes to me: “…these long-haired people!” She writes with such disgust, and because of this disgust she has become a very disgusting person, and she will not find a lover. For one year she has been in the West in search of one. She is Jewish. First she searched in America; then she went to Israel to search for a man. She could not find one in America; she could not find one in Israel – she will never find one anywhere. Even if she goes to heaven, God will look like a hobo. She has such condemnatory attitudes that she cannot love a simple human being. Yes, there are flaws, there are limitations, but everybody has those limitations. If you want to love, you have to love a man with all his limitations.You cannot find a perfect person. Perfection does not exist. God never allows perfection because perfection is so monotonous. Just think: living with a perfect person, twenty-four hours a day; you will commit suicide. Living with a perfect person? How will you live? He will be more like a marble statue, dead. The moment a person becomes perfect, he is dead. An alive person is never perfect, and my teaching is basically not for perfection, but for totality.Be total, and remember the difference. The ideal of perfection says: be like this – no anger, no jealousy, no possessiveness, no flaws, no limitations. The ideal of totality is totally different. If you are angry, be totally angry. If you are loving, be totally loving. If you are sad, be totally sad. Nothing is denied – only partiality has to be dropped, and then a person becomes beautiful.A total person is beautiful. A perfect person is dead.I am not trying to create mahatmas here. Enough! Those mahatmas have done enough nonsense in the world. We need beautiful people – flowering, flowing, alive. Yes, they will be sometimes sad, but what is wrong in being sad? Sometimes they will be angry, but what is wrong in sometimes being angry? It simply shows that you are alive, that you are not a dead thing, that you are not driftwood. Sometimes you fight; sometimes you let go. Just like climates change: it is rainy sometimes and it is cloudy; and sometimes it is sunny, and the clouds have disappeared. All the seasons are needed – the cold, the heat, the winter, the summer – all the seasons are needed. A real man, an authentic man, has all the climates in his being – only with one awareness: that whatsoever he is doing, he should do totally and should do it with full awareness. Enough, that’s enough, and you have a beautiful person.But Anand Prem is in search of a perfect man.I have heard…Once a man traveled all over the world… Whenever I look at Anand Prem, I again and again remember that man. He traveled all over the world in search of a perfect woman. He wanted to get married, but how could he accept an imperfect model? He wanted a perfect woman. He came back, his whole life wasted; he could not find one. Then one day a friend said, “Now you are seventy, and you searched your whole life, couldn’t you find a single perfect woman?”He said, “Yes, once I came across one woman who was perfect.”So the friend asked, “Then what happened?”But the man became sad; he said, “What happened? That woman was in search of a perfect man, so nothing happened!”Remember, the ideal of perfection is an egoistic ideal.Ronald Coleman told Herb Stein about a Hollywood phony who spoke with a fake Oxford accent, wore a fake Purple Star and Phi Beta Kappa key – and worst of all, passed a lot of fake checks. At the end of his rope, he decided to commit suicide, and went down to the Santa Fe railroad tracks. He calmly smoked several imported cigarettes while three or four heavy freights puffed by. A tramp who was watching jeered. “If you’re gonna do it, why don’t you do it?”“Don’t be vulgar,” squelched the phony. “A man like me waits for the Super Chief.”Even if an egoist goes to commit suicide, he waits for the Super Chief, the best train. He says, “Don’t be vulgar. A man like me waits for the Super Chief.” Even if he is committing suicide, he will not commit it under an ordinary train.Marriage is like suicide – you can commit it anywhere. You should not wait for the Super Chief. Anand Prem is searching and it is impossible for her, the way she looks at things with such condemnation, to find anybody whom she can love.“Please clarify the difference between a Taoist and a lazy escapist.” There is not much, and if there is, it is so inner that only the person will know – you will never be able to judge from the outside. Look at me. I am also a lazy person. Have you seen me doing anything, ever? It is very difficult from the outside to know. I love lazy people, Taoists or not; I love lazy people because out of lazy persons no Adolf Hitler is born, no Genghis Khan, no Tamerlane. Lazy people have silently lived their lives and disappeared, without leaving any trace on history, without contaminating humanity. They have not polluted consciousness. They were here as if they were not. To be lazy and aware, you become a Taoist. It does not mean that you become inactive. It simply means that the obsessive activity disappears. It simply means that you have become capable of not-doing too.It is said about a Zen master that a person asked one of his disciples, “What miracles can your master do?”And the disciple said, “Are you a follower of somebody?”And the man said, “Yes, I am a follower of a certain master, and he is a great miracle man; he can do great miracles. Once it happened that I was standing on this shore of the river, and he was standing on the other shore, and he shouted to me, ‘I want to write something in your book.’ And the river was almost a half mile wide. So I took my book out, raised it, and from the other shore he started writing with his fountain pen, and the writing came onto my book. I have seen this miracle and the book is with me – you can see.”And the disciple of the other master laughed and he said, “My master can do greater miracles.”So the man said, “What miracles?”And the disciple said, “My master can do miracles, and he is so capable, so capable, that he is capable of not doing them too.”“Not doing them too.” See the beauty of it. He is “…so capable, so capable…of not doing them too.”A Taoist is a man who does only that which is absolutely necessary. His life is almost like a telegram. When you go to the Post Office you don’t write a long letter when you are sending a telegraphic message. You go on cutting words, this and this can be dropped and then you come to ten or nine or whatsoever. If you write a letter, you will never write only ten words. And have you noticed? A telegram is more expressive than all letters. It says much more in a very few words. The unnecessary ones are dropped, only the most necessary are there. A Taoist is telegraphic; his life is like a telegram. The obsessive, the unnecessary, the feverish, have been dropped. He does only that which is absolutely necessary. And let me tell you that the absolutely necessary is so little that you will view a Taoist almost as if he were lazy.Remember, I am not praising laziness. I am simply condemning the egoistic attitude. Against ego – I am for laziness. But I am not for laziness itself; it should be full of awareness. Then you pass from both activity and from laziness. Then you become transcendental. You are neither active, nor inactive; you are centered. Whatsoever is needed, you do; whatsoever is not needed, you don’t do. You are neither a doer nor a non-doer. Doing is no longer your focus. You are a consciousness.So please don’t take whatsoever I have said in the sense that I am helping you to be lazy. To be really lazy means not to be inactive, but to be so full of energy that you are a reservoir of energy. Lazy as far as the world is concerned, but tremendously dynamic inside, not dull.A Taoist is lazy from the outside; from the inside he has become a riverlike phenomenon, he is continuously flowing toward the ocean. He has dropped many activities because they were unnecessarily leaking his energy. The danger is always there – in whatsoever I say, there is danger – the danger of interpretation. If I say, “Be active,” there is the possibility that you will become egoists. If I say, “Be inactive,” there is the possibility that you may become dull. Man is very cunning.I have heard…He was the kind of a guy who would bet on anything – provided he was sure of winning. “I’ll bet that my wife’s first words will be ‘My dear’ when I get home,” he said to Lucky.Lucky took him up on it. He knew the man’s wife very well, and she would be the last woman in the world to say, “My dear.”Must have been like Anand Prem.Lucky took him up on it, and they bet a hundred dollars. When they got to the sport’s house he stuck his head in the door and called, “My dear, I’m home.”“‘My dear’ be hanged!” roared his wife. “Wait till I get you inside!”And he looked at Lucky and said, “Give me a hundred dollars. Didn’t I tell you that the first words she would ever utter would be ‘My dear’?”Mind is very cunning. The wife is saying, “‘My dear’ be hanged, wait till I get you inside!” But you can interpret it many ways. So he is demanding a hundred dollars. Mind is cunning. It goes on interpreting in its own ways; it goes on finding reasons, rationalizations, tricks to defend itself. It wants to remain as it is. That is the whole effort of the mind: it wants to remain as it is. If it is lazy, it wants to remain lazy. If it is active – too active, obsessively active, it wants to remain active. So whatsoever I say, you have to be careful not to defend your mind. You have to come out of your mind.The man burst angrily through the door, threw his wife off the stranger’s knee and angrily demanded, “How do I find you kissing my wife?”“I don’t know,” said the stranger. “Maybe you’re home early?”People can find reasons. Be alert. But be alert about your own self, not about others. It is none of your business what others are doing. This should be one of the basic attitudes of a religious person – not to think about what the other person is doing; that is his life. If he decides to live it that way, that is his business. Who are you even to have an opinion about it? Even to have an opinion means that you are ready to interfere, you have already interfered. A religious person is one who is trying to live his life the best, the most total way he can; he is trying in the most alert way that he can. He is not interfering with anybody’s life, not even by having an opinion. Have you observed? If you pass somebody and you have a certain opinion about him, your face changes, your eyes change, your attitude, your walk. If you are condemnatory, your whole being starts broadcasting condemnation, disgust. No, you are interfering.To be really religious means to be non-interfering. Give freedom to people; freedom is their birthright.Once it happened…I stayed with one of my professors, my teacher. Though I was a student and he was my teacher, he was very respectful of me. He was a rare, religious man, but he was a drunkard, and when I stayed in his home, he was very afraid to drink in front of me. What would I think? I watched him; I felt his restlessness. So the next day I told him, “There is something on your mind. If you don’t relax, I will immediately leave, and go to a hotel. I will not stay. There is something on your mind. I feel that you are not at ease; my presence is creating some trouble.”He said, “Since you have raised the issue, I would like to tell you. I have never told you that I drink too much, but I always drink in my home to go to sleep. Now that you are staying here, I don’t want to drink before you and that is creating the trouble. I cannot go without drinking, and I cannot even conceive of drinking in front of you.”I laughed. I said, “This is foolish. What have I to do with it? You would not force me to drink.”He said, “No, never.”“Then it is finished; the problem is solved. You drink, and I will keep you company. I will not drink alcohol, but I can drink something else, Coca Cola or Fanta. I will keep you company; you drink. I will fill your glass, I will help you.”He could not believe it, he thought I was joking. But when that night I filled his glass, he started crying. He said, “I never thought that you would not have any opinion about it.” “I have been watching you,” he said, “and you don’t have any opinion about my drinking, about my behavior, about what I am doing.”I said, “To have an opinion about you is simply foolish. It is not something very great that I don’t have any opinion about you. Why should I have one in the first place? Who am I? It is your life – you want to drink, then drink.”To have an opinion about you means that deep down somewhere I want to manipulate you. To have some opinion about you, this way or that, means that I have a deep desire to have power over people. That’s what a politician desires. A religious person should be non-interfering.The seventh question:Osho,You speak a lot about the ugliness of jealousy. Yes, it is quite ugly, but any suggestions to us sufferers of the disease who aren't enlightened on how to diminish it?First, diminishing it is not going to help. You can diminish it to such proportions that it will almost become invisible, but that is not going to help. Diminishing simply means that you are throwing it into the unconscious and it goes deeper and deeper into the basement of your being. It becomes invisible. You may not be able to see it, but it will go on working from behind, it will go on pulling your strings from behind. It will become more subtle. Please don’t try to diminish it.The first thing to remember: rather than diminishing it, magnify it so you can see all of it. That is the whole process of all the groups going on around here – Gestalt, Encounter, Psychodrama. The whole process is that whatsoever the problem is, please don’t diminish it, but magnify it. Bring it out totally as it is – even exaggerate it, so that you can see every detail of it. Down the centuries, in the past, jealousy, anger, sadness, this and that, have all been repressed. The effort was to diminish them. No, a seed is a diminished tree, but a seed is tremendously powerful. A seed can again at any time produce a tree. The right situation, the right season, and the tree will again sprout. You can diminish your jealousy; it can become just a seed, and you will not be able to see it; the tree has disappeared, but it is still there.Diminishing is not the right process. That’s what you have been doing, that’s what you have done to your life: you have diminished everything. And another thing: when you diminish jealousy, your love will be diminished alongside it because your love and jealousy are so entangled with each other. If you diminish your sadness, your happiness will be diminished because your happiness and sadness are so together. If you diminish your hate, your love will disappear – that’s what has happened. You have been taught not to hate and the total result is that you have become incapable of love.No, please don’t ever diminish anything. That is not the way. Rather, magnify it, exaggerate it, bring it to its total blossoming, and then see it – every detail of it, every minute detail of it. In that very awareness, in that very seeing, you will become capable of transcending it, and then there will be no need to do anything about it.The second thing: you say, “You speak a lot about the ugliness of jealousy. Yes, it is ugly…” No, you don’t know. You are simply repeating what I have been saying. If you know it is quite ugly, in that very knowing it will disappear. You don’t know. You have listened to me; you have listened to Jesus; you have listened to Buddha, and you have gathered opinions. You don’t know. It is not your own feeling that jealousy is ugly. If it is your own feeling, then why do you carry it? It is not an easy thing; it takes a lot of investment. To be jealous is a very difficult thing: it needs a lot of effort on your part, a lot of involvement. It is so destructive of your own self that if it is ugly – and you have known the ugliness of it – you cannot carry it for a single moment. But listening to me you become knowledgeable.I have heard…“You can’t come in here,” the worried mother warned. “My son is sick.”“I want to catch your son’s measles,” the man said, “because if I kissed the nurse she’d get it. She would kiss the doctor and he’d get it. The doctor would kiss my wife and she’d get it. My wife would kiss the landlord and that’s the guy I’m after.”It is a great investment, and a great effort, and a very complex phenomenon.And finally, it may destroy things. It may not destroy others – it certainly destroys you; it is suicidal. Not only that, it is ugly, it is poisonous. It is suicidal, it is slowly, slowly killing yourself every day.See the fact of it. Don’t just become knowledgeable. What I say will not become an experience for you unless you experience it. And what is the way to experience it? The way is to bring it in front of you. It is hiding behind you.Don’t repress it, express it. Sit in your room, close the doors, bring your jealousy into focus. Watch it, see it; let it become as strong a flame as possible. Let it become a strong flame, burn with it and see what it is. Don’t say, ”This is ugly” in the beginning because that very idea that it is ugly will repress it, will not allow it total expression. No opinions! Just try to see the existential effect of what jealousy is – the existential fact. No interpretations, no ideologies. Forget buddhas and work, forget me. Just let the jealousy be there. Look into it; look deeply into it. Do this with anger; do this with sadness, hatred, possessiveness. And, by and by, you will see that just by seeing through things you start getting a transcendental feeling that you are just a witness; the identity is broken. The identity is broken only when you encounter something within you.The eighth question:Osho,What do you say to someone who, no matter what paths you talk about, always feels that he has one foot on each of them? And don't say that this must be my path! You only mentioned two yesterday, remember? Did I just put my foot in it?You cannot put your foot in both that of Taoism and Confucianism, by their very nature. Those paths are so diametrically opposite that you cannot put one foot on one path, the other foot on another path – that is impossible. You must be imagining, you must be dreaming, hallucinating. It is so diametrically opposite – just as you cannot be alive and dead together. If you think you are both, you are simply alive and nothing else because even to think one has to be alive.It is said that Mulla Nasruddin once asked…Somebody had died and he rushed home and asked his wife, “You are very wise, just tell me one thing: if some day I die, how am I to decide whether I have really died or not? I have just seen somebody die, and one day or other I am going to die, but how will I know?”The wife said, “Don’t be foolish, you will know it. You will become cold.”So, one day it happened. He was cutting wood in the forest, and it was a very cold day and he started feeling cold. He said, “Okay, so the last day has come. So I am becoming cold.” So he said good-bye to his donkey – because only the donkey was there – and thinking that he was going to die, he made himself comfortable under the tree and closed his eyes. What else was there to do? Of course, when he closed his eyes, lying down under the tree, he became even colder. So he said, “Certain, death is certain; now it is coming. I am becoming colder and colder.”Then, just out of curiosity, he opened one eye and looked at the donkey. What was happening to the donkey? A wolf had attacked the donkey! So he said, “What can I do?” Still he said loudly, “You can mess with my donkey because I am dead. But if I had been alive I would have shown you! But what can I do now?”Talking, thinking, how can you be dead? Even to think this much is enough proof that you are alive.No, you must have misunderstood. You cannot be on both paths. Look again. It is possible you may not be on either, but you cannot be on both.The last question:Osho,You said today “Ask a buddha why he is happy and he will shrug his shoulders.” Please, why are you happy?I will not even shrug my shoulders.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Chao Hsiang Tzu went hunting in the central mountains with a party of a hundred thousand. He set fire to the forests by lighting the tall grass, and fanned the flames for a hundred miles.A man came out from within a stone cliff, rising and falling with the smoke and ashes. The crowd thought he was a demon. When the fire passed he came out walking casually as though the fire he had passed through did not exist.Chao Hsiang Tzu marveled and detained the man. He scrutinized him at leisure. In his shape, his color, and the seven holes in his head, he was human; in his breathing, in his voice, he was human. He asked the man how he lived in stone and went through fire.“What are these things you call stone and fire?” said the man.“The thing you have just come out from was stone; the thing you have just been walking through was fire.”“I didn’t know,” said the man.Marquis Wen of Wei heard of it and questioned Tzu Hsia, a very well-known learned man, “What sort of man was that?”“According to what I have heard my master say, the man who is in harmony is absolutely the same as other things and no thing succeeds in wounding or obstructing him. To pass through metal and stone, and tread through water and fire are all possible.”“Why don’t you do it yourself?” said Marquis Wen.“I am not yet capable of cutting open my heart and throwing out the knowledge in it. However, I can tell you all you want to know about it.”“Why doesn’t your Master do it?” asked Marquis Wen.“My Master is one who, though able to do it, is able not to do it.”Marquis Wen was delighted with the answer.There is a very significant distinction to be made in the very beginning: the distinction between knowledge and knowing. Knowledge only appears to know, it knows not. Knowing may not appear to know, but it knows. Knowledge is borrowed, knowing is one’s own. Knowledge is verbal, knowing is through living. Knowledge is information gathered from here and there. Knowing is existential: you have lived it, it has come through your very experience; it is an experience. When knowing happens, a man is freed, he is liberated. Through knowledge, man becomes more of a prisoner. Knowledge binds; knowing liberates.The paradox is that the man of knowledge claims that he knows, and the man of knowing does not even know that he knows. The man of knowing is innocent. There is a very famous mystic treatise in the West – the only one in the West. Nobody knows who wrote it, nobody knows from whom it came, but it must have come from a tremendous experience. The name of the treatise is The Cloud of Unknowing. It is from a man of knowing, but he calls it The Cloud of Unknowing. He says, “When I came to know, I forgot all knowledge; all knowledge disappeared.” There is no need for knowledge when you know. When you don’t know, you cling to knowledge because only through that knowledge can you pretend to know. When you know, you can forget knowledge. When you don’t know, how can you afford to forget it?So only the greatest knowers have been able to forget knowledge. That is the peak, and it has to be remembered. Here, living with me, being here with me, don’t become men of knowledge; otherwise you will have missed me. Become men of knowing, become clouds of unknowing – which is the same thing in other words. Knowing is almost like unknowing because in knowing there is no knower, the ego does not exist. In knowledge there is a division: the division of the known and the knower, the division of the subject and the object. In knowing there is no division. Knowing is not divisive, it is unitive; it unites.Science is a sort of knowledge, religion a sort of knowing or unknowing, hence their paths never cross anywhere and they will never cross. Where science ends, religion begins. Where cunning ends, innocence begins. Where the knower disappears, knowing comes in.In the biblical story of Adam’s expulsion there is something to be understood in this context. The story is so beautiful that I come to it again and again, with different meanings, with different interpretations. God said to Adam, “You can enjoy all the fruits of this garden but there are two trees – one is called the Tree of Life; the other is called the Tree of Knowledge – please never eat from the Tree of Knowledge.” He mentions two trees: the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. He says nothing about the Tree of Life; he simply says, “Don’t eat from the Tree of Knowledge.” But Adam was too curious, hence the serpent could persuade him – otherwise the serpent would not have been persuasive, would not have succeeded. Deep down, Adam must have been curious about it, as every child is – as Adam was the first child, and God was the first father. Adam was persuaded to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. He ate, and he became knowledgeable. Immediately he felt ashamed, immediately he felt naked. Up to then he was innocent; the innocence was primordial, absolute, unconditional. He was not aware that he was naked. In fact he was not aware that he was. The ego entered: from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge ego was created. He became alert, he started judging whether he was beautiful or not, whether it was good to be naked or not; he became aware of his body. For the first time he became self-conscious; up to then he had not been self-conscious. Not that he was not conscious, he was conscious, but there was no self in it; the consciousness was pure, unobstructed. The consciousness was just a pure light, but suddenly the ego stood like a pillar in the middle of consciousness – a dark pillar, a pillar of darkness. And the story says that he was expelled.In fact, God need not have expelled him. He had expelled himself through eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Knowledge is expulsion. The moment you become aware of your ego you are expelled from the beauty, from the benediction, from the delight, from the joy, that life has to offer to you.Now what happened to the other tree, the Tree of Life? Nothing is said about it. My own interpretation is that had Adam eaten first from the Tree of Life and then from the Tree of Knowledge there would have been no expulsion. If knowing had come through living, if knowing had come through experience, there would have been no expulsion. His knowledge was bogus; it had not come through his own experience, it was unearned, it was immature – hence the expulsion. It was borrowed, it was not his own. When it comes through experience it liberates, it makes you more joyous, it makes you more delighted in existence. If Adam had eaten first the fruit of the Tree of Life and then the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, there would have been no expulsion. He reversed the process: he ate from the Tree of Knowledge first. Once you eat from the Tree of Knowledge, you start losing life. You cannot eat from the Tree of Life then, so the expulsion is self-imposed.Remember, knowledge can come in two ways. You can have it from others, from books, from people, from society, and you can claim it as yours, but then you are expelled. And remember, the expulsion is self-imposed; nobody is expelling you. Your very wrong approach toward knowing becomes a barrier. But knowing is attained through another way – that is through experience, through life. Eat the fruit of the Tree of Life first and then knowing comes silently. Without even a whisper it arises in your soul because if you go into experience, the ego is not created. The more you experience life, the less you have the self. Once life is known in its totality, you don’t think of yourself as separate from existence: you have fallen into unity, you have become one. You have become one with the whole. You are part of the organic unity of existence. And then there is knowing, a totally different kind of knowing, which liberates. Eat the fruit of the Tree of Life.There is another parable in the Bible that when God created the world he asked Adam to name things. He brought the lion and asked Adam, “What name do you give to this animal?” He brought the elephant and asked, “What name do you give to this animal?” Adam named all things, and since then man has been doing the same. All your knowledge is nothing but labeling, naming. If you ask somebody, “Do you know this flower?” he says, “Yes, I know it is a rose.” What does he know? Just the name. What else do you know? By knowing the name rose do you know the rose? By knowing the word god do you know God? By knowing the word love do you know love? That parable is also beautiful. Adam was foolish enough. He should have said, “No, how can I name these things? I don’t know them.” But he did name them – the elephant, the rose, the lion, the tiger – and since then, that’s what man has been doing continuously down the ages: just naming things. If you know the name of a person, you think you know the person; so when you introduce people to each other you just tell them their name or their country, their race. But what are you doing? Is the person known that way? A person is so vast, so huge, how can you label him and know him by his label? But naming gives a false impression – as if you know.A couple whose new home was completed very recently had hardly moved in before the neighbors came over to inspect it. Naturally the conversation was on the subject of the new house.“It is very nice,” commented one visitor, “but I don’t see why you call this type of house a bungalow.”“Well,” explained the owner, “we just don’t know what else to call it. The job was a bungle and we still owe for it so we call it bungalow.”One has to call it something, so, “The job was a bungle and we still owe for it so we call it a bungalow.”One has to call things something, so we go on labeling things and then we think we know. What exactly do you know? If you drop those names that have accumulated in your mind, what is left? Nothing, exactly, and that nothing has to be realized because unless you recognize that nothingness, you will never move in the right direction. The right direction is knowing, not knowledge.What do your experts go on doing?I have heard about a doctor…He had just started his practice and the first patient came. He examined the patient, but could not get hold of what kind of illness he was suffering from. He didn’t want to show that he didn’t know, so he looked into the books. But still he could not find the diagnosis. He became very nervous; the patient was sitting on the bed and watching, and the doctor started perspiring. Then suddenly an idea came to him. He asked the patient, “Have you ever suffered from this illness before?”The man said, “Yes, five years ago I suffered from it.”And the doctor laughed and he said, “So, one thing is certain. You have it again!”At least he could say something now. He was at ease. “You have it again!” But even if you can find a name for it, that doesn’t mean much.“I really was worried about my son Timothy,” confessed Mrs. Malone to her bridge cronies. “He had gotten into the habit of tucking all sorts of things into his pockets: twenty-dollar bills off my dressing table, other people’s silver spoons, things like that… Then my husband suggested that I take the boy to see Dr. Thingamabob, who studied analysis with Freud in Vienna.And do you know, girls, my husband was absolutely right. That doctor solved my Timothy’s problem after talking to him for just one hour. He told me ‘Mrs. Malone, your son is a thief.’”Now what are you doing? It seems as if the problem is solved. It appears – by naming, by labeling – that you have solved the problem. Avoid this habit – this is one of the dangerous habits of man. Because of this habit it has become impossible to penetrate into reality. This habit has become so unconscious, so deep-rooted, so mechanical, that the moment you see something, you immediately verbalize a name. You see the tree and immediately you repeat inside, “This is a tree – a gulmohar tree or a pine tree. This is a rose; this is a marigold.” You continuously go on saying something inside whenever you are encountering anything. And if sometimes you come across something which you don’t know the name for, you feel a little uneasy: you start inquiring, “What is this thing called?” Once somebody has given you a name – any name will do – you are at ease. How do you become at ease so easily? You think it has become known just by being named.A child is born and you give a name to the child, and the moment you give a name you have put up a barrier. Now the child will be equivalent to the name, and the name is an invention. The child was a mystery, and the name is very poor. No name can cover any person because each person is such a mystery. What name can cover a person? It is impossible. I know it is needed; names are needed for utilitarian purposes, but remember well that the name rose is not the rose. Use the name, but don’t forget that the rose is a tremendous existence.Tennyson has said, “If I could understand a flower, root and all, then I would have understood all of existence.” Yes, a small roseflower is so vast that if you can understand one small roseflower, you will have understood all of existence because everything is so interconnected. If you want to understand the roseflower, you will have to understand the earth: it comes out of it, the earth is the source. And you will have to understand the sky because it flowers into the sky. You will have to understand the sun because without the sun it cannot exist; the color comes from the sun. If you go deeply into it, you will find that you will have to understand everything that exists in existence. Only then will your knowledge of this rose be complete and total.Just by calling it a rose you start thinking you know it. These names give you knowledge and these names simply confuse you.Joyce, the inquiring child, asked, “Dad, is today Wednesday?”Answered the patient father, “No, daughter, today is Thursday.”Joyce: “But yesterday you said, ‘Today is Wednesday’.”Father: “Well, today was Wednesday yesterday. Yesterday Thursday was tomorrow. When today is tomorrow, today will be yesterday. Today is today now. Now do you understand?”Games of words: games, and nothing else. All your philosophy and all your theology are nothing but games with words, playing with words. One can play endlessly. One word can lead to another and so on and so forth. Existence is, and existence is not a word. Existence is, and existence is not a philosophy. Existence is, and existence is not a dogma, theory, scripture. If you want to move into existence, then you have to drop all words, all verbalizing habits; you have to drop language. Language is the barrier.Once language disappears, who are you? Are you then a knower? You are not then a knower. Then do you know anything? You don’t. You are not a knower, and you don’t know anything, and exactly in that moment of emptiness knowing arises. That’s what Zen people call satori. If language is dropped, satori happens, and the whole effort on the path of Zen is how to drop language. They give paradoxes to solve which cannot be solved. Solving these paradoxes, by and by one gets fed up with language itself. Out of sheer exhaustion a moment comes – language drops, and consciousness is freed – satori has happened.Zen masters say to their disciples, “Go and meditate on the sound of one hand clapping.” Now, one hand cannot clap; to clap at least two hands are needed. One hand cannot create any sound; for sound to be created something needs to clash. Sound comes from conflict. Clash! One hand cannot create sound. Now this is absurd, but the disciple has to meditate over it. He meditates. Sometimes it takes one year, sometimes two years and sometimes twenty years – it depends. The disciple goes on meditating morning, afternoon, evening, night. He hardly sleeps for five hours and again, by three o’clock in the morning, he is sitting again at that absurd game – thinking, meditating – “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” He knows well, and in his mind says, “What nonsense are you saying? This is not possible. You will never find it. But the master says you have to find it.”He has to go every day to the master and report whether he has found it or not. And the master insults and sometimes hits him, and sometimes he throws him out of the room and he says, “You have not found it. You are just a fool. Try harder. Try harder.” And he tries – harder and harder – one year, two years, three years, or twenty years. What will happen? One goes on becoming tense and tense and tense, and there is no possibility to solve it; so the tension cannot be relaxed. That is the secret of the koan. If there is an answer, then the tension can be relaxed, but there is no answer. An answer as such is not possible – it has been prohibited from the very beginning.A koan is a puzzle which cannot be solved. If it can be solved, it is not a koan. If the mind can solve it, then the mind can continue. But the mind cannot solve it, cannot solve it; again and again the mind is proved impotent, again and again to be impotent. Again and again, frustration. Again and again, the mind feels, “I cannot do anything. I cannot do anything.” This tension goes on, goes on, and becomes a climax: thunderous, roaring, like a storm; a madness arises out of it. The disciple goes on thinking “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” He goes on asking the mind.First the mind tries to supply answers: linguistic, verbal, borrowed, and the master goes on denying all of them. Even if the disciple enters the room and does not say anything to the master, he enters, and the master says, “No, this is not the answer.” Because, in fact, there is no answer, so the master knows no answer can be brought. Then, one day – out of sheer exhaustion, out of sheer tiredness, total tiredness – the mind flops, language disappears.With language disappearing, with mind disappearing, the question disappears. Who is there to ask? And if there is no language, how can you formulate the question, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” With the mind dropping, the question disappears. There is tremendous peace, silence: a state of no-language.Sometimes the disciple may not go to the master. Who bothers to go to the master now? But then the master comes or sometimes the disciple may go, and even before he has said anything, the master will say, “So you have come home, so you have arrived, so you have crossed the barrier of language, so you have become silent.” From that silence knowing grows.All that you know, all that you think of as knowledge is rubbish. Know it as rubbish and drop it. All that is borrowed, all that is learned from others – and all that you know that is learned from others – has to be dropped. It is humiliating: to carry it and to declare that it is knowledge is humiliating.Two comics met in Lindy’s. One of them was furious.“I saw you at the Palace,” he roared. “You told every joke that I told on my broadcast. They were my jokes.”“Look, wise guy,” answered the accused. “Anything that comes out of my radio is mine. I have paid for it, haven’t I? Anything that comes out of my radio is mine. I have paid for it.”Is anything that comes out of your Bible yours because you have purchased the Bible? Is anything that comes out of the Koran yours because you are a Mohammedan? Is anything that comes out of the Vedas yours because, accidentally, you were born into a Hindu family? All that you know – pile it up and burn it forever. It will be difficult because your whole ego is involved in it.To recognize the fact that you don’t know is the most difficult thing a man can do, but, in fact, a very manly thing. When you do it you have become for the first time a real man. Before it you were just pseudo, phony. And this knowledge gives you a false sense of knowing, but it never transforms your life. It never really gives anything to you. You know what is good, but you do what is not good. You know anger is bad, but you go on being angry. You know, but what is the use of this knowledge? It never becomes in any way part of your being, and it cannot become part of your being.Many people come to me and they say, “We know; we know exactly what is right and what is wrong, but we are weak and we cannot do the right, and we go on becoming victims of the wrong.” That is not the right thing. They are not weak. Nobody is weak. God never creates weaklings – it is impossible. Then where does the problem come from? The problem arises because knowledge is not a transforming force. So what if you know? It never transforms you. It gives you a feeling that you are weak; it makes you feel impotent. Look at it. Your knowledge, rather than helping you, destroys your self-confidence. It is better to be angry and not to know that anger is bad. To think that anger is bad and then be angry is very dangerous: you are becoming split. A part of your mind goes on saying, “It is wrong,” and a part of your mind goes on doing it all the same. You are becoming schizophrenic. Your knowledge makes you schizophrenic.Knowledge is impotent; hence it makes you feel impotent. Drop out of the company of knowledge and then, if you really know that anger is bad out of your own experience, that very knowing transforms you. Then you will never be angry again. How can you be? Once you know that fire burns, how can you put your hand into it? It is impossible – unless you want to burn your hand, then it is totally different. When you know you cannot get out through the wall and you will get hurt in the head if you try, you don’t try – unless you want to break your head.Knowing is always in tune with your being. Knowledge is always out of tune.The Police Chief was angry. “You have been on the force now for two years and never made an arrest,” he shouted at Patrolman Pat. “I’m gonna give you one more chance. Someone is stealing Squire Davis’s apples. Go up there and catch the thief.”So Pat goes up there and around midnight he pounces on a masked man in the orchard trying to sneak away with a pack on his back. He opens the bag and finds it contains valuable silver, so he returns it to the masked man. “Sorry, my mistake,” Pat says. “You can thank your stars it was not apples.”That’s how it happens. Knowledge never gives you insight; rather, it makes you blind. Knowledge is blinding; knowing is an insight, a clarity, a transparency. Knowledge is old; knowing is always fresh, young, it arises out of the now. Knowledge is very ancient. Religions go on establishing their oldness. Hindus say that they are the oldest religion in the world, so say the Jews, so say the Jainas. Most ancient – but why? Why this constant effort to prove that we are the oldest? Because knowledge is valuable if it is old. Knowledge is like wine: the older it is the more valuable. And knowledge is intoxicating. Yes, it is like wine, it is a drug: it dulls you, it makes you insensitive, it makes you unconscious. Knowing is fresh. A man of knowing arrives at his knowing each moment again and again. He never carries the old. He lives in the moment; he is responsive, sensitive, alert, aware.A French portrait painter sat in his favorite cafe sipping his wine. His first small bottle finished, he was about to order a second, when his eyes fell on the headline of a paper, “Hard Times Coming,” so instead of ordering his usual second bottle, he called for his check.“Is there anything wrong with the wine?” asked the landlord.“The wine is good, but I didn’t order a second bottle because hard times are coming and we must economize,” explained the artist.“Hard times?” said the landlord. “Then my wife must not order that silk dress we planned but must take one of cotton.”“Hard times?” repeated the dressmaker when the order was canceled. “This is no time to expand. I must stop the improvement I had planned in this place.”“Hard times, eh?” said the builder, when the dressmaker canceled the plans. “Then I cannot have my wife’s portrait painted.”So he wrote to the artist and canceled the order.After receiving the letter, the artist went again to his favorite cafe and ordered a small bottle of wine to soothe himself. On a nearby chair was the paper in which he had read of hard times a few days before. He picked it up to read more closely and found that it was ten years old.Knowledge circulates. It goes on from one hand to another and it affects people tremendously. They start living out of it – at least they try to. It cripples them. You have all become cripples. You are not centered because your knowledge has forced you out of your centering. A child is centered. The moment he starts growing and starts knowing things, he becomes more and more uncentered; he goes astray. An old man completely forgets where his center is.This parable, and I call it a parable; it is metaphorical. Try to understand it. It is of great beauty.Chao Hsiang Tzu went hunting in the central mountains with a party of a hundred thousand. He set fire to the forests by lighting the tall grass, and fanned the flames for a hundred miles.A man came out from within a stone cliff, rising and falling with the smoke and ashes. The crowd thought he was a demon. When the fire passed he came out walking casually as though the fire he had passed through did not exist.Chao Hsiang Tzu marveled and detained the man. He scrutinized him at leisure. In his shape, his color, and the seven holes in his head, he was human; in his breathing, in his voice, he was human. He asked the man by what way he lived in stone and went through fire.“What are these things you call stone and fire?” said the man.“The thing you have just come out from was stone; the thing you have just been walking through was fire.”“I didn’t know,” said the man.Marquis Wen of Wei heard of it and questioned Tzu Hsia, a very well-known learned man, “What sort of man was that?”“According to what I have heard my master say, the man who is in harmony is absolutely the same as other things and no thing succeeds in wounding or obstructing him. To pass through metal and stone, and tread through water and fire are all possible.”“Why don’t you do it yourself?” said Marquis Wen.“I am not yet capable of cutting open my heart and throwing out the knowledge in it. However, I can tell you all you want to know about it.”“Why doesn’t your master do it?” asked Marquis Wen.“My master is one who, though able to do it, is able not to do it.”Marquis Wen was delighted with the answer.Now, go slowly into this parable step by step. First:A man came out from within a stone cliff; rising and falling, with the smoke and ashes.This is a Taoist attitude that if you move, flow with life without any resistance, without any effort, without any direction of your own; if you follow life wherever it leads like a dry leaf in the wind… The wind goes to the south, and the leaf also goes to the south; the wind takes the leaf up, and the leaf goes into the clouds; and the wind drops it back, and the leaf sleeps silently under the tree on the earth. The leaf has no desire, and the leaf has no direction of its own. The leaf has no ego. Desire and direction are by-products of the ego. You want to be somebody; you want to reach somewhere; you want to prove something. You want to do something; you want to swim against the current; then you are not a man of Tao. Don’t swim at all. There is no question of going against the current, but just going with the river wherever it leads. Not pushing, not pulling, not trying to manipulate life, but just rising and falling with it, then you are dissolved. Then how can anything harm you?Have you noticed? Taoists go on telling these stories again and again. You may have noticed it happening many times – a drunkard falls down on the road, but is not hurt; you fall and you break a few bones. What happened? Why has the drunkard not been wounded by the road’? He falls every night, and every night he has to be brought home. Somebody carries him. And again in the morning he is going to the office smiling and happy.I used to live with a drunkard. He was my neighbor for a few years, a very beautiful man. Sometimes his wife would come to me and she would say, “My husband has not returned. He may be lying somewhere in the gutter and it is dark and I cannot go. Will you help me a little? Can you go and find him?” And I would go and find him. Many times I would go and find him lying in some gutter or on some road or just leaning against a post and I would bring him home. But he was never hurt! And in the morning he was as fresh as ever again rushing to the office, and in the evening again the same story.Watching him, one thing became absolutely certain: Taoists are right because when he fell he was un-self-conscious. When he fell, he simply fell; he was not resisting. When you fall, you don’t simply fall, you try to protect yourself, you become hard, you resist. In that very resistance is danger. When you are hard your bones are bound to break. Not because the earth is going to hurt you, but your own resistance hurts you.Out of this Taoist attitude have arisen many arts in the Far East: aikido, jujitsu, and others. The approach is to be relaxed. Even if the enemy hurts you, you absorb it rather than fighting with it, and you will not be hurt – difficult, a great art. To persuade yourself not to become hard when somebody is striking you is difficult because we have been trained for centuries to protect, to fight, to struggle, to make an effort to survive.The Taoist attitude is to go with life, to go all the way, to go without any conditions. Wherever it leads, go with it. Trust life so tremendously that you don’t fear, that you don’t have any fear of life. You come from life; you are part of life, so how is there any possibility that life will harm you? There is no need to be afraid, to have fear.…rising and falling with the smoke and ashes… the man came out of the stone cliff – walked through fire.The crowd thought he was a demon. When the fire had passed, he came out walking casually as though the fire he had passed through did not exist.It looks like a miracle, but this miracle can happen to you. I am not saying, “Go and walk through fire.” This is just a parable – a beautiful story to say something of great significance. Try it in your life: become un-self-conscious. Don’t carry this self and a constant struggle with life. Sometimes relax, sometimes let things be and see what happens, and you will be surprised. Once you let things be, once you start living in a let-go, or living as let-go, then you will see that life is not your enemy, it is tremendously friendly. It has to be – it is your mother, it is your father, it is your source and it is your goal. You come out of it, and one day you will disappear into it. Why fear?Out of fear comes fight. Out of fight you become a separate individual. Naturally, when you become a separate individual, you are in trouble. Then you take this vast existence as the enemy. That is the Western approach: all of nature is your enemy; it has to be conquered. “Conquest of nature” – that’s what science has been doing for two, three centuries and it has destroyed all the beauty of life. It has polluted the whole atmosphere. The whole ecology of the earth is disturbed because of these people who have been trying to conquer nature. It is foolish. It is as if my one hand tries to conquer my whole body – it is as foolish as that. Man trying to conquer the earth, man trying to conquer the sky, man trying to conquer nature is just absurd. Once you try to conquer nature, naturally one day or other you will try to conquer your innermost nature also. That is a corollary to it, a natural corollary to it. First you try to conquer the outer nature, then you start trying to conquer the inner nature, but then you are always in conflict, friction. You become a very sharp ego, and of course tremendously miserable, terribly miserable, infinitely miserable.Misery is to fall out of step with existence. Happiness is to fall in step with existence. And to fall in step with existence is so simple because it is so natural.…rising and falling with the smoke… The man walked out casually as though the fire he had passed through did not exist.…In his shape, his color, and the seven holes in his head he was human; in his breathing, in his voice, he was human. He asked the man by what way he lived in stone and went through fire.Of course Chao Hsiang Tzu was very surprised, intrigued, by the phenomenon. He could not believe his own eyes – how could this man be human? We have lost all meaning of real humanity. This man looked like a demon, something not of the human race – either something evil or something godly, but not human.Then Chao Hsiang Tzu looked at the man: In his shape, his color, and the seven holes in his head, he was human; in his breathing, in his voice, he was human.Remember, the human is the abode of the superhuman. Man is not an end, man has infinite possibilities; man has great potential. Man is not only the past, but the future also. Man has an infinite destiny in front of him. He has to grow – and he can grow to superhuman heights, but the growth does not come from effort. The growth comes in cooperation with nature. The growth comes through harmony, through harmonious cooperation. The growth comes not as a conquest, but as a surrender.That’s the difference between other religions and the Taoists. The other religions emphasize the will too much and Taoists say will is really the calamity. Surrender. One should become as will-less as possible. The moment you are will-less, then there is no problem: all blocks are removed, and deep inside you the superhuman rises to its optimum height.Yes, he looked like a man. Buddha also looked like a man, so looked Lao Tzu, so looked Krishna, so looked Christ. They were all men, but still something of the beyond had penetrated them. Because of that beyond we have given different names: Jesus is called Christ, “the only begotten son of God.” These are just metaphorical ways of saying one thing, and only one thing, that something of the beyond has happened in Jesus. He is no longer just the son of Joseph and Mary. Something of the beyond, something of the infinite has entered his being – he is the son of God. Hindus call Krishna, Avatar. Avatar means that God has descended; God has come to the earth.Names differ, metaphors differ, but one thing is certain: that whenever some human being has really fallen in tune with nature, something so superb happens in his life, we cannot just call him a man. We have to call him by a new name to indicate that he has gone beyond humanity. But remember, he has gone beyond humanity because it is human to go beyond humanity. It is part of being human to go beyond humanity and unless you have gone beyond you have not fulfilled your destiny, then you are not fully human. Then you are just a man.That’s the difference I make between man and human: man is a stasis, human is a process. Man is a static concept; being human is a growth concept, a growing concept, a movement. A human being is one who is constantly changing into superhuman; and a man is one who has become dormant, is not moving anywhere, is simply drying and dying.Start moving! Man is like frozen ice. A human is like a river flowing – the ice has melted. And when the river flows it is bound to reach the ocean. The river is meant to reach the ocean – it will arrive – and there is no need for any map. The rivers don’t carry any map. There is no need even of a guide. There is no need of milestones. The river simply flows, not knowing where it is going, and one day it arrives. So it happens in consciousness, the stream of consciousness. Just float naturally, in a relaxed way, not in a hurry, not in impatience. Cool, collected, in deep cooperation with nature, flowing, and one day you will arrive. Just by allowing the flow to happen, you reach the ocean.Chao Hsiang Tzu …asked the man by what way he lived in stone and went through fire.That’s natural. We always ask: “By what way?” “How did you achieve this?” What is the method, the technology? Buddha is asked again and again, “By what way have you achieved this?” And Buddha says, “The moment you ask this question, you create trouble for me because I achieved it only when I dropped all the ways: the pathless path. When I was on the way, I could not achieve it. For six years I was struggling hard. I was doing the utmost that I could do, and I failed. I failed utterly. Then one day there was nothing left to be done. I had done all that could be humanly done. Nothing to do, I relaxed. And that very moment I attained. So when you ask me by what way, you create trouble for me because I attained it only when I had dropped all the ways.”That is one of the greatest insights ever, and that is one of the very fundamental things of the Taoist approach toward life. Never ask, “By what way?” If you ask that, you’ve ask the wrong question. There is the possibility that some foolish person may answer. Fools are all around. If you ask a foolish question, you are bound to get a foolish answer. Once a question is asked, you will get an answer. People are very ready to supply advice and answers, but if the question is wrong, the answer is bound to be wrong because only a wrong answer can fit a wrong question. If you ask a wrong question and I supply you with a right answer, you will think I am irrelevant. You had asked something and I am talking about something else. This happens again and again.In darshan I watch people. If they ask a wrong question, and I give them a right answer, they look a little puzzled, they look uneasy. They feel as if they had asked one thing and I have answered something else: it does not fit – it is not an answer to their question. And they are right too. It is not an answer to their question because their question was so wrong that only a wrong answer could fit in with it.Remember not to ask a wrong question, otherwise there are priests and pundits who will supply you with answers. They have been cheating humanity because humanity, out of foolishness, asks wrong questions. Then they supply wrong answers, and those wrong answers fit perfectly well with your wrong questions – and then they cheat you.I have heard…In a country village there was a laborer who killed his hog; and it was the custom in such cases to send pieces of meat; sausages, black puddings and liver to all the neighbors. This farmer, who had already received innumerable presents of this kind, found that if he adhered to this custom he should have nothing left for himself. Confiding in one of his neighbors, he said, “I have killed my hog, and if I should send a piece to all from whom I have received, there will be none left for myself. Now, I pray you, advise me what is to be done?”To which his neighbor replied, “If I were you, I would hang up my hog at my open window for the greater part of the night, and the next day I would tell everybody it was stolen. By this means, I should be excused from making presents.”The laborer, much pleased with his friend’s advice, returned home and put it in practice. The giver of this friendly advice, not failing to profit by the darkness of the night, seized the hog and carried it home. How astonished was the farmer when early in the morning he found nothing of his hog! He raved at his neighbor’s invention, which he had so much approved of the evening before. He sallied out to give the alarm, and the first person he met was his friendly adviser to whom he related the whole affair, saying, “Oh neighbor, what do you think? They have stolen my hog!”“There, there,” said his neighbor, “that’s right, stand to it. Tell the same story to everybody you meet, and I’ve no doubt they will all believe you.”The farmer began to swear, and to protest most solemnly that it was no joke – that his hog was absolutely gone. But the stronger he was in his expressions of grief and vexation, the more his neighbor exclaimed, “That’s right, that’s right, my friend. Stand to it well and they’ll all excuse your lack of presents.”The priests have been exploiting humanity because man, out of his stupidity, has been asking the wrong questions. Of course you get wrong answers, and you have to pay for those wrong answers. They don’t come cheap, they don’t come free; you have to pay dearly for them.This man, Chao Hsiang Tzu asked: “…by what way?” The question seems logical, relevant, meaningful. It is not because a way means a will. You know the proverb: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Let me say to you: “Where there’s a way, there’s a will.” The way comes out of the will. The way is nothing but will translated practically into life. Tao has no way because Tao has no will. Will means struggle, will means fight. All ways are ways of struggle. Tao is a pathless path – no way – things are good as they are. There is nowhere to go, so what is the point of any way? One has simply to relax and be herenow. And remember: relaxation is not a way that you have to follow. If you make it a way, there will not be relaxation, there will come will.I have read a book – American, of course. The title of the book: You Must Relax. Now, “must” is very American, and naturally very tense. You must relax! Even relaxation has to be a must? Then how will you relax? It is something to do and you have to do – it is almost like a commandment. You have to follow the commandment. If you don’t relax, it will almost look as if you are committing a sin – you must relax! And what will you do when you will be relaxing? You will do something, and whatsoever you do will be wrong because relaxation comes only when you are not doing anything at all. If you are doing something, counting sheep, or just going from one to a hundred and then coming back from a hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, back to one. Whatsoever you are doing, or just trying to relax the whole body: relax the legs and then relax the stomach, and relax the hands – you are doing it. All doing is a tension. Relaxation is not something that you have to do. When you don’t do anything, it is there. When you are not doing, it is there. It is in your non-doing. If you do something, that will be your undoing.This is absolutely wrong, to say to somebody, “You must relax!” It is almost as if you go to an insane person and you say, “You must be sane!” Now what will he do? He is insane. He can make great efforts to become sane – he will become more insane. He is insane because he is tense. Now you are giving him another goal to become more tense, even more. There is no way.Tao says to drop all ways. All ways are mind inventions. All ways are man-fabricated. Tao is when there is no way, no will. When you are not going anywhere – no goal to achieve, nothing to become, nowhere to go – then what will you do? You will simply plop, you will relax into existence. In that very moment you have crossed to humanity: you have become superhuman.He asked the man by what way he lived in stone and went through fire.“What are these things you call stone and fire?” said the man.That is innocence. He does not know what stone is and what fire is; he must be a very childlike man. This is the idea, the Taoist idea, that a man should be so innocent – “the cloud of unknowing.”“What are these things you call stone and fire?” said the man.“The thing you have just come out from was stone; the thing you have just been walking through was fire.”“I didn’t know,” said the man.In his not-knowing was his knowing: because he was in a state of not-knowing there was no barrier. How can fire burn you, if you don’t know that it is fire and that it burns? This has to be understood.If you want to understand it exactly, you will have to ask the hypnotists. You can ask our Santosh what it means exactly. He can, some day, do an experiment in deep hypnosis before you. In deep hypnosis you can put an ordinary pebble on the hand of the hypnotized person and you can tell the person who is in deep unconsciousness, “This is a burning coal, burning hot, and you will be burned.” It is just an ordinary pebble, cold. But when you put the pebble on his hand, the man will be burned, and his hand will show that there has been a burning coal on it. What happened? And you can also do the opposite. You can put a burning coal into his hand; you can say that it is just a cold stone, and he will not be burned. Now, these are proved scientific facts. What happens exactly? When you put a burning coal on the hand of the man, why is he not being burned? If fire burns, then he should be burned. What does it matter whether he is conscious or unconscious, hypnotized or not hypnotized? What does it matter if you say it is a cold stone? By your speaking it, how do things change?Hypnosis is a very revealing force. It has been condemned too much in the West, particularly because of the wrong attitudes of Christianity. Otherwise hypnosis is a door to inner reality. And it has to become a door in the coming days. By and by, more and more people are getting interested in it and more and more scientific research is being done. It reveals a tremendous phenomenon. One of the phenomena which is relevant to this parable is that you create your reality by believing in it. This is a tremendous discovery.You create your reality by believing in it. The reality is as you believe it. Your belief becomes your reality. If your belief changes, your reality changes. Man lives in a very unreal reality. That is the meaning of the Hindu word maya. Maya means magic, maya means that which appears to be so, but is not. We live in maya; we live in a very illusory world. We create our own world.You can go to deep forests in India where primitive societies still live. They have their belief systems; you will be surprised that they work. Somebody can kill a person far away, miles away, by doing a certain ritual. If he wants to kill somebody who does not belong to the primitive society, he will not be able to, but he can kill people who belong to his society because their belief system is the same. Once a person comes to know that a certain ritual has been done which has always killed people, he will immediately die. He will simply lapse into death.In America, in 1952, they made a law, the Anti-hypnosis Act because in a certain university a few students, just out of curiosity, were doing some experiments. Four students were doing an experiment in their room: one was lying on the bed and three were hypnotizing him. The boy who was being hypnotized must have been of a tremendous capacity, he must have been a mediumistic person: he fell into a really deep hypnosis, which rarely happens. Ordinarily, thirty-three per cent of people are hypnotizable, and out of that thirty-three per cent not more than three per cent are deeply hypnotizable. So out of one hundred persons, only three are good subjects who can be put into a deep trance. Otherwise, others go into a trance, but they remain on the periphery: they will do something which they agree to do. If you tell them to do something to which they don’t agree, they will immediately come out of their hypnosis. But that boy must have been one of those rare, three per cent of people. The three were hypnotizing him, and they were playing – just like a joke – they had read a book and they were trying something from it. It was just coincidental that the boy was very hypnotizable, suggestible. They said many things and he did many things, and then suddenly the idea came to one and he said, “Now you are dead.” And the boy died. They tried to bring him back, but once a person is gone, he is gone; then hypnosis cannot work.Hypnosis reveals one thing: that if you believe in something very deeply, it starts functioning in your mind, in your being – it becomes reality. Reality is not always real. Ordinarily, whatsoever you think is real is ninety per cent imaginary, but it works as reality. Buddha defined reality as “that which works,” and that definition is really meaningful. Whatsoever works is real. If somebody, in a deep hypnotic trance, is burned because you put a cold stone in his hand, then it is fire for him. It works, and he will carry the wound for many days. The body believed it, the consciousness believed it, and it functioned.The man said, “I didn’t know,” You must have heard about firewalkers. They walk through the fire because of a great trust: they believe that the fire is not going to burn them; they move in a deep, hypnotic trance. In India, there are many firewalkers. In Ceylon, the best group of firewalkers are Buddhist monks. Every year, once a year, they gather around the temple of Kandy and they walk on fire. The belief is that Buddha protects, and certainly the belief works. Not that Buddha protects, but if you think that Buddha protects then the belief works – your belief protects.It happened that a Christian missionary went to see the firewalkers, and of course it was a challenge to him – Buddhist monks walking on fire and Buddha protecting? Somebody challenged him and said, “You believe in Christ. What about you? Why don’t you walk on the fire?”Now the challenge was such that he could not say no. He was a missionary and he was teaching people that Buddha is nothing, Christ is all. So they said, “Now then, let us see what happens.”He may not have been burned if he had really believed, but no missionary ever believes. He became suspicious, he was afraid. He walked out of his ego not out of his trust; he walked saying, “If these thirty people are not burned, why should I be?” Not only did he remember Christ, he even remembered Buddha too, inside – “It is okay, protect me too if you are protecting these thirty people.” But he had a doubtful mind. He was burned, terribly burned.The same group was invited to Oxford in 1960 and they walked there. Thousands of people watched, and a professor of philosophy, a simple man, just looking at this whole phenomenon became so enchanted that without saying anything to anybody he jumped into the fire, and he walked and was not burned. What happened? Neither Buddha nor Christ – simply seeing that if thirty human beings could walk, “Then why not? I am also a human being. It is humanly possible.” The very idea that it was humanly possible became a trust. There was no doubt in it. He jumped in without hesitation, and he could walk on fire.I am not saying that you should go and walk on fire, but if you watch your life you will see many things happen only because you believe them; many things cannot happen to you because you disbelieve them. Many things are not possible because there is doubt; many things become possible because there is trust. You create your reality. Look at the splendor of human consciousness – you create your reality, you are the center of your world. You create your world, you hold your world. If you are miserable, remember, it is you who are creating it. If you are happy, know well it is you who are creating it. It is your world: you can create a happy world; you can create an unhappy world. Hell is your habit of creating unhappy worlds around you. Heaven is another habit of creating happy worlds around you. And nirvana is to know that all which mind creates is useless. Why not move into that which is uncreated by mind? That is the ultimate. Then there is no misery and no happiness: no good, no bad, no heaven, no hell.“I didn’t know,” said the man. He walked into fire but was not burned. Fire burns only because the idea is in you that it burns. The idea burns really, not the fire. You can see it in small things.When Western people come to India they start suffering from many diseases: dysentery, diarrhea, hepatitis. They are very afraid of the unhygienic conditions here. The water is not clean, not scientifically clean, but Indians have lived on that water for centuries and there has never been any problem. But when you come with the idea that the water is unhygienic and you drink it, you are drinking your idea; it is dangerous, more dangerous than the unhygienic water. The water may be unhygienic, but it is not as dangerous as the idea that you are drinking with it: “It is unhygienic.” Now you are taking a dangerous step. It is a suggestion. Each time you drink water the suggestion goes in: you are creating an autohypnosis. How long will you be able to stand? You will fall; you will have hepatitis. And when you have hepatitis, of course, your old idea is strengthened even more: “I was right. The water was not hygienic.” No Indian suffers from this. You should go to Indian villages. In the same small pond the buffaloes, the bullocks, the cows are enjoying doing their thing, and man is also doing his thing, and everything goes on and nobody is worried. Nobody has any idea. Everything is good.If you go to a Hindu sacred place, you will not find any idea, any concept, of hygiene. People think that it is a sacred place and that the water is holy; you will not even be able to get into that water; there are so many people there – and they are enjoying. They have waited their whole lives to come to this holy water and to take a dip. They are drinking it, and they will carry the water, in bottles and flasks, to their homes: it is holy water. But if you take it to the scientist he will say, “It is the unholiest water! Throw it away! Don’t bring it here. Never touch it and never go close to it.” What is happening? An idea is becoming a reality.I was once for a few months in a primitive community in Bastar. The women go to the field – they work there – or in the forest, and suddenly they have a birth contraction and they give birth to a child. Nobody looks after them, no hospitalization, no nurses, no doctors, no other human being. The woman may be working alone in the field – she will place the child under the tree and start working again. No pain, nothing whatsoever: they have not heard about the pain that every civilized woman suffers, and because they have not heard of it, they don’t suffer it. Civilized women suffer very much: the more civilized a country, the more is the suffering. In fact, a Western woman thinks continuously for nine months, “The day is coming, the day is coming, doomsday is coming.” And she goes on hypnotizing and hypnotizing and hypnotizing herself. Then, of course, it comes. You create it. Nine months is a long hypnosis, and by and by the energy builds up and then the pain, then the tremendous pain.You may not have heard, but in the Amazon there exists a tribe in which not only the woman suffers from the birth pain, but the husband suffers it also. “The husband?” you will say. Yes, for centuries in that tribe the idea has remained prevalent. It seems very logical too, and very socialistic. I think the women’s lib women will agree to it. Why should only women suffer? Why shouldn’t there be equality? So when a child is born, the woman lies on one cot and the husband lies on another cot, and they both suffer! Of course when a man suffers, he suffers more. He is more vigorous and screams more and shouts more and swears more. He defeats the woman! You might think that he is simply pretending – but you would be wrong; he is not pretending; it really happens. Doctors have gone there to observe, and they have examined the bodies – real cramps and pain in the man’s body; it really happens. Because for centuries they have been living with the idea that the child belongs to both, so naturally both have to suffer.When people started coming from outside to that tribe and telling them, “Now, this is foolish; in our societies husbands have never suffered!” They could not believe it. They said, “How can it be possible? It cannot be!” It looked as absurd to them as they look absurd to us. If you go to Bastar, and you tell them “Our women suffer very much,” they would laugh. They say, “This is foolish. There is no pain at all.”In a few Western countries, particularly in France, painless birth is being rediscovered. A few doctors are working, and thousands of children have been given birth without any pain. But again the hypnosis, the idea has to be put deep into the woman that there is going to be no pain. Once the idea settles there, there is no pain. You live in your self-created world.Marquis Wen of Wei heard of it and questioned Tzu Hsia, a well-known, very well-known, learned man. “What sort of man was that?”“According to what I have heard my master say, the man who is in harmony is absolutely the same as other things and no thing succeeds in wounding or obstructing him.”This man, Tzu Hsia, is a scholar, a pundit. He has heard – he says, “I have heard my master say that when a man is in deep harmony with nature, nothing obstructs him, nothing harms him, nothing wounds him. Harmony is protection.”“To pass through metal and stone, and tread through water and fire are all possible.”“Why don’t you do it yourself?” asked Marquis Wen.Naturally, when you know, why don’t you do it yourself?“I am not yet capable of cutting open my heart and throwing away the knowledge in it.”That’s the only barrier. The man was a pundit, but must have been a sincere and honest man. He didn’t defend his knowledge, he accepted his ignorance. He said, “I am not a man of knowing – just a man of knowledge. I have heard people say it; I have been close to people who know, but I don’t know myself. I only know about these things.”“However, I can tell you all you want to know about it.”“But I don’t know exactly what it is. I know about it – I have all the information possible, I have gathered all the information – but as far as I am concerned, I have not yet been able to throw away the knowledge in my heart, hence I am not in harmony.”Knowledge is disharmony with existence. To know about, is to miss knowing. To be burdened with knowledge is to be far away from reality. “I am not yet capable of cutting open my heart…”The other day somebody asked, “Why is my heart empty?” The heart is empty because your head is too full. Make the head empty; your heart will become full; it is the same energy. If it gets involved with the head, the heart remains empty. If it is not involved with the head, it falls into the heart. And only when your heart is full, are you full. Only when your heart is full do you flower, you bloom.“Why doesn’t your master do it?” asked Marquis Wen.“My master is one who, though able to do it, is able not to do it.”That is the pinnacle of a miraculous man. To do a miracle is great, but not great enough. To do a miracle is still to be in the world of the ego. The very idea of doing it means that you are still separate from reality. A real greatness is so ordinary that it claims nothing; it is so ordinary that it never tries to prove anything.“My master is one who, though able to do it, is able not to do it.” This is the Taoist concept of the real master: real masters have never done miracles.In the West, Christians go on trying to prove that Jesus did miracles. If you ask Taoists, Buddhists, they will laugh. They will say these people are insulting Jesus. If it is true that he did miracles, it simply proves that he was not a real master – Buddha never did any miracles. Are they simply fantasizing, creating lies around Jesus? No, sometimes miracles happen around a master, that is possible but he never does them. Miracles may have happened around Jesus, that is possible, but he has not done them. He goes on repeating that again and again.A woman came. She touched the garment of Jesus and she was healed. He looked back and the woman was very thankful and she said, “I am very grateful. You healed me.” And he said, “Don’t say such a thing. Your faith has healed you.” He’s tremendously true. It is not the garment of Jesus that has healed, “It is your faith.” It is not that Jesus has done anything, it is your own faith that has done something to you.No, in the East we have never claimed miracles. And if somebody in the East claims that he is doing miracles, that simply shows that the East is losing its Easternness, its great heights; it is coming to the marketplace, to the very ordinary, to the businesslike world where claims are significant.No…“My master is one who, though able to do it, is able not to do it.”Marquis Wen was delighted with the answer.The answer was beautiful – he was delighted. Of course to be delighted is not to be enlightened. It was just a scholarly answer from a man who himself did not know anything, who only “knew about.” Yes, the answer delighted, but if it had come from a man of knowing it would have made him enlightened.Delight is just entertainment. It is good to listen to great truths, but there is nothing of value. Just listening to great truths is not of much value unless you listen so tremendously, so totally, that it becomes a transformation, that you become enlightened through it.It depends on two things. First: there should be a man who has, himself, known through experience. Then there should be somebody who is ready to receive it with an open heart. Wherever this rare opportunity arises – that a man is there who knows, who really knows, not through knowledge, but through his experience, and there is a disciple, a receiving open heart – wherever this rare opportunity arises, there is great lightening, enlightenment.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,The pundit in today's story – was he not also a beautiful Taoist? Perhaps not reached the ocean, but on the way?He can be called a Taoist, but not a man of Tao. A Taoist in the sense that he believes that Tao is true, but not a man of Tao because his belief is unfounded in experience. It is not his own experience, it is not his own existential understanding. It is still knowledge; it is not knowing. To be a Taoist is easy, it is very cheap: you can always borrow knowledge. To be a man of Tao is arduous, it needs guts.Sometimes you may be more impressed by a Taoist than a man of Tao because the Taoist is understandable by your intellect. He has some affinity with you; he talks the same logic and the same language that you can understand. To understand the man of Tao may be difficult because there is no bridge yet between you and him. He exists in a very transcendental world, in a totally different reality. He is part of a separate reality. If he is right, you are totally wrong. The Taoist can be right and he does not make you feel that you are totally wrong. The Taoist is in tune with you, not in tune with Tao. That is the meaning of the end of the story: “The marquis was delighted…” But not enlightened.The answer was really beautiful, delicious, but it has no nourishment in it. You can enjoy it, but you cannot live on it. It is a meaningless, substance-less thing. It is an empty gesture – however beautiful, it is still an empty gesture. It is impotent, it is not creative. Yes, it can entertain you – but that’s all.So I can concede that the pundit, the scholar was a Taoist. He believed in the philosophy of Tao, but it was a philosophy, a dogma to be believed in. He has not lived it, he has not tasted it; it is not yet his heart. It has not happened to him. It is like a blind man who has heard many things about light, colors, rainbows, flowers, the sun, the moon, the stars, and has become very clever in talking about those things. Maybe whatsoever he says is right, but still, how can it be right? A blind man can understand all that is written about light and he can reply to your questions about light perfectly – maybe he uses the exact words that a man with eyes uses. As far as words are concerned, they are similar, but as far as experience is concerned, one has experienced, the other has not. This has to be remembered. The thing that he said, “My master can do these miracles, and he has become capable of doing them, but he is also capable of not doing them.” This is a tremendous saying, a great statement, but it is coming from a blind man.If it comes from Lieh Tzu, it will have tremendous significance. If it comes from Buddha, it will have tremendous significance. But it comes from a pundit – it is meaningless. Remember always that it is much more important who has made the statement, than the statement itself. You can repeat the words of Jesus exactly, but you are repeating them. Your parrot can be taught to repeat the exact words of Jesus, Mohammed. But what will it mean? The parrot repeating is an empty gesture, there is nothing inside the parrot; it is mechanical. But when Jesus said those words they were coming from his heart; he was not repeating anything, he was not imitating – they were authentic, they were true.Truth means that which comes from your own experience, arises out of your own experience; is part of your life, part of your blood, bones, marrow, circulates in your being; you breathe it in and out. Then, remember always, the statement in itself does not mean much, but from whom it comes means very much. Sometimes you will be surprised listening to me: if Lao Tzu says the thing, I will support it; if Confucius says it, I will criticize it. The same thing! The same words! If Socrates says it, I will support it, if Aristotle says it, I will condemn it. You will be surprised, you will think that this is not fair, but try to understand me. I look into the person, not into the statement. I look into the being, into the experience, into knowing. What a person says is not very relevant. What he is – the being – is relevant, not his knowledge.So, I can concede that he was a Taoist and beautiful too, but all imitation; no real diamonds – artificial. Artificial diamonds also can be beautiful – at least, they can appear beautiful. Flowers of plastic can look beautiful, they can be made in such a way that they can attract you, but they are not real. There is deception, fraud.The second thing: you asked, “Perhaps not reached the ocean, but on the way?” Then you have not understood me, whatsoever I have been saying here. Tao is a pathless path. What does it mean? It means that the way and the goal are one; if you are on the way, you have arrived. That is the beauty of Tao: if you are on the way, you have arrived home because the way and the goal are not separate, the journey and the destiny are not separate. The journey itself is the goal. That is the meaning of the word Tao. Tao means the way: the way itself is the goal. The means is the end, there is no other end.Whatsoever you say looks logical, “The man may be just on the way – may not be yet enlightened, but on the way.” What do you mean? Does it mean “a little bit enlightened?” “partially enlightened?” on the way – moving toward it? There is no possibility of any partial enlightenment: either it is, or it is not. Either you have arrived, or you have not arrived, and between these two there is none. There are no midway stations. A man on the way means a man in the ocean – drowned, arrived, disappeared. As far as Tao is concerned, the way and the goal cannot be separated, they are not separate. That’s the beauty of Tao and the great understanding of Tao. Once there is a goal, then you will become tense because then there will arise the desire and the ambition to achieve it. Then you will have to prepare for it: time will be needed; methods, techniques will be needed; virtue, character, will be needed. And you will always be anxious and afraid whether you are going in the right direction or not. Will you be able to make it or not? Are you going to miss it again? The fear, the anxiety, the trembling will continue because there is a future with the goal. When the way is the goal, there is no future – future is simply destroyed, time disappears.There is no tomorrow.Herenow everything is available, there is no need to postpone. These are the tricks of the mind which wants to postpone, the mind which wants to postpone divides the way and the goal. And then the way is also divided into many milestones, into many stages: the first, the second, the third, one goes on dividing. Then there is much space for your mind to be projected into. Tao leaves no space for the mind. It utterly destroys the mind because there is no goal. Just think about it, contemplate it: if there is no goal, how can the mind exist? Then this moment is all there is; this is all. Desire is not possible because there is no tomorrow and there is no goal. Nothing to be achieved – then where will you go? Where will you escape to? Where will you hide? The goal gives you an escape. You can hope. “Today I am not right, tomorrow I will be right. Today I am just a beginner, tomorrow I will become an adept.” But if there is no goal, nowhere to reach, nowhere to arrive, then all tricks, devices, have been taken away; all props have been removed. Then you are left with this moment. This moment is all, and in this very moment there is liberation.Mind liberated from desire is what liberation is. Mind no longer in desire is what enlightenment is. Mind no longer projecting, hoping, is what coming to the ocean is. Please don’t divide. Look at life as an undivided whole, as one whole.The second question:Osho,I understand what you say about so-called knowledge, but it still persists.Just intellectually understanding what I say, knowledge is not going to leave you. Just intellectual understanding is not going to help. In fact, if you only understand what I am saying intellectually, this will also become another knowledge – this will add to the knowledge that is already there; it will pile up more knowledge.The foolish person, listening to me, will become more knowledgeable. The wise person will drop all his knowledge and will become ignorant; the foolish person will accumulate knowledge and will become more knowledgeable – it depends on you. Remember, just by understanding a thing intellectually… Of course, if you have understood totally then there is no problem, then in that very understanding the problem disappears – if the problem remains, it simply shows that it is only an intellectual understanding. Logically you feel, “I am right,” but who lives through logic? Nobody lives through logic. Logically you know anger is wrong, but when somebody insults you then all logic is forgotten, then the anger comes up. Each time you have fallen in love, you have gone beyond logic. And whenever a love disappears, you again decide: “It was foolish, it was madness. Never again! The frustration of it, the hell of it!” You are tired of it. But within only a few days you forget all about that frustration, the hell that the other had created. Again a face starts looking beautiful, again a person starts looking heavenly, again you are falling in the trap – logic is forgotten. Who lives according to logic?When you understand me logically it is not going to help. Logic never transforms anybody because you are dominated by the unconscious, not by the conscious. When you understand that knowledge is futile, that it is just on the surface… But deep down knowledge is a great investment. It is through knowledge that you are important, it is through knowledge that you are somebody, it is through knowledge that your ego is fulfilled and strengthened, it is through knowledge that you can feel superior – superior to those who don’t know – it is through knowledge that you have the upper hand. These are all the investments in it. Unless you drop these investments, knowledge is not going to be dropped.Habits die hard. And the habit of knowledge is the ancientmost habit that man has carried; it is the most dangerous habit. Smoking or drinking or gambling is nothing. This is the most dangerous habit because it prevents you from seeing; it prevents you from coming into deeper contact with reality. It is the greatest barrier: the Wall of China. But habits die hard, remember it, and it is the longest, the most ancient habit.An old gambler was talking to his son as he lay dying.“Son, promise me you’ll never touch a card. Above all, never play blackjack. It’s a game that will cost you a fortune, waste your time, ruin your health and cause you untold moments of anguish and pain. Do you promise me, here on my dying bed, with the merciful angel of death hovering about and Almighty God as a witness, that you will never play blackjack, that you will never touch playing cards?”“Yes, Father,” muttered the pious son.“And remember,” shouted the old gambler, “if you must play, always be sure to take the bank!”Old habit: a gambler is a gambler. What he is saying does not matter much, deep inside he is the old gambler. All this great sermon against gambling is just superficial. Deep down, from the unconscious, arises this statement: “And remember,” shouted the old gambler, “if you must play, always be sure to take the bank!”You listen to me; you listen to these murmurs, whisperings, of Tao. For a moment, a small light burns on the surface of your consciousness, it lights a little, but it is a very flickering light – it comes and it goes. In that flickering light, for a moment, you seem to understand. But from your deep unconscious will come the great storm and will blow out this small light very easily.I have heard about a great gentleman…The area had been hit with an epidemic of robberies perpetrated by the notorious gentleman burglar. One night Sadie woke and shook Hymie. “Hymie, there’s a burglar in the house,” she said.“There is not,” Hymie said sleepily. “Go back to sleep, stupid.”Just then a man sprang from inside a closet. “There is too,” he declared. “Now apologize to the lady.”A gentleman is a gentleman – even if he becomes a burglar…Just then a man sprang from inside a closet. “There is too,” he declared. “Now apologize to the lady.”Habits die hard. They continue deep down.Up in Dartmouth, an English professor suddenly surprised another colleague writing on a washroom wall. “Elmer!” gasped the professor. “Don’t tell me you’re the kind of fellow who writes on washroom walls!”“Stuff and nonsense,” huffed the professor. “I’m merely correcting the grammar.”Old habits of correcting – must have found some grammatical mistakes there.A miser, a very famous miser…The big crowd gathered on Coney Island beach and watched the man apply artificial respiration to the heiress he’d just rescued. Her parents broke through the crowds, joyful at seeing their daughter alive and well. “Mama,” said the old man, “give that fella a dollar. He saved her life.”“But, Papa,” protested the girl, “I was half dead.”“All right,” papa said. “Give him fifty cents.”Watch what comes from inside you. Be more watchful about it – it shows deep-rooted habits, and you will have to become aware of all those habits. I am not saying fight with them, no. I am not saying drop them with effort, no. Anything dropped by effort will come back and will come back with a vengeance. Never fight with any old habit because fighting will create a split: you will be fighting with yourself. Simply understand. Become more watchful.Now you have understood one thing – that knowledge is futile. It is just a glimpse. Now carry this glimpse deep into your unconscious. Watch. Whenever you start showing your knowledge, watch why. What are the deep motives? Look into the motives and you will find motives behind motives behind motives. When you have come to know all the motives and all the investments, when you have searched all around in your being, suddenly you will see that through understanding habits disappear. No need to fight; no need to make any effort – otherwise this small glimpse that comes sometimes will never be translated into your life.There are two types of people: one who, once he understands something intellectually, starts thinking he has understood. He is befooling himself. Sooner or later situations will show that the understanding was just skin-deep. Scratch a little and the reality comes up. Then there is a second type of person who is not befooled by this small glimpse. It is a small window, significant, but not enough in itself to create change. It has to be translated deeply into your being, but translation means that you have to watch all the things that are against this glimpse. And watch without judging, watch without conflicting with them. Simply watch and see what is what. Once you have known who is who and what is what inside you, things will start changing; and that change will be a surprise to you because you have not done anything to produce that change directly. It comes as a by-product, as a consequence of understanding.The third question:Osho,This ashram seems to me to be like an oasis in a desert, and in the middle of the oasis is an unfathomable well of pure crystal water, and the well is Osho. But round the edge of the oasis, under the palm trees, some very strange games are being played. I know it is good for children to play games; it can help them to grow up and widen their understanding of this world. But when these games get out of hand, they may easily do more harm than good, and I believe this is dangerous. And, too, thirsty pilgrims coming across the desert in search of water may see these strange games first and depart bewildered with their thirst still unquenched. I tell myself, “Judge that ye be not judged,” but I am a little troubled! Please comment.First: whatsoever is happening here is certainly a strange game, and whatsoever is happening on the periphery, “under the palm trees,” is part of me. Remember that always: whatsoever is going on here I am perfectly aware of. You need not be troubled about it. Nothing is out of my hand, whatsoever is going on. I give enough rope: it seems everything is completely free – it is not so – just that the rope is long enough. So it is not going to come to any dangerous end. Danger happens only when there is repression; with freedom there is no danger.Yes, total freedom cannot be given to children – not that total freedom is dangerous, no; freedom is never dangerous, but children are unaware. Total freedom to them may become suicidal. Hence the long rope, but still the rope is in my hands. The moment I see a person becomes mature, then that rope is completely broken, thrown away; then he has total freedom. But to make a person capable of total freedom, freedom has to be given to him, otherwise how is he going to practice? To make a person really capable of being himself one has to allow many things, but whatsoever is allowed is very much knowingly allowed.It can appear to a newcomer that these games are dangerous, but you can trust me. These games cannot be dangerous; in fact, these games will help you to go beyond all dangers. The real danger comes from repression, never from freedom. If you are repressing something, one day or other, it is going to explode. And that will be the day of your madness or your suicide, or you will commit a murder or something. Humanity has trusted the technique of repression too much; hence the whole earth has become almost a madhouse. This madness that has gathered has become accumulated into the human mind and has to be released, hence all the so-called dangerous games being played around here. The madness has to be released slowly, methodically.Somebody coming from the outside for the first time may start wondering: “What is happening here?” In fact, never has such an ashram existed. Sometimes efforts have been made on a very small scale – some Sufi schools have existed, but on a very small scale. Twenty, twenty-five persons working in a closed world; nobody knowing what is happening there. Now this is an open university. Almost all of the world is participating in it; you can find every nationality, every race, every religion represented. It is an open phenomenon. Never has freedom been experimented with on such a big scale.On the gate of a Sufi house in Esfahan, Iran, these words are inscribed from Khwaja Esmat Bokharai. Listen to these words:This is no Kaaba for idiots to circleNor a mosque for the impolite to clamor inThis is a temple of total ruin.Inside are the drunk, from pre-eternity to the Judgment Day,Gone from themselves.That school of Khwaja Esmat Bokharai was a small school. What was happening inside nobody knew from the outside. Great things were going on there; great games were being played, but it was a very secret school. Such secret schools have always existed. Jesus was trained in just such a small school called the Essenes. In Zen monasteries, in Taoist monasteries in China, small groups have always existed, working together in deep secrecy and privacy.For the first time, all secrecy is thrown away and all privacy is thrown out – for this reason: now there is no time for secrecy left. Humanity is at such a dangerous crossroads that it is very possible that within a century humanity may not exist at all. In the past there was enough time; the game of secrecy could be played, but now it cannot be played. All the secrets have to be made available to each and every one, hence I am taking all secrecy away; and as you become ready, the more I will drop other secrets. My effort will be to bring you the truth, however dangerous it is, as naked as possible because all of humanity is at stake. If man cannot be taught how to be free and yet sane, then there is no future for humanity. To teach man how to be free and sane we will have to devise all sorts of mad games. Through those mad games the accumulated madness will have to be acted out through catharses, thrown out. Hence you see so many games going around here. But nothing is beyond my vision.I may not come out. I never come out of my room. I never go to the ashram to see what is happening because there is no need for me to go there physically. Sitting in my room, I am watching everything that is going on. I am perfectly aware; you need not be troubled. I know you have asked out of love.It is from a new sannyasin, an old lady, Gramya. She is new, old, has much love in her heart. She must have become a little worried about what is going on. No need to be worried. You can rest at ease.People who sometimes may come and become frightened and go back are not the people for me. So that is not a loss. If you are really thirsty in the desert, you will not bother with what games are going on around the oasis, you will rush into the oasis. If you are not thirsty, only then will you go back. It is so simple, it is so arithmetical. If you are really thirsty, who bothers? Just think about yourself. For days together you have been thirsty in the desert and you have not seen even a single tree, no greenery, all over a burning fire. And then, one day, you come across an oasis with beautiful palm trees. You come close, but under the palm trees mad games are going on. Will you bother about them? You will say, “I will see that later on. First let me go to the water. First let me drink my fill to my heart’s desire, then I will see what is going on.” In fact, you will not even be able to see what is going on if you are thirsty – you will see only water; you will hear the sound of running water. You will not be able to see because we only see that which we are interested in. If you are interested in water, you will see water. You will let those mad people dance and sing and do whatsoever they are doing. You will say, “First let me quench my thirst, then I will also rest under a palm tree and see what is going on here” – but not before that. And if you find that somebody becomes frightened and goes away from the oasis, then only one thing is certain – he was not thirsty. He may be thinking about the oasis, it may have been a curiosity, but it was not thirst that brought him here.He is not the man for me, or the woman.This is no Kaaba for idiots to circleNor a mosque for the impolite to clamor inThis is a temple of total ruin.Unless you are ready to die, it is better you should not be here because only through your death is resurrection. Unless you are ready to be reborn, don’t waste my time.This is a temple of total ruin.Inside are the drunk, from pre-eternity to the Judgment Day,Gone from themselves.Only those who are ready to drop their egos and selves, their judgments, their rationality, their intellects, only those who are ready to cut their heads off will be able to understand what is going on here. I am interested only in such mad people.My whole work here is not for the curious, but for the thirsty, so don’t be worried about those people who come to the gate and go away. More and more mad games will happen around here – more and more. And more and more will it become impossible for those who come out of curiosity, out of the desire to know a little bit about God, religion; for those who come in search of theories and knowledge, or in search of morality and character. No, I am not for them.It “…is a temple of total ruin,” but only when you die totally are you born as a new being, as a new man, as a new energy. Unburdened from the past, discontinuous with the past, you become as fresh as dewdrops in the morning, and only then do you know what God is. Only in that virgin freshness do you know what God is, only in that innocence, primal innocence, do you come in contact with reality.Gramya has asked, “I tell myself ‘Judge that ye be not judged,’ but I am a little troubled!” She has quoted wrongly. Jesus said, “Judge ye not that ye be not judged.” Judge ye not that ye be not judged. She says, “Judge that ye be not judged.” No, that is not the exact statement – in fact, it is just the opposite of what Jesus says. And she has put it in inverted commas, that’s why. Otherwise there is no problem. Remember the words are “Judge ye not that ye be not judged.” A person who goes on judging is in danger because out of all judgments a subtle ego is created.Gramya is very simple and innocent, that’s why I have given her the name Gramya. It means “so simple,” like a villager. Gramya means one who comes from a very primitive village, not knowledgeable – simple, innocent, primitive. She is, and that’s why she feels troubled because this judgment is creating a subtle ego. “Judge ye not…” There is no need to judge. Whatsoever is happening, accept it. Whatsoever people are doing, they have to go through it. There is a method to all this madness around here; it is very methodical. You just keep quite silent, nonjudging.It happened once…A great Sufi mystic, Jalaluddin Rumi, used to live with his one hundred disciples in a monastery. Few travelers came. The monastery was far away from any town, far away even from any roads, but people became interested – curious people can go anywhere: they go to the moon. Curious people are curious people, they can go anywhere. They became curious and they went there. It was far away from towns, off the road, but they took all the trouble of the journey and they reached the place in the desert. The doors were not closed – because Rumi had never thought that anybody would come so far away – so they could watch what was happening inside. Exactly this scene that you see here…Somebody was laughing loudly, madly, somebody was dancing, somebody was singing, somebody was standing on his head, people were doing a thousand and one things – and Jalaluddin Rumi was just sitting in the middle of it all, silent, with closed eyes. So they thought, “What is going on? Have these people gone mad? What are these lunatics doing here? And what is this man doing? He is simply sitting, with closed eyes. He should stop these people – it is dangerous; they may go beyond the limit.” And somebody was raving like a maniac, and somebody was hitting the wall, and everything was going on.They became very afraid. They became so afraid that they went away. But after a year curiosity took possession of them again and they thought, “We should go and see what is happening now. Things must have gotten worse. Either they must have killed that Jalaluddin Rumi by now because he was just sitting in the middle of it, or they must have committed suicide; murders must have happened!” So they went again. They could not believe it: they were all sitting silently. Only Jalaluddin Rumi was dancing. “So what has happened? Things have completely changed.” They thought, “It seems this man has taken the madness of all, so that they have become silent and he is dancing.” But this was a worse situation because they thought at least he had been sane, now he also was insane. But they took pity on the man. They thought, “It is natural – just to be amidst these mad people for so long, he must have gone out of his mind.”They went away. But after a year curiosity again took possession of them and they thought, “We must go and see what is happening now.” So they went there. There was nobody, only Jalaluddin Rumi was sitting alone – the whole group had disappeared. Now it was too much. What happened? They became too curious. They went to Jalaluddin Rumi and they said, “We want to ask what happened? Where are those nuts? What happened to them? And what are you doing sitting here alone?”Jalaluddin Rumi said, “The work is done. Now they have gone into the wider world to find other nuts – to help them. The work is complete.”Then they asked, “Why were you dancing last year when we came?”He said, “I was dancing because I was so happy that my disciples had achieved. It was dangerous, it was very arduous, to release their madness accumulated down the centuries, but they were really capable people. I was happy, that’s why I was dancing. Now they have gone to find other mad people. Now they will make a hundred monasteries all around the earth.”Exactly. When you come new to this ashram, it does not appear like an ashram. People have very different notions about an ashram. If you go to other ashrams, the first thing: you will never find young people there. You will always find old, dead people because people go to the ashrams only when they think that now one foot is already in the grave. So, to bribe God, they go to the ashrams. Of course they are dull, dead; they sit there with their malas, turning beads – that’s all they can do. All their energy has gone. In fact, nothing is left. They are no longer rivers of energy but dry stream beds, drying up every moment. They are already too late. And their religion is not true, cannot be true because it has not come out of understanding, it has come out of fear. Now death is approaching…When a man becomes religious because of life, then it is true religion. When a man becomes religious because of death, it is an untrue religion. Here you will find young people. Even if you find old people you will find them very young. In fact, to be old and here with my young sannyasins is almost impossible. If some old person can tolerate these people, that simply means he is young, spiritually young. He has the quality of youth, he is not yet dead. Maybe the body is getting old, but his spirit is young, adventurous, courageous.These people are here because of life problems. They want to solve their living problems; they want to solve the mystery of life, not the fear of death. These people are here not in search of any God; they are here in search of their own being. They are here to know what truth is; not a truth of the scriptures, but something existential that they feel in love, that they feel in happiness, that they feel in sadness – that they can touch, that they can live, go into, feel, enjoy, dance about. They are in search of a celebration; they are in search of a dance. They are in search of the song that they feel is there in their heart, but they are not capable of singing it. They have not been able to find the way to allow this song to be expressed, to become manifest. They are in search of the fragrance that they are carrying, but they have lost contact with their source and they want to release this fragrance to the winds.This is a totally different phenomenon. For these people, religion means simply to be more alive. These people are not serious people because seriousness is a disease. These people are in search of delight. Naturally, the whole approach is different, and I am interested only in these people. They will be coming by the thousands soon. They will come from all over the world; they will have to come. Whosoever is in search of celebration will have to come.Of course, the whole approach is so diametrically opposite. I am not against love: I am all for love. If you go into the ashrams, the first thing they will start destroying is your love: they will teach you brahmacharya, celibacy. I know the beauty of brahmacharya, but that beautiful brahmacharya comes only out of deep experience of love – never otherwise. It is not an imposition, it is a flowering. Loving the other, by and by you are thrown back again and again to yourself. One day you realize that the search for the other outside is meaningless; it is doomed from the very beginning. Loving the other, looking into the eyes of the other, you are reflected again and again. Through the other is self-knowledge: the other functions as a mirror. Once you have realized it, you start settling into your aloneness. And a celibacy arises which is not a practiced celibacy, which is not afraid of love, which is not afraid of relationship, which is not afraid of the woman or the man, which is not afraid at all, which is so confident, so strong, so well-rooted…In fact, a well-rooted tree waits for the storm to come because that will be a challenge, and when the storm comes, the well-rooted tree knows how well-rooted it is and feels the strength, the vitality. The storm is not the enemy but a challenge which takes away all dust, which takes away all frustration, which takes away all sadness. And the tree starts celebrating again, feels alive to the very roots, becomes young again. Each storm makes the tree younger, again and again young.A celibacy that comes out of fear is escapism; you become weak. You become so weak that even seeing a picture of a woman, and you become afraid. Even the idea of a woman, and you start trembling. This is stupidity; enough of it! Humanity has suffered enough of it. This chapter has to be closed completely.You have been taught and told in other ashrams down the centuries to enforce a character upon yourself. No, I am not doing that here. I would like a character to arise in you, but not a structure. A structure is an armor; a structure is a dead scaffold around you – it kills, it imprisons you. You are already imprisoned. My whole effort is to help you to get out of the prison.Just the other day I was reading a story…The lawyer of a man who was imprisoned for life came to see him. The man asked, “What are the prospects of my getting free again?” and the lawyer said, “I appealed to the District Court and the case has been filed, the appeal has been rejected. And then I appealed to the High Court, the case has been filed, the appeal has been rejected. Then I appealed to the Supreme Court and the case has been filed and the appeal has been rejected.”Desperate, the prisoner said, “Then do something else! What else do you have to do? Where can you appeal?”The lawyer said, “Now there is no other court, they have all filed your appeal. So the last thing is this: I have brought this for you.” He opened his bag and gave the prisoner a metal file and said, “Now you can start filing the bars; I have done enough of filing, myself,” he said, “now the last recourse is for you to file the bars!”My whole effort here is to help you to file the bars, and sometimes those bars are exactly the thing you call character, morality, sanity, responsibility, duty – duty to the society, to God, to the church, to the nation. These are your bars in which you are caged like an animal. So, naturally, the effort to make you free will create many sorts of absurd things around here – absurd because they are not expected of you; absurd because the society has completely forgotten about them. They have to be brought into consciousness, hence Gramya’s fear. She is innocent, compassionate, a very loving old lady, but she had to understand what is happening here.The work that is being done here is very invaluable work. It is not cheap. It is not even valuable. Value is not the name for it.I have heard…“Listen, Sol, what a bargain! If you go to Radio City before noon, it is only a quarter. Such a gorgeous place. Chandeliers, rugs, plush seats, full-length feature movie, short subjects, newsreels, animated cartoons, fifty beautiful girls, a one hundred and ten piece orchestra…”“All for the same quarter?”“All for the same quarter. And what is more, when you leave the movie you can go upstairs and see a real art show.”“All for the same quarter?”“All for the same quarter. And then they give you a delicious cup of coffee.”“All for the same quarter?”“All for the same quarter.”“Hmmm… Must be an awful cheap brand of coffee.”The churches, the temples, the mosques are giving you a very cheap brand of religion at no cost at all. You don’t really have to pay – it is cheap; naturally, at the most a consolation, not a revolution. Here, what we are doing is a revolution, it is not a consolation.Man has come to a point where evolution has stopped, now only revolution can help. Evolution means unconscious growth – it has come to a point beyond which it cannot go.Can’t you see that for centuries man has remained the same? Everything else has changed: the bullock cart has become the jet, but man? The man who was driving the bullock cart and the man who is piloting the jet plane are not different at all – exactly the same. A sword has become a hydrogen bomb, but the man who was wielding the sword is not different from the man who is holding the key for the hydrogen bomb. Everything has changed except man. If a man from the times of the Vedas became alive again, he would not be able to understand anything except man. He would not be able to understand what these trains are, these cars, these airplanes, the radio, the TV, the electricity, the movie – no, he would not be able to understand anything except man. Man would be absolutely understandable. There is no difference at all: as jealous as ever, as mad as ever, as angry as ever, as violent as ever. What does this mean? It means that man has attained to the last stage that can be attained through unconscious evolution. Now everything is stuck.People come to me and they say, “We are feeling very stuck.” It is not an individual problem; all of humanity is stuck, everybody is stuck. A cul-de-sac has come. Now evolution is not going to help. You will have to take the reins in your own hands – that’s what revolution is. And when you start evolving on your own, naturally you are taking great risks; it is a great adventure. And it is costly.So this is my suggestion for Gramya: please, don’t get troubled. If you start getting troubled, one trouble will create another trouble; it is a vicious circle. So, from the very beginning, be alert.A little old lady entered a suburban home and found a lad of four in sole possession playing with his toy train. “You don’t know me,” the old lady said, “but I’m your grandmother – that is, on your father’s side.”Without looking up from his train, the lad replied “Well, I can tell you right now – you’re on the wrong side.”To Gramya I have to say this, that if you start judging, from the very beginning you are on the wrong side. Drop it from the very beginning; forget about it. Start enjoying. Forget what others are doing. Do what you always wanted to do and have not done yet. You wanted to dance? Dance. You wanted to sing? Sing. Nowhere can you get so much freedom as is possible here, and nobody will make any judgment about it; nobody is going to interfere. That’s how an ashram should be – a freedom, a non-interference. Nobody should interfere; unless you start interfering in their life, nobody should take any notice of you. You do your thing, they are doing their thing. By and by understanding will arise: understanding arises only when you are, exactly, doing your own thing.One more anecdote for Gramya…Grandma had already extended her unannounced visit for three weeks, and her daughter-in-law and son were slowly going crazy. Finally they concocted a scheme: they would fake a fight and the one with whom she sided would tell her the other was so insulted that she’d simply have to leave.So that night the wife deliberately spilled a plate of hot soup down her husband’s neck. “You’re the clumsiest, ugliest, stupidest clunk I’ve ever seen,” roared the husband.“And you,” shot back the wife, “are the laziest, demandingest, meanest poop in the world. What do you say, Grandma?”“I’m not saying a word,” replied Grandma cheerfully. “I’m staying two more months.”Keep that attitude. If you want to stay with these people, don’t say a single thing, just be cheerful.The fourth question:Osho,Krishnamurti is vehemently against gurus, meditation techniques and “all the rest of it.” Apparently you are a guru and giving meditation techniques. To me, you and Krishnamurti are both showing the truth, each one in his own way. What is your feeling about Krishnamurti's objections concerning guruhood?I enjoy them, and especially so when they come from such a big guru. And remember, he is not “vehemently against,” whatever the appearance; he cannot be vehemently against anything. Yes, sometimes he almost looks in a rage – that is all acting. Don’t pay much attention to it. I know him better than you: that is his game, and he has to at least act in that way because that is the path I call via negativa.On the negative path nothing is to be allowed. No has to be said to everything: no to methods, no to gurus, no to scriptures; no to everything. No is the method. Denying all methods is the method of the path I call via negativa. No guru is needed – but even to say this, a guru is needed. He has been saying this for fifty years, continuously. In fact, nobody has been working as hard as he has been working. Even in his old age he is running from one town to another, from one country to another, around the world, telling people that the guru is not needed. Why do you bother at all? People are so stupid that even this has to be said, so what about other things? Even to make them alert that the guru is not needed, a guru is needed. To tell them that methods are not needed, that techniques are not needed, somebody is needed to tell them. People are so unaware. They have to be guided. Even on the negative path they will not move on their own.Once a Krishnamurtite came to me and he said, “I don’t believe in any techniques, and I don’t believe that anybody can be a guru to anybody else, and I don’t believe in any meditation methods.” I said, “Perfectly good. Just tell me one thing. Could you have discovered this without Krishnamurti telling you?”He became sad. He pondered over it, and he said, “It would have been difficult for me to have come upon it by myself.”Then I said, “What is the point of saying all this? Even to say this somebody was needed, a guru was needed.”What is a guru? You are unaware, so somebody is needed to make you aware – that’s all that a guru is about. You are so fast asleep that you need the alarm, that’s all. If you can wake up on your own, good – at least I will be very happy if you can wake up on your own: you will save me much trouble. But it has never happened.Krishnamurti is the purest example of the negative path, as pure as Lao Tzu, as pure as Ashtavakra. A very pure statement, but pure statements become very difficult because you cannot understand them; they are so far out. You can only misunderstand them. So he has been misunderstood. He is the most misunderstood man. Nobody understands him, not even those who say that they follow him. They also cannot understand because he says, “No following is allowed. You should not become imitators.” And they have become imitators. He says, “You cannot learn from me.” And they have learned from him. That’s why he sometimes beats his own head.Again and again, people ask the same question. He went on saying for one hour that there is no method, and then a gentleman, a very old gentleman who may have been hearing him for forty years – is as old as he himself – and was nodding continuously, “You are right. You are right,” then stands up and says, “How to attain it?” How? Naturally he becomes very vehement. For one hour he has been telling you that there is no method, now you again ask how. “How” means that you ask for the method: “how” means method.Nobody understands him because people are in such deep sleep that they cannot understand such a superb statement. They have to be led slowly, persuaded slowly; by and by they gather courage, in small steps they gather courage. It is his compassion, but it has not worked. He has worked hard, but whatsoever he has been working at has not given any result. That’s why, as he becomes older, he becomes more and more vehement because he can see that his whole life he has been struggling with these people, and they go on asking the same stupid questions. If they had really understood him, they would have left him.This is exactly what happened to Jalaluddin Rumi – sitting alone, and all the disciples gone. That would have happened to Krishnamurti if people had understood him. Then what is the point of coming to him, listening to him, reading his books? The guru is not possible, it cannot be taught, so what is the point of coming to him and listening to him again and again, year by year, for half a century? If you had understood, you would have said good-bye, and he would have been left alone. But no, people go on listening.My feeling is that his compassion is infinite, but it has not been of much use because he cannot see a simple thing: that the people who go on listening to him, listen to him, even pretend that they believe in him, for a wrong motive. The wrong motive is that whenever somebody says to you, “There is no need of a guru, and there is no need for a scripture – no need to follow anybody,” your ego feels very good. You feel very good: “So there is no need to surrender? Good, perfectly good.” He says, “There is no guru, no guru is needed.” You feel, “Perfectly right. So I need not become a disciple.” He denies the guru; you deny the disciplehood. It looks almost alike, but it is not.My observation has been that Krishnamurti is surrounded by the most egoistic people of this world, and the reason is because there is a safe place – no need to surrender, no need to drop your ego, no need to follow anybody. Your ego feels very strengthened and your ego feels that many rationalizations are given to you. So you protect yourself with those rationalizations. His compassion is infinite, but it has not worked. My feeling is that if a person is egoless, no guru is needed. But the paradox of life is that the only people who become interested in the teaching that “no guru is needed” are the egoists. If a person is an egoist, then the guru is a must. But the egoists never come to a person to surrender. This is the problem, the dilemma. The egoist becomes interested in the teaching of Krishnamurti and the non-egoist becomes interested in the teaching of Meher Baba.For the non-egoist there is no need for the guru because the whole need consists in canceling your ego – the guru is nothing but a cancellation of your ego. You surrender unto somebody’s feet and you say, “Now I will listen to you and I will not listen to myself. Now my will is surrendered, and your will, will be my will. Now even if you tell me to jump into the abyss I will jump without thinking about it. Now I am no longer the controller of my life. You will control it.” This is a way, just one way, to drop the ego. If the ego is there, then a guru is a must because the guru is just a device. If the ego is not there, then the guru is not needed at all. When you are ill, the medicine is needed. When you are not ill, the medicine is not needed at all.Krishnamurti is talking to ill people and telling them that the medicine is not needed. Only those people who are afraid of taking the medicine come to him, and they are the people who are most in need of medicine. If the people who surrounded Meher Baba were with Krishnamurti, there would be no trouble – much would have happened. But they never go to Krishnamurti, they go to Meher Baba. They are egoless people – they can surrender. And had the people who are surrounding Krishnamurti, gone to Meher Baba, they would have been tremendously benefited, but they never go. This is how life is – a dilemma: the ill avoid the doctor and the healthy go to the doctor.The fifth question:Osho,I am sixty-five and yet not decisive about sannyas. What have you to say about it?I will just tell you an anecdote and will not say anything.The tail gunner was being tried for dereliction of duty and the court-martial proceedings were very stern. “Tell us what you heard in the headset,” the court demanded.“I heard a squadron leader hollering, ‘Japanese planes coming in at five o’clock. Japanese planes coming in at five o’clock…’”“Then why didn’t you do something?”“Why should I? It was only four-thirty.”The sixth question:Osho,If some day it happens that there is nobody in the Chuang Tzu auditorium for the morning talk except Teertha to read the sutra, what will you do?Years ago, a circuit rider, just starting out, went to a small country church to preach. Only one farmer showed up. They sat there waiting in mutual embarrassment. Finally the young preacher put it to the farmer. “My friend,” said he, “if you took a load of hay down to the pasture for your cows, and only one cow showed up, would you feed her?”The farmer considered. “Yeah, preacher,” he finally said, “I believe I would.”The preacher took the challenge, got up, sang a few songs, passed the collection plate, preached for an hour, pronounced the benediction, and walked out with the farmer.At the door they shook hands, and the farmer said, “You know, preacher, I been thinkin’ while you was preachin’. If I took that load of hay down t’ the pasture, an’ only one cow came up, yeah, I’d feed ‘er all right, but I don’t believe I’d give ‘er the whole load!”The seventh question:Osho,Disciples need a guru, does a guru need disciples?The guru exists only because the disciple needs him. The guru does not exist for the sake of the guru himself; it is the disciple’s projection. When the disciple has understood, there is neither disciple nor guru. When the disciple is in need of understanding, there is a disciple and a guru. The guru and the disciple both exist in the mind of the disciple.It has to be understood; I exist not as far as I am concerned, I exist in your mind. You also exist in your mind. It is your need to know that projects gurudom. You start thinking of me as the master, as your master; it is part of your disciplehood. The day you will have understood and have awakened, your disciple will disappear. In the same moment the guru will also disappear.As the peak exists, so the valley exists by the side of it. When the peak disappears, the valley too has disappeared; no valley can exist without a peak. You see a big wave in the ocean. Following the wave comes a hollow wave, the valley wave, in the wake of it; they are both together. When the wave has disappeared, the hollow wave that was following it has disappeared also. Silence exists with sound. If sound disappears, silence will disappear.Silence exists between two sounds as an interval. If those two sounds disappear, the silence will disappear. There is a state of silence and there is a state beyond silence and sound both. The man who is really a master – and when I say really a master, I mean one whose presence can help disciples; not that he does anything, his presence is just a catalytic agent – in his presence things happen.When something happens to you, I don’t feel that I have done it. I am not here to do it. I simply know it has happened. You may feel grateful to me, but I know well that it is just a happening: I have not done it. You have allowed it; I have not done it, hence it has happened. It is, more basically, dependent on your allowing it. If you allow, things will happen in the presence of a master. If things happen in the presence of a master when you allow, then he is a master. That’s what I mean when I say a master; he is not a doer, but just his presence helps things to happen.He has no need, no need for the disciple; the leader has the need for the follower – that is the difference between a leader and a master. A master is not a leader. The leader cannot exist without the follower, the leader needs the follower. In fact, the leader needs the follower more than the follower needs the leader. The leader goes on persuading followers: “I am very much needed,” but he depends on the follower. A leader is a follower of the followers. He looks at the followers – what they want, and he will do that. Remember, Jesus is a master, the pope is a leader. The original Shankaracharya was a master, the shankaracharya of Puri now is a leader. Mohammed is a master, but the Maulvi is a leader.A master is one whose needs have disappeared, who himself has disappeared – where can needs cling? Needs need an ego to cling to. He has no need: whether you are there or not makes no difference.Just look at it in this way: the sun rises in the morning and the flowers open and the birds sing. If no flower opens, it does not make any difference to the sun – it will go on rising. There are millions of stars where no flower opens, there are planets where no flower opens, but the sun goes on shining. The flower cannot open without the sun – that is certain – but the sun can go on rising without the flower opening. The master is just a light. If you open, if your flower opens in his presence, good. If nothing opens in his presence, good. There is no difference between the two. If there is a difference, then the master is a leader, not yet a master.A flower opens in a deep forest. Nobody will ever pass. The fragrance will still continue to spread around. It does not wait for a traveler, does not wait for somebody to come and appreciate it – that’s not the point at all. If somebody comes and appreciates it, good; if nobody comes and nobody appreciates it, it is as good as the other. There is no distinction, no difference.The master and the disciple both exist in the disciple. When the disciple’s mind becomes awakened, he will laugh and he will come to know who is a disciple and who is a master. The whole game becomes ridiculous. But since the disciple is not yet alert, the game continues. Krishnamurti is right when he says no master is needed. Yes, one day you will also know that no master is needed, but you will know only when somebody has awakened you, or you have become awakened in somebody’s presence. Then you will know, you will say, “Krishnamurti is right.” But if you listen to Krishnamurti right now and believe that no master is needed, you will never come to know that Krishnamurti is right. You will remain unawakened.This will look like a paradox. Listening and believing in Krishnamurti you will never come to know that he is right. If you want to know that he is right, forget all that he says; find a master; and one day you will know that the master is not needed, was never needed really. But it will be known only when you have become awakened. When you look back, then you will be able to say, “Yes, the master was not needed really. I could have become awakened…” But you could not, remember.This looks like a puzzle – it is not, it is simple. Have you not noticed it sometimes? You are trying to solve a riddle, a puzzle, a crossword puzzle or something. The moment it is solved, you start feeling very ridiculous. Why, for hours, could you not solve it? Now you see that it is so simple. It is so foolish – to struggle for three hours and you could not solve it, and now it is so simple. Once solved, it is so simple that you know anybody could have solved it, but you also know that for three hours you were struggling, or for three days, and you could not solve it.It happens to every scientist. When he makes a discovery, sometimes it takes ten years, twenty years, to work. The day it is solved he simply cannot believe how he was missing it. It was so simple. Why were twenty years wasted? Why could it not have happened on the first day?Once anything is known, it looks very simple, but it looks simple only when you have known it. After knowing, after experiencing, truth is so simple, so available, so “already there.” But right now, when you are fast asleep and lost in your dreams, somebody is needed to shake you out of your sleep. This need is yours.The master has no need of the disciple. In fact, a man is a master only when he has no need of the disciple. If he still hankers for disciples, then he himself is fast asleep and snoring. Avoid him! Escape from him!The last question:Osho,I also feel on both paths, but you said that it is not possible to be on both paths.I said it is not possible, but I have not said that if you try hard you cannot succeed a little bit. If you try hard, really hard, you may succeed a little bit. Even the impossible can become possible if you do really hard work. And I know you can do really hard work because you have made many impossible things possible.For example, to be miserable is an impossibility. Through hard effort and perseverance you have made it possible. To be happy is natural; to be unhappy is unnatural. It needs really great effort, much capacity, much ability, efficiency, to become miserable; it needs long practice. In fact, when I look at you and I see that you are miserable, I am simply surprised: it is a miracle. How are you doing it? In the first place, it should not be there, it cannot be there. But man is a very impossible animal: he can do things.I say it is difficult to be on both paths – the negative and the positive – because they are diametrically opposite, but you can try. Listen to this anecdote.The rather broad lady showed up at the theater just before the performance started and handed the usher two tickets. “Where’s the other party?” asked the usher.“Well,” said the lady, with a blush, “you can see one seat is rather uncomfortable so I bought two. But they’re really both for me.”“Okay with me, lady,” the usher replied, scratching his head. “But you’re gonna have a rough time. Your seats are numbers fifty-one and sixty-three.”But you can go on trying – you can sit on this seat for a few minutes and then you can move to the other, and then come back again; you can alternate.To be on both the paths is impossible really, but you can alternate. For one day you can be on the path of the positive, another day you can be on the path of the negative – and your mind is so contradictory that you can make it possible. So one day you make something, another day you destroy it. Ultimately you will find that eventually you are standing where you have always been; you have not moved a single inch. In the day you make the house, in the night you destroy it; the house is never built. Yes, you can do both. You can be both the builder and the destroyer, but it is impossible.To be on the positive needs a totally different approach: affirmative, yes-saying. To be on the negative needs a diametrically opposite approach: no-saying, negating, eliminating, neti-neti, neither this nor that. On the positive you become bigger, bigger, bigger – so big, so huge, one day, the whole existence is covered with your being, the whole existence becomes part of you. On the negative you go on denying, denying, denying, and you come to a point where you are just a zero, a nonentity.Ultimately both bring you to the same goal. Either you become so huge that you are the whole existence or you become so much a nothingness that you are just a zero. In both cases duality disappears – I and thou disappear. In one case, thou is dissolved into I; in the other case, I is dissolved into thou. But the ultimate result is one: that there remains only one, two are no longer. The positive person will try to grow, to expand; the negative person will try to shrink and disappear.Either grow so big that only you exist and nothing else, or become so small, so small, that everything exists except you; and from both viewpoints you will take the jump into oneness, the organic unity of the whole.Expressions will be different. One who has moved on the positive path will say, “I am God,” “Aham brahmasmi.” “Ana’l haq,” “I am truth.” And the person who has moved on the via negativa will say, “I am not.”Anatta, nonbeing. But you will see that both are tremendously blissful, silent. Their silence has the same taste, and their blissfulness has the same color. If you meet Buddha, and if you meet Krishna, you will find that they are the same, but they talk differently. Krishna talks in positive terms, affirmative, and Buddha talks in negative terms. But if you watch them, you will find the same presence, the same overflowing love, compassion, blissfulness, cheerfulness; the same silence, the same celebration – but their statements will be different because they have learned different languages.One who is still trying to seek cannot be on both. One who has arrived, both have dissolved for him. One who has not yet arrived, it is better for him to choose. That will be more practical and you will be less in trouble, conflict, schizophrenia. Never choose two opposite things together, otherwise they will create a split in your being.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Lieh Tzu was going to Ch’i but turned back half way. On the road he met Po-hun Wu-jen who asked him why he had turned back.Lieh Tzu said, “I was alarmed by something.”“What was it?” asked the old man.“I ate at ten inns and at five they served me first.”“If that is all? Why should you be alarmed?”“When a man’s inner integrity is not firm, sometimes, something oozes from his body and becomes an aura, which, outside him, presses on the hearts of others; it makes other men honor him more than his elders and betters, and gets him into difficulties.“The only motive of an innkeeper is to sell his rice and soup, and increase his earnings. His profits are meager, and the considerations which sway him have little weight. If men with so little to gain from me value me so highly as a customer, will it not be even worse with the lord of ten thousand chariots who has worn out his body and drained his knowledge in state affairs? The Prince of Ch’i will appoint me to some office and insist that I fill it efficiently. This is what alarmed me.”“An excellent way to look at it! But even if you stay, other men will lay responsibilities on you,” said the old man.Not long afterward, when Po-hun Wu-jen went to call on him, Lieh Tzu’s porch was full of the shoes of visitors. Po-hun Wu-jen stood facing north; he leaned on his upright staff and wrinkled his cheek against it. After standing there for a while, he left without speaking. The doorkeeper told Lieh Tzu. Lieh Tzu ran out barefoot holding his shoes in his hands and caught up with him at the gate.“Now that you have come, Master,” he said, “aren’t you even going to give me my medicine?”“Enough! I told you confidently that others would lay responsibilities on you, and it turns out that they have. It is not that you are capable of allowing them to do so; you are incapable of preventing them. What use is it to you to have this effect on people which is incompatible with your own basic peace? If you insist on making an effect, it will unsteady your basic self, and to no purpose.”To be is to miss Tao. To be is to miss the whole. To be is to be separate, therefore not to be is the door. To be is going astray. Not to be is coming home. When you are not, godliness is. When you are, godliness is not, and both have never been seen together; they cannot be together by their very nature. Just as darkness and light cannot exist together: if one is, the other is not.So the basic, the very basic, teaching of Tao is to be in a state of nonbeing, what Buddhists call anatta, a state of no-self. Empty, a deep nothingness, nobody inside – then you really are. But then you are not: the whole is. The moment you start thinking about yourself as a separate individual, the part is claiming to be the whole; the part has gone mad. The ego is the only insane thing in the world. The ego is neurosis, and anybody who suffers from the ego suffers from neurosis because he thinks as if the part were the whole. The part is not the whole. If a leaf in the tree starts thinking, “I am,” then the leaf has gone mad. The tree is and the leaf exists only as a part, an organic part, of the tree. Even to conceive of the leaf as separate is impossible. The tree is flowing in it. It is the tree’s energy that has become the leaf. If a wave in the ocean thinks, “I am separate: I am,” then the wave has gone mad. The ocean is. All waves are nothing but the ocean waving.All human beings are nothing but the universal consciousness waving. We are waves. The moment you understand that “I am a wave,” it means you have understood that you are not – only the ocean is. Sometimes the ocean waves and you are, and sometimes the ocean remains silent and you disappear.Tao says that the ego is the only barrier. All other religions say the same, but Tao goes deepest in its approach; its insight is the greatest. All religions say that the ego has to be dropped, but if you listen, if you read, if you look into those religious people, you will find that their insight is not very deep and the ego comes up in different forms again and again.Only two persons have touched the very substratum of the ego and those two are Lao Tzu and Gautam Buddha. Religions go on saying, “Drop the ego. Be egoless,” but in a subtle way, somehow, they go on protecting it too. They say, “If you drop the ego, you will become spiritual. If you drop the ego, you will be the first in the Kingdom of God. If you drop the ego, you will be the chosen one. If you drop the ego, great is going to be the payoff in the other world – heaven, paradise, moksha.” On the one hand they say, “Drop the ego,” on the other hand they persuade you, they bribe you, they buttress your greed. They say, “You will be special. You will be extraordinary.” On the one hand they say, “Drop the ego,” on the other hand they go on strengthening the same ego under different names. “You will become a miracle man. You will have siddhis – you will have spiritual powers, occult forces. You will be able to manipulate existence more deeply. You will become telepathic. You will be able to read others’ minds. You will be clairvoyant.” This and that – all the siddhis of the yogis – all the miraculous powers of Yoga. Again you are decorated, again you become very, very strong.Remember, there are three layers of your being: the body, the mind, and the self. And beyond the three is your no-self. So there are three possibilities for the ego to assert itself. Either it asserts itself on the layer of body – a beautiful body, a strong body, “I have the most handsome body, the most powerful body.” Somebody is a beauty queen, a Miss Universe, and somebody is Mohammed Ali, the greatest man, Mr. Universe. On the layer of the body, the ego can assert itself. If the ego asserts itself on the layer of the body, one becomes animalistic. All your wrestlers, great wrestlers, are nothing but too attached to their animal part, so that when you see the body of a Mr. Universe you can feel it; he looks more like an animal than like a human being. Certainly he is very strong physically. His ego is asserting itself on that path. He will be very aggressive, brutal, violent. He will be very sexual, indulgent, unconscious. He will move like a robot, like a machine. He will not have any consciousness whatsoever. His whole life will be eat, drink and be merry. He will live on the very superficial layer of his life. Civilizations are against it, cultures are against it. They say “This is not good. Drop this ego.” They go on teaching to every child who is born on this earth, “Drop this ego. Become nonaggressive, become nonviolent. Don’t be brutal, have kindness, sympathy.” Then the ego starts asserting itself on another level, the level of the mind.At the mind level it becomes knowledge, money. Money is a higher thing than sexuality, so those people who become interested in money forget all about sex; they are no longer interested in sex. Their whole sexuality becomes money oriented, or power, politics, ambition. Those people, who become politicians, become ambitious for power; they can also sacrifice sex, indulgence – they can sacrifice everything.They can sacrifice on the first layer because they need all the energy available on the second layer. So they repress on the first layer and the ego asserts itself on the second layer. All cultures depend on this. In fact, all cultures use it as a technique: repress the child’s ego on the first layer and he will become egoistic on the second layer. Then he will start hankering for gold medals in the university, to become more knowledgeable, to come first in the university. He will start becoming more aggressive mentally than physically.You can see it in the universities. All the students who are in sports are very poor as far as their mind development is concerned, and all the students whose minds are very clever and cunning are poor physically. The sportsman lives on the first layer and the scholar on the second layer. The scholar will have a delicate body, will wear glasses from the very beginning; he will be old even while he is young. On the physical level his ego has disappeared. He cannot fight, but he can argue. His fight now asserts itself as argument. He can discuss and debate; he has found a finer instrument to conquer and be aggressive with. He will not become a wrestler, he will become a lawyer. He will live through argument, through his knowledge – say anything against his knowledge and he is ready to fight. Of course his fight will be of words, verbal. If you fight with the body, he will call it brutal, animalistic, primitive; if you fight on the level of words and language and logic, he will say that it is a “civilized fight,” but the same ego is asserting itself on the second layer.Religions depend on repressing this second layer of ego. Civilization depends on the first repression: repress the ego on the body level so that it asserts itself on the mind level. Religions depend on repressing on the second level so that the ego starts asserting itself on the third level, the level of the self. So religions say knowledge is nothing, politics is nothing, money is nothing, to become a great artist is nothing, to become a great novelist, writer, is nothing. Then what is real power? Real power is siddhi. If you can do miracles, if you touch a man and he is healed when he was ill, and if you touch a dead body and the dead body is resurrected, then you have something. If you can produce things out of nothing, if you become a miracle man, then you have something. So religions repress the ego on the second layer, then the ego asserts itself on the third layer.Tao says that the ego has to disappear from all the layers. One has to understand it so totally that it cannot find another way to its existence, so that it cannot find another shelter in your being. When ego disappears completely and there is no way for it to assert itself, then you are not in one sense and you are, for the first time, in another sense. You are not as an individual any more, you are the whole.This is the meaning of a holy man in Taoism: a holy man is one who is not. Very paradoxical. And remember, Tao does not teach you to become humble. If you become humble, the ego will continue – it will become the ego of the humble person, it will hide behind humbleness. So a practiced humbleness, a cultivated humbleness, is not going to help. Then what is to be done?If you ask Lieh Tzu, Chuang Tzu or Lao Tzu, they will say that nothing has to be done because whatsoever you do will create the ego; ego is created out of doing. Nothing is to be done. One has just to see the ways of the ego, the subtle ways of the ego, the cunning ways of the ego; one has to see them so totally… One has to follow the ego into one’s being from body to mind, from mind to self, one has to seek and see all the hideouts. Once you have known all the possibilities of ego assertion, in that very understanding, in that very awareness, ego disappears.When ego disappears, your body is different, your mind is different, your self is different. When ego disappears, many things happen. First, now you are no longer identified with your body. You are in the body, but you are not the body. When the ego disappears, you are no longer identified with the mind. You use the mind, the mind becomes an instrument – a beautiful instrument – but you are not identified with the mind either. When the ego disappears, you use the self, but you are not identified with the self either. You remain an individual: you walk and live like an individual, but remain continuously aware that the wave is just an appearance, the reality is the ocean, so that: “I am just a wave. God is the ocean, Tao is the ocean.”The disappearance of the ego is the disappearance of what Gurdjieff calls identification. But the right word is disidentification. We get identified with everything, whatsoever we are close to. You are very close to the body, so you start thinking, “I am my body.” You feel hungry, and you say, “I am hungry.” That is not right. The body is hungry, you are the knower; you are the one who knows that the body is hungry. Sometimes you are insulted and the mind is feeling miserable, but you are not miserable. You are the knower who notices that the mind is miserable. Sometimes you see miracles happening in your life, but you know that you are not the doer; you are not the self. They are happening, but they are happening from the whole. That’s what Jesus goes on saying again and again.A man came to Jesus and said, “We are very grateful to you. You are good and great.” And Jesus said, “Don’t assert such a thing. Only God is good and great. I am not.” What is he saying? He is saying, “I am not a self. I function as a self, but the function is not the reality, the function is just a function. The reality is far larger, far bigger, enormous, infinite.”It is as if you were standing in your house by the side of a window and looking outside. The frame of the window becomes the frame of the sky, although you know well that the sky has no frame. There is a trend in modern painting not to frame the painting. It has significance. The moment you frame the painting it becomes artificial because existence is unframed; all frames are man-made. Existence has no frame. But if you look from the window, then the frame of the window becomes the frame of the sky; and the sky has no frame. If you have always looked from the window, and you have never been outside the house, then naturally you will think that the limitation of the window is the limitation of the sky. Looking from the body, you become framed within the body; it is just a window. Looking from the mind, you become framed within the mind; it is again just a window. Looking from the self, you become framed within the self; it is again just a window.Once you start coming out of these windows, then you know that even the sky is not your limit; you are unlimited. You are as unlimited as the whole: you are the whole. There will be great transformations.On the body level sexuality will disappear. Sex will be there, but sexuality will disappear. When you get identified with sex it becomes sexuality. When you are not identified with sex, then it is as beautiful as anything else, but it is not sexual; it is simple sex, natural sex. Animals are not sexual. They have sex, but they are not sexual. If you show a dog a nude picture of his girlfriend, he will not be interested – not at all. You cannot circulate magazines like Playboy to the animals; they will not be interested at all, they will not look. They are not sexual, they have no sexual fantasy, they don’t think about it. Their sex is pure and simple. It has not become cerebral; it has not entered their heads.When sex enters the head it becomes sexuality. When sex is sex it is beautiful. When you eat because you are hungry it is beautiful, but when you become obsessed with food then you are mad. When you start thinking about food, sitting and meditating on food with closed eyes, in the night dreaming about food, then you are mad. Then your hunger has moved beyond the limits of sanity. You take a bath – good, but you don’t think about it the whole day. You don’t fantasize about standing under the shower again and again; if you start doing that, then something is wrong.I have heard…A woman was very fat. Her psychoanalyst suggested to her that she should find a beautiful nude picture of a woman and, “Stick it on your fridge so that whenever you open the fridge, you will see the beautiful, proportionate body of the woman and that will bring you to your senses: become aware of what you are doing with your body.”And it helped. Again and again all day long she would be opening the fridge, taking things out, putting things in, and she would see the beautiful, proportionate body. Within one month she lost twelve pounds. But another thing happened – the husband gained twelve pounds! Because of that nude picture, he started going to the fridge again and again and when you go to the fridge – of course you drink and eat – Coca Cola, Fanta, ice cream – he started eating. So the wife lost, the husband gained.Sexuality simply means that sex has become a mind thing; it has entered into mental states. Anything, when it moves beyond its center, becomes an illness. Gurdjieff used to say that man’s centers have gotten very confused. If you search in man, you will find great confusion. You will find sex in the head – where it should not be; that is not the center for sex.Man has repressed, changed arrangements inside himself so much, that if God dissected man he would be surprised because he never made man this way. Everything has changed; the whole arrangement has changed. The greatest calamity that has happened is that everything which should function on its own is no longer functioning on its own – it needs the mind. Everything goes via the mind, so the mind has become very polluted, poisoned.When the ego disappears from the body, there are two possibilities. If you repress it, it will assert itself on the mind level. If you don’t repress it, if you simply understand it – and through understanding it disappears – then it will not assert itself anywhere, and your body will change. You will attain to new insights. Your body will become more affectionate, warmer. Your body will have a certain new quality to it, the quality of weightlessness, as if gravitation does not affect you as much as it used to affect you before. You will feel that you can almost fly. You will become more loving.When sex is no longer sexuality, then sex starts on the right path and, by and by, the sex energy starts turning into love energy. Love is a transformation of sex energy. Sexuality is a repression, and repression is never transformation. Remember, repression is regression. A transformation is a totally different thing: you reach higher levels – sex energy becomes love. A person becomes more loving and less sexual. His approach toward life becomes more sensitive and less sexual – more sensitive and less sensual. He no longer thinks in terms of sensuality; his bodymind, his body wisdom has changed: his body has become mature. Of course, if he looks at the trees, he will see more greenery than you can see because he has become more sensitive. If he looks at the sky, the sky will be bluer and deeper than you will find it. The whole of life becomes a great mystery.It happens sometimes under drugs that your senses become so sensitive that you cannot believe it. When Aldous Huxley took LSD for the first time, he was sitting before a chair, and suddenly the chair became luminous, multicolored, as if it were a rainbow. He could not believe his eyes – an ordinary chair. And he had been seeing that chair for years; it had always been in his study – but there was never any color in it, it was never alive. Now suddenly it had a life of its own, so many colors, and so beautiful. He went and touched it, and he could not believe again that its texture was simply incredible. He wanted to hug the chair and to sing a song for it, to dance a dance for it. An ordinary chair can become extraordinary.To painters it has always been so. You may have seen the great painting of Vincent Van Gogh, The Chair. Ordinarily you think, “Why should a painter think to paint a chair, an ordinary chair?” But to Van Gogh that chair was not ordinary. What happened to Aldous Huxley under the impact of the drug was very natural to Van Gogh. His eyes were very sensitive, he could see through and through: there were no longer any screens – nothing to bar the way. His sensitivity was very clear.You will live more, you will love more, you will eat with taste more. When you touch something, you will know the texture. When you listen to a song, it will go to your very heart. Your body will not disturb it; your body will be just a passage, a tremendous receptivity – it will simply soak it up and take it to your heart. The whole of life will take on a different luminosity – it will become colorful, psychedelic.Man needs drugs because civilization has dulled his senses. Now this is a problem. The government, the society, the politicians are against drugs. But these people are the source of the problem; they have created such an ugly humanity that people have lost all sensitivity. Now people are trying desperately to find that sensitivity in any way – even if it comes through drugs. Drugs are harmful, but to live without sensitivity is not to live at all. To live without sensitivity is to live a very dull life, a dead life. Five thousand years of acculturation, five thousand years of civilization, have dulled humanity so much that people are bound to rebel against it. Now, the politicians and the priests are the source. It is they who are responsible for driving humanity to such a desperate state where people want to take drugs. Drugs cannot be stopped unless man is made sensitive again. Drugs will disappear once man becomes sensitive again.My approach is that if you are sensitive, you will not take drugs. Why would you? Just to do harm to yourself? When you are sensitive, even if somebody gives you a free drug you will not take it because a sensitive man will feel his sensitivity lessened through drugs. A dull person will feel that his sensitivity grows, and a sensitive person will feel that his sensitivity is dulled. It is relative: it depends on you. If you feel good through a drug, it simply shows that you have become very dull; and to feel sensitive through chemicals is simply meaningless because they are not going to make you sensitive. You will need more and more drugs, in larger and larger quantities, but the basic problem remains there. The basic problem is how to attain the receptivity, the sensitivity, of the body again – how to make your body alive again. The resurrection of the body is needed, and that resurrection is possible only when you are no longer using your body as an ego vehicle.Ego is the greatest drug. LSD is nothing, marijuana is nothing, alcohol is nothing. Ego keeps you so drugged, so asleep, so unconscious. Once the body attains to sensitivity, you will find joy through the body, great joy. Small things become so delightful. Just taking a shower is so delightful that you will feel great gratitude toward God – just for a shower. The water falling on you, the coolness of it, the freshness that comes into you…You will be lost in its beauty. Small things: eating, talking to a friend, holding the hand of a friend, looking at the sky or looking at the trees, just swimming in the river, or lying down on the sand taking a shower of sun rays, and everything becomes so joyful. The whole of life takes a new hue of rejoicing. You will be able to dance and sing if the body is resurrected.The ego is the death of the body. The ego has to disappear. But let me repeat again: it cannot be repressed, otherwise it will bubble up on a deeper level. When the ego disappears from the mind, knowledge disappears, knowing arises – you don’t have any knowledge, but you have a capacity to know. Wherever you look, whatever your eyes see, you can see through and through. You may not have any information, but your insight is great. Scriptures disappear, borrowed knowledge becomes meaningless, your own knowing capacity arises. You have an inner lamp, and silence grows.Knowledge is a continuous clattering inside you, a continuous talk. Sometimes you are puzzled: why do I go on talking inside? Why this monologue? For what? And you go on repeating the same thing again and again and again. You have thought those thoughts many times, then why are you repeating them again? There is a reason: only by continuously repeating them can you maintain your knowledge, otherwise your knowledge will disappear. By continuously repeating, chattering, muttering inside, you maintain your knowledge, otherwise it would disappear; you would not be able to possess it. This is the only way to possess it. Because it is borrowed, the only way to possess it is through constant repetition.When the ego is no longer there in the mind, all the barriers disappear. Mind becomes a mirror: you reflect reality. It is your own experience, so you need not continuously keep it moving in your mind, you need not repeat it; it is your insight. Tomorrow, also, you will be able to look into reality in the same way – maybe even far more deeply because time will give you depth. So why repeat it?A man of knowing never carries any load. He can depend on his knowing. You cannot depend on your knowing, so you have to carry knowledge, otherwise you will be in difficulty at any moment. If some problem arises, you cannot trust yourself: you have to carry the knowledge. If you can trust yourself, then there is no need. You can just look into the problem and the solution will come out of it because each problem has its own built-in solution. It does not have to be brought from the outside, the problem has just to be understood rightly, and it will give you the solution.Silence will arise. A man of knowing is very silent. Words don’t go on floating in his consciousness; there is no monologue. He is not continuously in the inner talk – and awareness arises, and celebration; a man becomes creative. That’s what celebration is: one starts participating in God the creator. That’s what celebration is all about. Whenever you are really celebrating, you create something. Whatsoever it is, you create something: you become a participant in the creative process of life. And when on the third level, the self, the ego disappears, a great explosion happens. That’s what Zen people call satori, Yoga calls it samadhi.When in the self, the self disappears, when you look inside yourself and you don’t find anybody there: just a pure awareness, a witnessing, a no-self, you have arrived home.This is the very basic approach of Tao, that the ego has to disappear on three levels. The ego gone, the body becomes the temple, the mind becomes the innermost shrine, and the self becomes the whole – the God himself of the shrine. You become religious when your body is a temple, your mind is a shrine and you are nothing but God himself, the whole itself.This is the vision to be carried. It is a dream now, but it can be transformed into reality any moment you are courageous enough to go into it. It can be transformed into reality very easily because the ego game is just a dream. Once you come out of the dream, the reality will be available. It is available right now – you are only dreaming.It is as if you fall asleep here in Pune and you dream of Istanbul or Timbuktu. In the night you dream of Istanbul, but you are still in Pune: your dreaming does not take you to Istanbul. In the morning, when you open your eyes, you will not find yourself in Istanbul, you will be in Pune, and you will have a good laugh. In fact, in the night, when you had suddenly found yourself in the streets of Istanbul, you were worried about how you would manage to get back. And at eight o’clock in the morning you had to be here in Chuang Tzu Auditorium – how were you going to manage? You may have rushed to the airport to inquire whether there was a plane going right now. But in the morning, suddenly you find that there was no need to go to the airport, there was no need to go anywhere, that you had always, all the time, been here. In reality you had never gone anywhere.The ego is a dream, and whatsoever you have dreamed through the ego is a falsity, it is illusory. That’s what Hindus call maya.Now this beautiful story. It has to be understood step by step.Lieh Tzu was going to Ch’i but turned back half way. On the road he met Po-hun Wu-jen who asked him why he had turned back.Ch’i was the capital of the kingdom where Lieh Tzu lived, so he was going to the capital of his nation, but turned back in mid journey. When he came back, he met Po-hun Wu-jen. Po-hun Wu-jen was an old Taoist master, a man who had really arrived. So the old man asked, “Why have you come back?”Lieh Tzu said, “I was alarmed by something.”Listen carefully because nobody has gone as deeply into these phenomena as the Taoists.“What was it?” asked the old man.“I ate at ten inns and at five they served me first.”Now look. He says: “I ate at ten inns and at five they served me first. That alarmed me.” Why should it alarm you? In fact, it should make you very delighted that people are recognizing that you are extraordinary, that you are exceptional, that you are a V.I.P., that you are being served before others. But Lieh Tzu is a disciple of Tao; he understands that this is dangerous. When people start thinking that you are exceptional, there is danger.What is the danger? The danger is that you may fall again into an ego trip; the danger is they may again give you an ambition; the danger is that they will not allow you to relax and to be yourself. When people give importance to you, they start dominating you. That’s the whole art of manipulating people. When you want to manipulate a person what do you do? You make him feel very important. You say, “You are simply great.” And the moment you have said, “You are simply great,” you become powerful over him. Now, if he wants to maintain his greatness, he will have to consider you; now his greatness will depend on you. If you go against him, then what about his greatness? You have made him great – now you have the key. Now, in a subtle way, he will become your slave. So whenever somebody comes and exaggerates about you, beware! He is trying to catch hold of you, and once you allow it, it will be difficult to go back home.Mind wants to play these games very much. Even when sometimes a person is saying a lie, if it is fulfilling to your ego, you accept it. You can try it. Say to an ugly woman, “You are very beautiful,” and she will not say, “No, I am not. Stop all this nonsense! I am just plain and homely.” If you say to an ugly woman that she is the most beautiful woman in the world, she will accept it; she will not say, “No, don’t deceive me.” Once she accepts it, she is deceived. Now she will be in your power; now she will always have to think about you and concede things to you because you are the only person who has made her beautiful. You are the only mirror in which she has looked beautiful. All other mirrors were saying that she is ugly, now she cannot afford to lose you. She will cling to you, she will become a servant to you, she will become a slave to you – but she cannot afford to lose you.Remember, whenever you are being made important there is danger. Danger! If you are not alert that ego has disappeared from all the layers of your being, there is danger. Lieh Tzu must have been a disciple when this happened; he was not yet a master. A master can afford to be in any situation; a disciple cannot afford that; he has to be very alert because there are still dangers, he has not yet arrived. There are tremendous possibilities of getting lost.“I ate at ten inns and at five they served me first.” “If that is all, why should you be alarmed?” asked the old man.“When a man’s inner integrity is not firm, sometimes, something oozes from his body and becomes an aura, which, outside him, presses on the hearts of others; it makes other men honor him more than his elders and betters, and gets him into difficulties.”This is a very great insight. Nobody has ever mentioned it – not even Patanjali who completely covered the map of consciousness, not even he mentioned it in this way. The credit goes to the Taoists.He is saying: “When a man’s inner integrity is not firm…” Ordinarily you think that a man has an aura when his integrity is very firm. No, that is wrong; the aura comes from some leakage. Your integrity is not absolute yet, so your energy starts leaking, and it creates an aura, a subtle magnetism around you. Of course, whenever you come in contact with others they will be impressed. Your aura will function as an intoxicant; they will simply be impressed. You will have a very charismatic effect on them, but Taoists say that it simply shows that you have not yet become really ordinary – you are still hankering for something. Somewhere the ego is still there because only through the ego can your inner energies leak out.“When a man’s inner integrity is not firm…” What do they mean by “inner integrity”? When there is no ego, you are integrated with the whole. When there is ego, you are not integrated with the whole. When there is ego, you are split; when there is ego… In fact, there are many egos – you are a crowd, and there is a constant fight inside. Each ego tries to be more powerful than the others, and there is a continuous struggle, and in that struggle your energy starts flowing out: it becomes a sort of aura.Remember, this is not the aura that happens to a Buddha or a Lao Tzu or to Jesus. An aura happens to Buddha, but that aura is not energy coming out – no. His whole being has become so luminous, that even from his body you can see the subtle rays of his luminosity. It is as if a lamp is burning in a house and even through the curtains you can see that there is no darkness inside. It is not a leakage; it has a totally different quality to it. And how will you make out the difference?When you come in contact with Buddha, his presence does not press your heart; in fact, his presence makes you freer. His presence does not turn you into a slave; his presence turns you into a master. His presence does not become binding on you, but becomes a freedom – he liberates.When the energy oozes out, it becomes a very repressing force. It is almost violent. It is as if somebody has jumped upon you with a sword in his hand and forced you to submit. These words are good. When you come in contact with a Buddha, whose energy is not oozing out, who has no leakage left, surrender happens, but there is no submission in surrender.When you come in close contact with a person who is not yet really integrated and he is creating great energy through his sadhana and the energy is leaking out, submission happens, but there is no surrender. You become a slave, you become an imitator. Your individuality is crushed and destroyed, you become a carbon copy.Remember, this will help you always: only keep company with a master with whom you don’t become a carbon copy, with whom freedom is possible, with whom even surrender gives you individuality, following whom you don’t become a follower, with whom you earn more and more freedom. He makes you so free; he gives you tremendous freedom – more than you can give to yourself. He does not give you a discipline, he gives you awareness, and through awareness you flower. You are not repressed, you are not forced; great things happen, but they happen naturally, spontaneously.You must have seen auras in the pictures of Buddha and Jesus and Krishna. They are not the aura Lieh Tzu is talking about. If you want to see this type of aura, then you have to come in contact with a man like Rasputin. Then you will find an aura, a great aura.Whoever came in contact with Rasputin immediately submitted to him and became a slave, even the Tsar and the Tsarina. In fact, for a few years, Rasputin had become the real ruler of Russia. Whoever came in contact with him would simply lose his individuality, would lose his freedom and would become just an yea-sayer; would become more unconscious than he was before and would start doing things which he could never do in his right senses. Around Rasputin such things were an everyday affair. He could tell people to do foolish things, but his order was an order which they would do and not even for a single moment feel that they were being stupid. When they would go back home, then they would suddenly recognize the fact that what they had done was ridiculous.Rasputin was killed by people who became more and more aware of this phenomenon; he was murdered, and he was really a man of great energy. The people who murdered him were his victims. By and by, many people became aware that whenever they were around him, something simply went off within their being and they became just puppets; and whenever they were far away from him they would again regain themselves. They started feeling this phenomenon so deeply that they conspired against him – his own disciples – and they killed him.It was very difficult to kill him. He was a man of energy, of great energy – disintegrated, but still of great energy. And the energy was oozing so much… First they persuaded him to drink, and he drank too much, but nothing affected him. He was perfectly alert. Then they poisoned him, they gave him poison in food, but nothing affected him. Then they became afraid: they shot him – eighteen bullets – but he was still alive! Then they were very afraid that if he survived, what would become of them? So they tied him in a bag with rocks and threw him into the river. After forty-eight hours his body was found, and the post mortem report says that he was not dead when he was thrown in the water, that even under water he remained alive for at least four hours.A man of tremendous energy – but the impact was evil, the impact was not good. Let this be your definition: whenever you are in close contact with a man whose energy makes you a slave – escape from him. Escape from him like the plague. Never look back. You are in danger: that man has an oozing energy. It is dangerous for him because he is losing the energy which can become integration, and it is dangerous for you.“When a man’s inner integrity is not firm, something oozes from his body and becomes an aura, which, outside him, presses on the hearts of others…” It is a pressure. These are things to be felt. If in contact with such a person you feel a pressure on the heart, a crushing pressure, then that man has more energy than you; but that energy will prove evil – it is aggressive energy.In the presence of somebody who is integrated, you feel that you are uplifted, that you are taken to a higher altitude, that you start floating upward, that gravitation is less; that the presence is soothing, gives you silence, awareness; makes you more conscious, no pressure in it. In fact, the ordinary pressures of your life dissolve in the presence of a man who has become integrated.“…it makes other men honor him more than his elders and betters, and gets him into difficulties.” Lieh Tzu said, “It is bad for others, but that is not the point – it is bad for the person himself.” It is bound to get him into difficulties. That’s how Rasputin got into difficulties. He could have become a Buddha – he had the possibility. He was a man of great energy, he was really very rare, but others got into difficulty, he also got into difficulty. He got into many difficulties and he went astray. The more he became powerful over people, the more he forgot his own training, his own inner discipline.He had worked hard on himself: for years he had meditated and prayed, and his prayer was going deep. Then he became aware that he had great influence over people. The moment he became aware that he had great influence over people, he forgot about his prayers. He became ambitious. The ego asserted itself on the last layer, the self – not on the body, not on the mind, but on the self. And when the ego asserts itself on the third, deepest, layer, many people are deceived because it is very difficult to make distinctions, sometimes the energy feels really helpful.The Tsar had only one son and the son used to suffer from a disease for which there was no cure. The disease was that if he would get any wound, the wound would not heal and the blood would start oozing out of his body and not stop. His life was always in danger – a small wound and… A child is a child; playing, he would fall and get a small wound and a little blood would ooze. Then it would be impossible to prevent the blood flowing: that was the problem. And when too much blood would flow out, the child would become unconscious, would fall into a coma. There was no medicine to stop it, and there was no cure.Then Rasputin came, and he simply touched the boy and the blood stopped. He would simply touch the child and the boy would become conscious. He was the Tsar’s only child; Rasputin became a must. They would not even allow him to go far from Moscow, from the capital, because it was dangerous: if he could not come in time… So his presence had to be there in the palace. The Tsarina became too impressed, then the Tsar became too impressed, then the whole court. Rasputin started ordering people: he became the real emperor. His orders had to be listened to, otherwise he would threaten, “I will leave,” and the life of the child would have been in danger. The doctors had said, “He has to be kept here, otherwise we cannot help at all. Any moment the child could die.”But Rasputin forgot his prayers; he forgot his own inner discipline. He created many difficulties for others, and created many difficulties for himself. In fact, if some day the real history is written, then he will be seen as the cause for the Russian revolution, not Lenin, not Stalin, not Trotsky. He was the cause: he created such a ridiculous state that the people rebelled. The revolution came because of Rasputin; because of Rasputin Russia has suffered for almost half a century. The whole of Russia has become a great prison – all freedom lost; millions of people have been killed. And if you look, deep down you will find Rasputin at the beginning of this whole Communist myth – the myth of revolution, the myth of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nobody talks about him, but he was the provocation. His presence was so ugly, so repressive, so oppressive, that not only was he killed, the Tsar and the Tsarina and the child were all killed, and the whole empire disappeared into disorder and chaos.Lieh Tzu says that it:“…gets him into difficulties.The only motive of an innkeeper is to sell his rice and soup, and increase his earnings. His profits are meager, and the considerations which sway him have little weight. “If men with so little to gain from me value me so highly as a customer, will it not be even worse with the lord of ten thousand chariots who has worn out his body and drained his knowledge in state affairs? The Prince of Ch’i will appoint me to some office and insist that I fill it efficiently. This is what alarmed me.”Really a man of understanding. He says, “If I go to the capital and the king comes to know about me, I am bound to be in trouble. He will appoint me; he may make me a minister, a prime minister. He will certainly get hold of me. If ordinary people like an innkeeper, who has nothing much to gain from me, becomes so impressed, then what about the great king, the lord of ten thousand chariots, who has wasted his energy in state affairs, who has lost his soul in the world, who is really poor as far as the inner integrity is concerned? If I come in contact with him, he will immediately take hold of me. He will say, ‘Come here. Serve the kingdom, serve the state.’ And I will be in difficulty. That’s why I became alarmed.”Look at the beautiful understanding of Lieh Tzu. He is still a disciple, but has great insight. One should avoid ambition; one should avoid any possibilities where one can get into unnecessary troubles.“An excellent way to look at it! But even if you stay, other men will lay responsibilities on you,” said the old man.One thing more before we go deeper into this parable: when your energies ooze out and you are not yet centered, you will certainly become a man of great influence, but your presence will be a violence to others, an aggression. Even if you are nonviolent, you will do violence to people.The same thing happened in the case of Mahatma Gandhi. He believed in nonviolence, but his presence was very violent. All those who lived around him were very much pressed upon. For small things he would press them too much. For small flaws, human flaws, human limitations, he would create much fuss. He would very easily go on a fast; if a disciple did something wrong, he would go on a fast. Now this looks very nonviolent – he was not doing anything to the disciple – but look deeply, he was being violent, doing it in a very subtle way: he would go on a fast.When you are on a fast, more energy oozes out of you than at any other time – that’s why people who fast become very, very influential. And when you are fasting for a particular person… For example, somebody was found smoking a cigarette – now, this was not allowed, or somebody was found enjoying a cup of tea – now, this was not allowed. Gandhi would go on a fast. And the disciple would certainly start feeling very, very guilty: Gandhi was suffering for him. He would not eat for three days. A disciple fell in love with a woman, and Gandhi fasted because this was not allowed. The disciple was no ordinary disciple; he was his secretary, so it created a great fuss, a great controversy. He should have told Gandhi why he lied – not that he had really lied. The only thing was that he had not declared it – but why should he have kept it secret? It should have been made public. He accepted that it was wrong: he asked to be forgiven, but it could not be forgiven so easily. Gandhi fasted.Now, what would the situation be for the disciple? For three days Gandhi fasted. The disciple could not sleep; he cried and wept, and he would go again and again, he would say, “I am sorry; forgive me.” And Gandhi would say, “I am not doing anything to you. I am doing it to myself.” And he would say, “You are not at fault.” Look at his logic: he would say, “I must be at fault because if the master is right, the disciple has to be right. Then something must be wrong in me, so I am purifying my soul.” Now this is very violent; it is better to hit a person with a sword. This is more violent: you are pressing his heart with a subtle sword.In the name of nonviolence much violence can be done to people. In the name of love much violence can be done to people. You all know. Parents go on being violent with their children in the name of love. They say, “…because we love you.” They go on making them feel guilty; they go on torturing them in subtle ways; in a thousand and one ways. And they are always doing it for you, for your own good.Remember, Tao says: the desire to impress the other, the desire to change the other, the desire to do good to the other in any way is violence. There should be no desire. This is the beauty – when you don’t desire to help the other, others are helped. When you don’t desire to impress them, they learn out of their own insight. They are never pressed. They are transformed, but not because you want to transform them. Your simple presence with no pressure is a great transforming force.The old man said: “An excellent way to look at it! But even if you stay home, other men will lay responsibilities on you.”“Beware of it! If you don’t go to the capital, it doesn’t make much difference. Even if you stay home, other people are going to lay their responsibilities on you.”Not long afterward, when Po-hun Wu-jen went to call on him, Lieh Tzu’s porch was full of the shoes of visitors. Po-hun Wu-jen stood facing north; he leaned on his upright staff and wrinkled his cheek against it. After standing there for a while, he left without speaking. The doorkeeper told Lieh Tzu. Lieh Tzu ran out barefoot holding his shoes in his hands and caught up with him at the gate.“Now that you have come, Master,” he said, “aren’t you even going to give me my medicine?”This is called “medicine” in the Taoist circles – when a master gives his presence to you. It is medicinal; his presence is therapeutic, his presence is a healing force. Just by being in close contact with him, just being in front of him, a great healing happens. This is called the medicine the master gives.The word medicine comes from the same root as meditation. Both come from the same root – that’s very good; they have something in common. Medicine, meditation, both come from a root which means to take care – a caring, loving care. Medicine takes care of your body; meditation takes care of your soul. Certainly the master is a physician, Buddha used to call himself “the physician.” When people would come and ask him great philosophical questions he would simply put them aside, and he would say, “Don’t talk nonsense. I am not a philosopher, I am a physician.” Nanak also used to say, “I am a vaidya, I am a physician. I don’t answer questions, I treat people. I am not concerned about their questions, I am concerned with their illnesses, with their disease.”In Taoist circles the presence of the master is called medicine, the medicine. You cannot find a more medicinal energy anywhere else. Whenever a man becomes enlightened, his surrounding is therapeutic. Just to be in close contact with him, you will be healed. Not that he will do something – no, a master never does anything. He has forgotten all doing. But because he is a non-doer healing happens. Because he is a nobody he gives you space: in that very space you become integrated, you become centered.“Enough! I told you confidently that others would lay responsibilities on you, and it turns out that they have. It is not that you are capable of allowing them to do so; you are incapable of preventing them. What use is it to you to have this effect on people which is incompatible with your own basic peace? If you insist on making an effect, it will unsteady your basic self, and to no purpose.”A great sentence, a great sutra.“Enough!” said the old man. “I told you confidently that others would lay responsibilities on you, and it has happened. So many people are gathering around you. Why?”And the old man said: “It is not that you are capable of allowing them to do so…” For that one needs to become perfectly enlightened – to allow others to do so – because one has come to his own center. Now there is no possibility of getting distracted. When one has arrived; there is no problem.“But, Lieh Tzu,” said the old man, “you have not yet arrived. You are still struggling; you are still far away. You have not yet become really integrated. From the body the ego has disappeared, from the mind the ego has disappeared, but from the self it has not disappeared yet. On the most subtle layer, the ego is still hiding.”To see that phenomenon, the old man stood there: …he leaned on his upright staff and wrinkled his cheek against it. After standing there for a while, he left without speaking.What was he doing? He looked deeply into his friend, Lieh Tzu. He looked deeply into him: “Have you really become integrated? Then there is no problem. Then you can have disciples, then you can have a crowd around you, then you can allow them to lay their responsibilities on you because you don’t exist, so nothing burdens you. You are not, so how can you be burdened? How can you burden a nothingness? Then there is no problem.” The master looked deeply and found that at the third layer the ego was still vibrating. It can be heard. If you listen silently, it is very simple to hear the ego of the other, and a man who has come home can immediately see it.“It is not that you are capable of allowing them to do so…” “No, it has not yet become possible.” “…you are incapable of preventing them.”Your state is negative, not yet positive. You are enjoying it. You still need people to make you feel important. You still need them; and if you need them, you cannot help them. In fact, on the contrary, they will distract you, they will harm you.The other day someone asked, “A disciple needs a master; does a master need a disciple too?” Now you will understand. The master is a master only when he needs nobody, when his need has completely disappeared. If he still needs somebody, then he is still far from his home; he has not yet arrived. If he needs disciples, then he is not a master. He is a master only when he needs no disciples, and only then can he be of help – not that he will help, but he can be of help.“It is not that you are capable of allowing them to do so, you are incapable of preventing them. What use is it to you to have this effect on people which is incompatible with your own basic peace?” “Your own peace is not yet there. You are still wavering, swaying. Your center is still not fixed, and these people will make you go more astray; they will be a distraction, so what is the point of it all? You didn’t go to the capital, but the capital has come here; the people have come, and sooner or later the king will be coming. These people will spread the news. So what is the point?”“If you insist on making an effect, it will unsteady your basic self; and to no purpose.” “And nobody gains out of it. You lose, and nobody gains out of it.”It is a great parable. Let it sink deep into your heart. Think about it, and whenever you want to influence people, become capable first. The capability comes only when you don’t have any desire to influence people – only then will you be of help. If you want to influence people, that simply shows that you are on an ego trip. Enough! These games you have played long enough; for many lives you have been playing them. Now it is time to stop these games. Because of these games you cannot contact reality. Reality is not a game. When you stop all games and all play, then reality explodes into your being.All the games have one thing in common and that is the ego; body games, mind games, self games: all have one thing in common – the ego. That’s why I say to you not to repress the ego, but to disperse it, and that dispersal comes.Find out. Whenever you are feeling some ego arising, just go inside yourself and look at it. See its movement, how it moves from one space to another space, how it takes more and more energy from you, how it takes you on faraway journeys, how it always takes you away from yourself. Just watch. I am not saying, “Fight it.” I am not saying, “Stop it” – but just watch. First you will become aware of the ego in the body – that is the most gross. Then, by and by, you will start hearing the whisperings of the second layer – the ego in the mind: that is subtle. If you become capable of listening to that, then one day you will understand even a third layer which is very subtle. You want to become a mahatma, you want to become a great saint, you want to become a great yogi, mahayogi, you want to become this and that. You want to become a great benefactor to humanity, you want to become a buddha – then, again you are playing the same game on a very subtle level. The Zen people have the right word for it: when the ego asserts itself on the third level, they call it the buddha disease.The body, the mind, the self – one has to go on looking, layer upon layer, into the ego, into its functioning. Just looking into it is enough. When you have seen well, when you have seen all the nooks and corners of your being, one day, you will suddenly find that it has evaporated, it is not there.And when it is not there, godliness is, Tao is. When you are not, you really are. To die on one plane is to be born on another plane. To die on the plane of games is to be born on the plane of existence. That is the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Crucify yourself as far as ego is concerned, so that you can be resurrected.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 1 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/tao-the-pathless-path-vol-1-14/

The first question:Osho,The word esoteric has been used in a very sacred sense. Would you please tell us what inspires you to use it in a ridiculous and humorous sense?The word esoteric means the hidden – it is ridiculous because nothing is hidden. All is obvious, God is obvious; if you cannot see, it is not because God is hidden, but because you are keeping your eyes closed. The sun is there, the light is there; if you keep your eyes closed and then you call the sun esoteric, that means you don’t even want to accept that you are keeping your eyes closed. You are throwing the responsibility onto the sun itself. “What can we do? If God is hidden, what can we do? It is his responsibility.” Priests have loved the word esoteric very much because if God is obvious, then what will be the need for the priests? God has to be hidden. If he is not, then he has to be forced to hide somewhere! Then the need for the priest arises – a mediator who will make you aware of things which are hidden, who will help you, who will guide you to the secret world of the truth.Truth is very obvious. In Zen they have a saying: from the very beginning nothing is hidden. It is the declaration of truth; hence the word esoteric is ridiculous, stupid.You ask, “The word esoteric has been used in a very sacred sense…”There is nothing sacred either. Life is simple; there is nothing sacred and nothing secular. My whole effort here is to help you to dissolve the distinction between the sacred and the secular. The secular should become the sacred and the sacred should become the secular. That’s why I insist that you should remain part of the market world and meditate. Meditation should not be a thing apart from life; it should be amidst life, it should be a part of life, an organic part, nothing made separate. The temple should exist exactly in the middle of the market, and all distinctions between the sacred and the secular should be dissolved.Life is one.But again the priest comes in. He wants to make distinctions; he wants to tell you that your life is ugly, that your life is mundane, that you are a worldly being. He is spiritual; he is something superior beyond you, beyond your reach. He is holy, you are unholy; he is a saint and you are a sinner. These distinctions have to be created. These are ego distinctions: somebody is rich, somebody is poor – then the ego can exist. Somebody is holy and somebody is not holy – again the ego can exist. The ego can exist only through distinctions of inferiority and superiority. “This world is inferior.”A man who lives an ordinary life – loves his wife, children, goes to work, is an ordinary human being condemned by the priests, by the so-called mahatmas. They exploit this same ordinary man, they live on him, they are suckers – but they are holy, they are spiritual. Their hands are never muddied because they don’t work, they don’t move into life. They remain far away; they are “holy.” And the man who lives is “unholy.”If you look deeply, you will find that the very word sacred is based on ego distinctions. What is sacred and what is not sacred? If God is everywhere, then everything is sacred. If God is in the rock and in the tree and in the man and in the woman, then everything is sacred. God is everywhere, in everything; God is the only reality – then how can anything not be divine? Even the Devil has to be divine. And that is the beauty of the word devil: it comes from the same root as divine. The Devil has to be divine otherwise he cannot be.So I want to dissolve all distinctions because through distinctions egos exist. So I don’t say what is sacred and what is ordinary. To me the ordinary is extraordinary, the mundane is sacred. Day-to-day life is holy life – hence I use the word esoteric as a ridiculous word. It hurts too many people because there are many people who think that if religion is obvious, then where will they find their ego trip? If everything is unhidden from the very beginning, then their ego has no challenge. Ego is challenged only by the difficult. This is my observation: if you find one hundred persons interested in religious inquiry, ninety-nine will be there only because God is almost impossible. That gives the thrill; that makes them feel good – that they are going to attain the impossible. Others are only working for the possible and they are working for the impossible. They feel very good; their ego is strengthened.Here with me, God is the only possibility; nothing else is possible. God is not impossible. He is just in front of you; he is not hidden. He is holding your hand; he is sitting by your side. He is in your child, in your wife, in your husband. He is in your friend, and he is in your foe. He surrounds you from everywhere: you exist in the ocean of God. But then the egoist feels dull. He says, “Then what is the point?” The egoist wants to go to the moon because it is impossible. The egoist wants to go to Mt. Everest because it is impossible.When somebody asked Edmund Hillary, “Why? Why in the first place did you become interested in going to Mt. Everest? And what was the point? There was nothing to gain.”Edmund Hillary said, “I had to go, man had to conquer it.”“But why?” the questioner asked.Hillary said, “Why? Because it is there, standing there so aloof, so impossible. Man had to conquer it for no other reason – just because it is a great challenge.”When God is far away in the heavens the ego feels thrilled, then there is adventure. And when I say he is very close by, then the ego feels no interest. Remember this trip of the ego.Ego can play such beautiful games, such beautiful, subtle games, that if you are not aware, you will never get out of it. And unless you get out of it, you will never see God. Ego is what I mean when I say your eyes are closed: it is the curtain of the ego that is keeping them closed. Drop the curtain and you will know that from the very beginning nothing is hidden, and there is nothing that is not sacred, so what is the point in making such distinctions? I don’t make them. I am not a priest, I am not a mahatma; I am not a saint. I am a very ordinary person, as ordinary as you are.My whole work consists in this: to declare that ordinary human beings are divine. Ordinary human beings like me are divine. You are also divine.The second question:Osho,You confuse me.Whatsoever I say, you don’t hear, hence the confusion. The way that I say it, you don’t hear in the same way; you interpret it, you bring your mind in. A constant commentary is going on in your minds: while I am speaking you are continuously commenting inside your mind. Your commentary does not allow me to reach your heart. All that I pour into you never reaches your heart. Only fragments reach; much is missed, hence the confusion.You cannot put those fragments together. Even if you try to put them together they never fit because much is missing, and then you start feeling confused. I am not confusing you – you confuse yourself. If you listen to me, all confusion will disappear. You will become fused, you will become one. But I say something, you hear something else.They strolled into the park. It was a beautiful day. Perfect for youth and the romance that youth is entitled to enjoy.“See those humming birds flapping their wings a thousand times a minute?” she said.“Yes,” he answered softly. “And they have their bills together.”“Let’s do that,” she implored.“Gee,” he said breathlessly, “I’m afraid I can’t flap my arms that fast.”This is continuously going on. I say one thing, you understand something else. You go on misunderstanding me; your prejudices come in the way. Your philosophies, your religions, your accumulated knowledge, continuously distract you – hence the confusion. Those who hear me are never confused. Those who don’t hear me are only confused. So learn how to listen. Become more alert. When you listen to me, don’t think! Become pure awareness, transparent; just a clarity, mirrorlike – don’t distort. Just listen, there is no hurry to decide.I am not saying believe what I am saying – I am neither saying believe it, nor am I saying don’t believe it – I am simply saying listen to it. There is no question of belief or disbelief. If you have listened rightly, things will start happening. So don’t be in a hurry to judge whether what I am saying is right, or that what I am saying is wrong. I am not asking for your conviction, your approval or disapproval. I am simply asking for your transparent, mirrorlike clarity. In that very clarity, whatsoever is true reaches deep into your heart, sinks deep; and whatsoever is untrue never penetrates that clarity, that transparency. Transparency is the only protection against the untrue.Right now, what is happening? You are not transparent, so only distorted things enter. Whatsoever goes with your prejudices enters in, and whatsoever goes against your prejudices you don’t allow, you don’t hear. You don’t even want to hear that it has been said because you feel afraid. If you hear it, your prejudices may become weakened, may become loose. Your whole investment in the past is at stake every moment with me. What I am saying is rebellion, it is not tradition. If you cling to the tradition, there will be great confusion. If you cling to the scripture, there will be great confusion. Don’t cling to anything. Just listen to me, and you will see that there is no confusion. Out of that clarity understanding arises.Understanding is not intellectual; it is not a by-product of thinking. Understanding arises when you listen to me totally – as if your whole body had become your ears; mind, body, soul, all together, you are just drinking me in. Then understanding arises. Understanding never confuses; understanding has no possibility of confusion.Sometimes I say things that shock you because that is the only way to wake you. The purpose is not to shock you; the purpose is to awaken you. Sometimes I say things to uproot your prejudices. I am not against them. I am simply trying to clean your ground; as if a person wanted to plant a new garden, a new lawn. What is he going to do first? The weeds have to be removed; the soil has to be cleaned of all stones, weeds, grass. If that is not done, then roses cannot grow there. While I am talking to you it is a continuous effort to uproot weeds. If you cling to those weeds, you will feel very disturbed: I am uprooting, and you are trying to protect them – then there is a constant fight between me and you.That’s why I insist so much that this fight disappears if you become a sannyasin – if you become an initiate. You are more in tune with me, you are less afraid of me. You feel more deeply in love with me, more en rapport, and work becomes easy. When you don’t protect those prejudices, things can be done fast; the ground can be cleaned very easily. Once the ground is clean, then there is a possibility of beautiful roses.A well brought up young lady, who handled a car well in the country but wasn’t so sure of herself in traffic, decided to take a course at one of the city auto schools to brush up on her driving. To her utter astonishment, soon after she had started out on her first lesson, the instructor leaned over, close to her ear and queried softly, “Did I hear you call me ‘darling’?”“Sir!” cried the young lady, hotly, forgetting all about her driving and turning to glare.“That’s just to teach you, Miss,” the instructor responded sternly, “no matter what anybody says to you, keep your eyes on the road.”Sometimes I shock you; sometimes I say things that you had never expected I would say. Unexpected, you cannot believe that I am saying it; it simply shakes you to your very roots. But remember only one thing: I am not enjoying shocking you. The purpose is to awaken you. When the alarm goes off in the morning it is not against you. You may feel that it is against you – it looks like an enemy: you want to sleep, it is cold, you would like to have another turn, and snuggle under the blanket, and have a little more of a beautiful dream, and now this alarm goes on and on and on. I have known people who have thrown their alarm clocks across the room. It is natural, but foolish too. Sometimes you may be very hurt by me – your prejudices are deep-rooted, of long standing – but my purpose is not to shock, my purpose is to wake you.Confusion is coming because you are not hearing me. I am not responsible for it, you are responsible for it. Remember one very basic rule: whatsoever happens to you, you are finally responsible for it; nobody else can be responsible for it. Take responsibility. Whatsoever happens to you – misery, happiness, confusion, sadness, clarity – nobody else is responsible. Never throw your responsibility on somebody else because that is the way of the slave. Then you will remain a slave forever and ever; you will never become free.If I can confuse you, then what sort of clarity do you have? Then anybody can confuse you; then wherever you go, people will confuse you. When will you become unconfused, and how? No, you have to understand that unless you want to be confused, nobody can confuse you. And unless you want to become clear, nobody can give you clarity either. If I could give you clarity, I would have already given it. There would be no need to wrestle with you every day. I would simply give it to you and be finished, but it cannot be given.You have to learn one basic law: that whatsoever happens to you, you are responsible for it – nobody else, never – it is always you. This is the way that one becomes a master of one’s own being. When you are unhappy, remember you are making yourself unhappy. Maybe there is an excuse outside, but the excuse can never make anybody unhappy unless you want to be unhappy. When you are happy, there is an excuse outside. Once you have understood you will find that there are always millions of excuses outside, you have to choose. If you want to have misery, if you need misery, if you love misery, you can always find excuses, they are available. The world gives a great opportunity to each kind of mood, at any moment, to each state of mind. You can choose, but the choice is yours.The third question:Osho,I want to be holy but every time I try it always comes out “good girl.”The very idea “to be holy” is stupid. Be aware of it – it is an ego trip. The very idea of being holy means to be holier than others; it is comparative. In that very idea you want to have your superiority over others: others are unholy, you are holy. So naturally it always comes out “good girl” – it is bound to. You will become a goody-goody, and that is one of the ugliest things that can happen to a person. You will lose all life. You will become a saint, but a saint is a dead person, just pure ego, pious ego, and nothing else.This is a new turn in the world of the ego. First you want to be a famous star, or you want to be the richest man in the world, or the president of a country, or a prime minister – things like that. Then one day you feel that is useless. You see the prime ministers, and you see the presidents and you see the richest man and the most famous star committing suicide, and then you start feeling frustrated because they have not attained anything. Then there is only one more way: to look into the world of religion. “Become holy – maybe these holy people have attained something.” But I tell you, those who want to attain, never attain. Whatsoever their goal, whatsoever their object, they always fail. Frustration is their fate, they are doomed to fail; failure is their destiny. Why? Because all attainment is in the future, and life is herenow.So don’t bother to be good, don’t bother to be this and that, just be whosoever you are. Accept it and live it. If you can start living totally, fully, not holding anything back, if you start flowing totally, your life will have a fragrance; that fragrance I call religion. It has nothing to do with holy or unholy, with virtue and sin – no. It is the fragrance of a flowing life, of a dynamic life, of one who is not stagnant, of one who is not divided, of one who has no future, no past, of one who has only the present – only the moment – and lives it. Live each moment as if you are going to die the very next, and then there will be great intensity and great passion. You will be aflame with life. That being aflame is what being divine is to me.If you ask me, that is my definition of holiness: aflame with life – as if a torch is burning from both ends together. A great passion, a great fire… This is the last moment, why not live it totally? If God allows you another moment, again it is the last moment. Don’t wait, don’t postpone.All these ideas of being good are of postponement. How can you be good right now? You will have to wait for tomorrow. To be good means to train, to discipline yourself, to drop many things, to grow new qualities, to have a new character – a new morality. Of course it is going to be very painful because you will be constantly in a fight with yourself. Anything that creates a rift in your being is ugly. Remember, anything that creates a division in your being, which makes you split, makes you schizophrenic, is pathological. Be total, be one.So don’t judge. The moment you say, “This is good and that is bad,” you have judged, you have divided. Now you will be in trouble. Whenever you will be doing bad, you will only be doing it half-heartedly because one part will say, “This is bad, don’t do it! You know this is bad, don’t do it!” And if you do good, you will feel that it is not satisfying, and the bad part will go on pulling you: “Why are you wasting your energy, why are you fasting while you could have feasted? Why do you remain in celibacy when you could have loved a beautiful woman?”When you are trying to be good, whatsoever you have called bad will take revenge, will go on pulling you from the back and, sooner or later, it will pull you into the bad. When you are doing the bad, when you are making love to a woman, suddenly you will remember that Mahatma Gandhi says brahmacharya is the only thing to be done. Making love to a woman, and in comes a mahatma and stands just between you and your woman. Again everything is disturbed. You cannot love perfectly, totally, absolutely; and then there is frustration. You feel that you have committed a sin, then you want to do something good to keep the balance, otherwise you will become very lopsided. This is how I see people: moving from good to bad, from bad to good, again and again; their whole life is just a continuous movement between opposite polarities.What is my teaching? What is Tao? Tao is to accept life in its totality and don’t divide it. There is nothing good and nothing bad. Whatsoever happens, let it happen. Allow it. Don’t struggle.When you listen to me, suddenly your mind will say, “This is dangerous” because you know you have repressed many bad things, so if you allow them, those bad things will start coming into your mind. Just listening to me, watch your mind. When I say, “Whatsoever happens, let it happen,” you have started planning to escape with the neighbor’s wife because that has been coming naturally to you – you have been avoiding it because you are a good person, a respectable citizen. What to do then?I have heard about an office…The boss was very worried because people were not working as they should. He asked a psychologist what to do. The psychologist said, “Just put many signs in the office: Do It Today Because Tomorrow Never Comes.” So he fixed many signs – on almost every table, every wall – and by the evening the psychologist came to inquire what happened.The boss was crying, and he said, “You destroyed my whole business!”“But,” said the psychologist, “what happened?”He said, “What happened! My typist escaped with the receptionist, the cashier has taken all the money, and the office boy wanted to murder me. All finished! They said, ‘Do it today. Why are you waiting? Tomorrow never comes.’ They were all thinking to do these things… ‘This is the last chance if you want to do it’ – so they have done it.”When I say, “Do whatsoever happens,” suddenly you will feel a great urge to do all that you have repressed. That’s natural, but that is only because you have repressed; it will come and go. If you allow it, soon it will be released; you will become normal. You will become absolutely normal and healthy. And once you have become balanced and you are not continuously being pulled in opposite directions, an integrity arises in you – and I call that integrity real holiness. It has nothing to do with good, nothing to do with bad; it has something to do with totality.The word holy comes from the word whole. Whole means total. The basic root is right: holy means one who is living a whole life. Don’t try to be goody-goody; allow everything, then your life will have richness. A goody-goody person is nauseating. If you have the misfortune of living with a goody-goody person, you will feel like vomiting. He is so good, no salt at all – saccharine. A man needs a little salt too, a man needs a little bitterness too, a man needs a little sourness too that makes life enriched. A man needs a little Devil too, then you live more fully.I am not against the Devil; I am all for God, but I am not against the Devil. In fact, if a God is really a God, he will absorb the Devil into himself too, he will not deny him. A God, if he really is God, must be capable of absorbing the Devil too. If you ask my definition, God is one who can absorb the Devil without becoming devilish, and the Devil is one who cannot absorb God at all without becoming godly – that’s the definition. The Devil is very incapable. He cannot absorb God without becoming godly and God is infinity: he can absorb the Devil without becoming devilish. Even the Devil will have a place in God’s being and will give some beauty to God, will function as a background, will become the field. If God is the figure, the Devil will become the field.If you want to paint, you have to use many colors. If you use only one color, your painting will be very dull and boring. The more colors, the richer the painting will be. If you drop the black color completely, your painting will miss something. The black is needed because only through the black does the white become loud and clear.So I am not teaching you to be good; I am not teaching you to be bad; I am teaching you only to be whole. To be whole is to be healthy, and to be healthy is to be holy.The ego does not want to be whole; because once you are whole the ego cannot exist. The ego exists only in the split. When you are fighting with yourself, the ego exists. The ego always exists through conflict; conflict is its food, its nourishment. So if you are whole, the ego cannot exist. You can see it. You can go and watch the criminals – they have their ego, you can go and watch your saints – they have their ego: the ego of the good and the ego of the bad. But if you can find a man who has no ego, he will be neither a sinner nor a saint; he will be very simple. He will not claim anything good or bad; he will not make any claim at all.The ego is created by the rift. When you are fighting, the ego comes in; when you are not fighting, the ego cannot come in. Ego is a tension. If you want the ego, then divide yourself as fully as possible – become two persons. That is what is happening to many people, that is what has happened to all of humanity. Everybody has become two persons: one voice says, “Do this,” the other voice says, “Don’t do that.” Then the ego arises. Out of friction, ego arises and ego is very intoxicating; it makes you unconscious. This is the whole mechanism.For ego, you have to fight, divide, create conflict. Inner violence, inner war – then ego arises, and ego intoxicates. It makes you very unconscious, as if you were always on drugs. It does not allow you to see things as they are.Another athletic drunk appeared at a ticket window in Louisville with a companion slung over his shoulder, out cold. “One seat to Cincinnati,” he demanded.The ticket seller said, “How about that big lug you’re carrying?”“Him?” scoffed the drunk. “Thass jus’ my little six-year-old boy Abner.”“Six years old, eh?” said the ticket seller. “Why, he’s fully six feet tall, weighs about one eighty-five, and has a beard three inches long!”The drunk dumped his companion on the platform and grumbled, “Dammit, Abner! I told you to shave!”A drunk is a drunk; he cannot see things as they are. He projects, imagines, and he thinks that if he is befooled, he can befool the whole world.The egoist – watch the egoist – he thinks that if he is befooled, he can befool everybody. Have you not observed the fact that your ego becomes very apparent to everybody else except you? You know everybody else’s ego except your own. The husband knows the ego of the wife, the wife knows the ego of the husband, the children know the ego of the parents, the parents know the egos of each of the children – nobody knows his own. Deep down it creates such an intoxicated state that when everybody is aware of your ego, only you are not aware. And if people say something to make the truth and the facts known to you, you are bound to misinterpret it, or you are bound to hear something else. When somebody says that you are very egoistic, you will say, “I know he himself is an egoist, so this is all his ego talking.”She wasn’t exactly anything to look at, but she had heart and a desire for show business. “I’m going to London’s Theatrical Agency about a job” she told a friend.The friend eyed her carefully. He saw her bulbous figure, her ugly face, her stringy hair. He thought about her scratchy voice and her sloppy dress. “There’s no use going there,” he said diplomatically, “unless you’ve got good legs.”“Why?” she was genuinely puzzled. “Haven’t they got an elevator?”It is very difficult to understand even if it is pointed out; even if everybody points it out you will not understand. You remain drugged.Two drunks registered at a hotel and asked for twin beds. However, in the darkness they both got into the same bed.“Hey,” yelled the first drunk, “they gypped me. There’s another man in my bed.”“There’s a guy in my bed too,” called the second.“Let’s throw ‘em out,” called back the first.A terrific wrestling match ensued and finally one drunk went sailing out of the bed. “How’d you make out?” the drunk on the floor called.“I threw my guy out,” the bedded drunk replied. “How about you?”“He threw me out.”“Well, that makes us even. Get into bed with me and go to sleep.”Be watchful about the ego. It is the greatest drug that exists and it drugs you so badly that you become almost incapable of seeing what is what. The ego is created by conflict between good and bad, so if you want to drop the ego, you will have to drop the conflict between good and bad. And to drop the conflict between good and bad is the greatest act of courage a man can afford – that brings you to the very door of divinity.God is neither good nor bad. The day you are neither good nor bad you become divine.The fourth question:Osho,I love you, but these questions you are making up are too much – so I must ask one, not that I am curious, but what is this Hollywood business?The question is from Devesh. He will not ask unless he is really in difficulty, so I have to answer. He is not one to ask just out of curiosity. His sleep must be disturbed. It must be haunting his mind. He must have brooded over it for many days because this is nothing new, this Hollywood business: it is already very old news.A few things: first, you know journalists… All over the world that is the worst profession a person can choose and then Indian journalists… I cannot stand two types of persons: the journalist and the professor and unfortunately I have been both in my life, maybe that’s why I cannot stand them. So it is a fiction created by journalists. Maybe Laxmi was talking to them and she may have said something which could have been interpreted as if I were going to Hollywood. Maybe she was talking about the “holy wood.”Adolf Hitler was very worried about his death. Naturally, he had killed so many people, it was natural that he should be worried about his own death – all those killed Jews must have been haunting him. So he inquired. Somebody suggested, “There is a great Jewish astrologer, the greatest in Germany. Only he can say something about when you will die, how you will die; and he has always predicted rightly – he can be relied upon. All his predictions have been one hundred per cent correct.”But he was a Jew. Still Adolf Hitler called him and asked him. The Jew brooded over it, closed his eyes, and he said, “Yes it has come: you will die on a Jewish holiday.”Hitler said, “Make it exact. What do you mean? What Jewish holiday?”And the man said, “That is difficult. One thing is certain: whenever you die that will be a Jewish holiday.”So, wherever Osho goes, that will be Hollywood, that’s natural. Don’t be worried about such things.The fifth question:Osho,In the last few days my mind has been playing with this question: What happens when a hard-way person, for example a follower of Gurdjieff, comes across a Taoist master?A beautiful question, significant: What will happen if a follower of Gurdjieff comes across a Taoist master?What happens when a river comes falling, tumbling, down off a hillock upon strong rocks? If you look, you will think, “Those rocks are so hard, what can the river do; what can this waterfall do?” But if you come after a few years, you will find those rocks are gone; they have become sand. The soft water has become victorious over hard rocks. Lao Tzu calls it, “the watercourse way,” the way of the soft, the way of the feminine.What happens when a man, a very strong man and a very fragile beautiful woman come across each other, what happens? The man looks like a rock and the woman looks like just a small rivulet, tumbling from a hillock. But whatsoever the appearances, the final victory is of the feminine; the woman wins over. She is soft, the man is hard, and the paradox is that the woman surrenders and through surrender she conquers; and the man never surrenders, but even never surrendering, one day he finds that he has been taken over, he has been possessed. Even the strongest men, Napoleon or Alexander, are strong when they are outside: when they come home they are no longer strong. Then their fragile wife is all strength. There is a strength in softness.Tao is the way of the soft, the feminine way, the watercourse way. Gurdjieff’s way is the way of the rock. If it happens that a Taoist and a Gurdjieff follower meet, in the beginning you will say that the follower of Gurdjieff is winning, but finally, eventually you will find that he has disappeared and the Taoist has won over. That has always been so. You cannot defeat the soft. Maybe, for the time being, you can have a certain victory, but you cannot really defeat the soft.It is impossible to defeat the soft. The soft is so fragile, so ready to disappear; that’s why it cannot be forced to disappear.Lao Tzu says, “Nobody can defeat me because I am already defeated. Nobody can defeat me because I don’t hanker for victory at all.” How can you defeat him who has no desire to be victorious? The way of the hard, what Buddhists call vajrayana, “the way of the diamond”… The diamond is the hardest thing in the world – vajrayana is exactly the right word for it: vajrayana the way of the diamond. But even the diamond will have to give way to water.It has always been so, and it is good that it is so. It simply shows that God wins. The one who is humble, the one who is meek, wins. Says Jesus, “Blessed are the meek, for theirs is the Kingdom of God.”The Gurdjieffian way is the way of the will. It takes you to the last but one step. It takes you exactly to the last but one step. The final step has to be Taoist because through the will you can come to a peak of your will, but then one has to surrender that peak of the will; it has to be surrendered. The only difference between the path of surrender and the path of will is that on the path of surrender you surrender as the first step, on the path of will you surrender as the last step – that’s the only difference. What is required as the last step on the path of will is required as the first step on the path of surrender. So those who are wise will choose the path of surrender because what is the point of struggling so hard for so long, and then finally relaxing, then finally dropping everything? What is the point? If you are incapable of relaxation, okay, then you go on the path of will; otherwise the path of surrender is simply the wisest way because it is the path of least resistance, in fact of non-resistance.The question is significant and it is from Purna. She herself is a little rocklike, very hard. She is a woman, but very hard, very German – she is a German, very strong-willed. She could have moved on the Gurdjieffian path very easily. Here she is in the wrong company, but she is relaxing. By and by she is coming to understand. Her struggle, her fight, is going, her ego is dropping. The soft will win over.The question is not just an intellectual one, that’s why I say it is significant; it is very important to Purna: it is her situation. If she were in a Gurdjieff school she would be on the right track as far as her own nature is concerned – superficial nature, of course. The way she is right now, she would have felt very in tune. Here she is in a Taoist world, but great is her courage – she is trying, and she will succeed. She will become effortless one day.So the question has come from the very core of her heart. It is her question; it is not intellectual gymnastics. It is not that she has read it somewhere, it has come out of her own situation. She is rocklike, and the rock has started to hurt, and so now she understands it.Now the rock has to be melted. Just relax and allow me to melt it – it will disappear, it will become sand and will be gone. The water is already falling on you – just give way.The sixth question:Osho,Why am I so possessive about things?Ordinarily everybody is possessive of things because nobody possesses themselves; it is a substitute. When you don’t possess yourself, you start possessing things. It gives a sort of security – at least you possess something: a big house, a big balance in the bank, a beautiful woman, a wife, a husband, children, security, respectability. You possess something; you don’t possess yourself. To take your eyes away from that inner zeroness, nothingness, that emptiness, you go on filling things all around you. But it is not going to satisfy because whatsoever you possess will never make you full inside; you will remain empty.The idea of possessing things arises because we don’t possess our being. Because the being is missing, we start moving into the world of having – “Have this, have that,” but you remain frustrated. Deep down the emptiness is felt again and again and again. You cannot deceive yourself; one day or other you will have to recognize the futility of it. You can possess the whole world and yet you will remain poor. Unless you possess yourself, you will remain poor. There is only one richness and that is to possess oneself, to be oneself.So it is not only a question with you, it is with everybody: it is a very human question. Have you noticed? Men are less interested in things than women – why? Because the woman has been so repressed down the centuries that she cannot even imagine possessing herself. She has been possessed like a thing; she has been completely dispossessed from her center, hence she has become so interested in things. She continuously thinks about things: “Have more money, have a bigger house, have a bigger car, ornaments, jewels, diamonds, this and that – go on having.” The woman seems to be almost crazy. Why? She has been completely dispossessed by man, she has been thrown off-center, she has been turned into a thing, so the only way to feel that she is, is to have a fur coat, to have diamonds, to have gold. That is the only way she can have a little feeling that she is also somebody.I have heard a definition: One woman talking is monologue, two women talking is a catalogue. The catalogue is their Bible, their Koran. It is the only thing they read – The Whole Earth Catalogue. But why? Why has this ugly situation arisen? Because they have never been allowed to possess themselves. The man is the master and the woman is the slave – that’s why. But man is also only the master for the name’s sake, so he is also interested in things.You become really human only when you start moving toward the inner direction of possessing yourself. It can happen only through meditation. Money and meditation are the two directions. If you want to possess things – money; if you want to possess yourself – meditation. If you possess yourself, money loses all meaning. I am not saying that you will renounce money; I am not saying that you will not earn money, but it loses its importance. Then it is fun, then it is a utility; then you earn and you spend, then you are not a miser; then it is a good medium of exchange – very helpful, but nothing more. It is not your soul; it is not your god.Ordinarily money seems to be the only god in the world. People look at money as they look at God: they pray. In India, you will be surprised; they say that India is a religious country, but in fact you cannot find a more materialistic country anywhere. This is one of the most materialistic countries – they worship money. They have a festival, Diwali, when they worship money – they actually worship it. They pile up money and worship it like God with mantras, chanting, and a priest offering flowers to the money.When you possess yourself you use money, you don’t allow money to use you. So this is just an indication of your becoming a little more alert. Everybody is deeply interested in things, but when you become a little more alert then you recognize the fact: “Why am I so interested in things?” A good indication, a good symbol, that you have become alert about it. Through this alertness you will start turning inward.Recognize the fact that you are empty, and then immediately the idea will arise, “Then what am I to do?” Go into this emptiness. It cannot be filled by anything from the outside. If you go in, it can be filled. If you reach to your center of being, it will be filled. And that is real fullness. Then you are an emperor – outwardly you may be just a beggar. Then you are really rich, and the richness is such that nobody can take it away from you. Even death cannot separate you from your richness.You are carrying this richness as a treasure in your being, but you have not looked there. Start looking inside, search your house. Take a small candle of meditation and go in.The seventh question:Osho,You say that you are “all light.” What about your name: “Lord of the night?”Just one of my consistent inconsistencies.The last question:Osho,Since the first discourse, I have noticed you always looking up before you begin a question. I had thought that there was something mystical in this, that you were “looking toward God.” So this morning, after lecture, I went up to the dais and looked. What a good laugh I had. Thank you Osho, you trickster.I will tell you a few anecdotes…The witness was being badgered by the cross-examining lawyer.“You sure it was exactly five minutes?”“Yes, sir.”“I’m going to give you a test,” the lawyer said, taking out a pocket watch. “Tell me when five minutes are up.”At exactly five minutes lapse the witness yelled, “Time’s up!”After losing the case, the lawyer, being a good sport, walked over to the witness and asked, “How could you tell the time so exactly?”“Simple,” was the answer. “By the clock on the wall behind you.”I am not looking at God because God is everywhere; there is no way to avoid him. You cannot look at anything else: God is everywhere. When I look at you, I look at God. When I look at the trees, I look at God. When I close my eyes, I look at God because only God is. God, to me, is exactly synonymous with existence. So I cannot look for God anywhere.There is a beautiful story in Nanak’s life. He went to the Kaaba. In the night, when he was preparing his bed and was just ready to go to sleep, the imams of the Kaaba came and they said, “We have heard you are a holy man, but you seem to be stupid – you have the soles of your feet toward the Kaaba. This is insulting! Turn your feet somewhere else.”And Nanak said, “You do it; I don’t know of any place where it would not be disrespectful. God is everywhere; so wherever I put my feet, in whatever direction, God will be there. You please do it.”The story goes on… Up to this point the story seems to be factual, then it takes a mythological turn, it becomes a parable. It is said that the imams tried to turn Nanak’s feet in every direction, but wherever they turned his feet, the Kaaba moved there. It cannot happen; things like that don’t happen, but the meaning is clear.I cannot look anywhere without looking at God, so there is no way to look at God. You thought that it was something mystical. The mind is always hankering for mystery, for sensation, for some thrill. The mind is always creating and projecting and hankering for mysteries, and because of your created, fabricated mysteries, you are not aware of the great mystery that surrounds you.Stop these childish games. The whole of life is mysterious; there is no need for other mysteries. Stop playing these games, otherwise you will go on creating fictions, you will go on imagining things. You imagine something, and if it is not proved right, then you are frustrated. If it is proved right, your ego soars high. In both ways it is dangerous. Just look, but don’t look for mysteries, and the greatest mystery will be revealed to you.Otherwise people create UFO’s and a thousand and one things – Atlantis and the continent of Mu. People go on creating and people become very involved in such things: that in the past astronauts landed on the earth, and books like that are sold by the millions. That simply shows the foolish human mind – always seeking for something miraculous. That’s why magicians become mahatmas. If they can do a trick, which any ordinary magician can do, they become great mahatmas – because you are in search of some mystery. You want some mystery.I am a very non-mysterious person. There is no mystery at all. So, once and for all, let it be dropped. Simply start looking at things as they are. Don’t try to find some mystery, don’t create fictions, don’t be too imaginative, and I can promise you that if you stop creating mysteries, God’s mystery will be revealed to you. Then everything is mysterious: the trees, the birds, the rocks, the moon, the sun, the stars – everything is mysterious. A small dewdrop is so mysterious – what else can you want? A sprouting seed is so mysterious – what else can you want? A man, a woman, a child, is so mysterious, but because of your created fictions your eyes have become dull.It was good that you came and looked – there is nothing but a clock. And the clock is needed because my own inner clock stopped long ago. For me, time has disappeared so I have to be dependent: I have to look again and again at the clock. My own sense of time has completely gone. The day your past disappears and the future, your time sense disappears also because the present is not part of time; the present is part of eternity.Somebody asked Jesus, “Can you tell us what will be one of the most significant factors in your Kingdom of God?” And he said, “There shall be time no longer.”In the Kingdom of God there is no time. Time is a mind fiction. Mind is time. The day your mind disappears, time disappears. Then you have to be constantly dependent on the clock outside because in the inner world there is always just now – nothing moves. It is always present, it is just present; it never becomes past, it never becomes future. Nothing is moving inside me. The future is not turning into the present; the present is not turning into the past. The inner clock has stopped.His failing textile business had driven a man out of the industry and into an asylum, where his relatives came to visit him. They stood around for a while, and then, as the end of visiting hours approached, one of them asked, “What time is it?”“Fifteen to,” said the textile man.“Fifteen to what?”“I don’t know,” he replied. “Times got so bad I had to lay off one of the hands.”So when you have only one hand on your watch, you can only say “Fifteen to, twenty to, thirty to…” but to what? Thirty to what? It is impossible. And in my clock, times got so bad that I had to lay off both hands; both hands have disappeared.Once a madman offered me a watch. He said to me, ‘I have a most unusual watch to offer you. It never needs any repairs or winding. It has no hands, no sweep second hand and no face.’“But how can you tell the time?” I asked him.“That’s easy. Ask anybody.”So I have to ask continuously. After each question I have to look up. I am not looking for God, I am looking at the most ungodly thing – the clock.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Hui Ang visited King K’ang of Sung. The king stamped his foot, coughed and said fiercely, “What pleases me is courage and strength. I take no pleasure in men who preach morality. What have you to teach me?”“Suppose that I have a way to make anyone, however brave and strong, miss when he stabs or strikes at you. Wouldn’t Your Majesty be interested?”“Excellent! This is the sort of thing I like to hear.”“But even if a stab or blow misses, it is still humiliating for you. Suppose that I have a way to prevent anyone, however brave and strong, from daring to stab or strike you. But a man who does not dare to harm you may still have the will to harm you. Suppose that I have a way to ensure that men have absolutely no will to harm you. But a man who has no will to harm you may still have no thought of loving or benefiting you. Suppose that I have a way to make every single man and woman in the world joyfully desire to love and benefit you. This is three degrees better than courage and strength. Isn’t Your Majesty interested?”“This is the sort of way I should like to find.”“The teaching of Confucius and Mo Tzu is what I have in mind. Confucius and Mo Tzu became princes without owning territory, became leaders without holding office. Every man and woman in the world craned his neck and stood on tiptoe in his eagerness for their safety and benefit. Now Your Majesty is the Lord of ten thousand chariots. If you were indeed to share the aims of these two men, everyone within your four borders would enjoy the benefit. You would be far greater than Confucius and Mo Tzu.”Hui Ang hurried out. And the king said to his courtiers, “Clever, the way he talked me round with his argument!”Tao means transcendence – transcendence of all duality, transcendence of all polarity, transcendence of all opposites. Tao is the ultimate synthesis – the synthesis of man and woman, of positive and negative, life and death, day and night, summer and winter.How does this synthesis become possible? How may one grow into that ultimate synthesis? A few things have to be understood.First, the principle of yin, the principle of femininity, is like a ladder – a ladder between hell and heaven. You can go to hell through it, and you can go to heaven through it. The direction will differ but the ladder will be the same. That ladder is the principle of yin, the principle of femininity. Nothing happens without the woman. The energy of the woman is the ladder of the lowest and of the highest, of the darkest valley and of the brightest peak. This is one of the fundamental principles of Tao. It must be understood in detail. Once it gets rooted in your heart, things will become very simple.It will be good to go into the symbol of Adam and Eve.The world does not start with Adam, it starts with Eve. It is through Eve that the serpent persuades Adam to disobey. The serpent could not persuade Adam directly – it is as if there is no direct way to man. If you want to reach man you have to go through woman. The woman functioned as a medium for evil.Then again, when Christ is born, he is born of the Virgin Mary. The Christ child was born out of virgin femininity, out of virgin yin. The highest enters through the woman.The lowest and the highest have both been through the woman.Adam stands for earth, clay – red earth, to be exact. God made Adam out of red earth. Adam represents the principle of dust unto dust. Man is the outer principle, the principle of extraversion: man is the physical body.Try to understand these symbols. Man is the physical body and God created Eve out of man’s physical body. She was something higher. First man had to be created, then woman. She was something subtler, something more refined – something of a greater synthesis. Eve was created out of a rib; Eve could not be created directly from the earth.For example: you cannot eat mud but you can eat apples; apples are on a higher plane. They come out of the mud. The tree grows out of the mud, so the apple is nothing but earth transformed. You can eat the apple and you can digest it, but if you try to eat the earth, you will die. The apple is from the earth but it is a superior synthesis – better, more digestible.God created Adam and mankind has taken it as though, because God created man first, he is primary. No, man was created first because he was very close to the earth. Then woman was created – she was not as close to the earth; she was created out of Adam, she was a higher synthesis.The name of Eve is also very significant. It means the heart. Adam means the earth and Eve means the heart. God told Adam to name things, so he named everything. When he came to name Eve he simply said loudly, “She is my heart, Eve.” That became Eve’s name. Eva or Eve means the heart. Translated into the modern idiom it means the psyche. Man is the body principle, woman is the psyche. Man is body, woman is mind. Everything happens through the mind.To do bad things, your mind must be convinced of it first; to do good, your mind must be convinced of it first. Everything happens first as an idea then it can be actualized. Your body cannot be persuaded to do something unless your mind is ready. Even if illness enters your body, it enters through the mind. Anything that ever happens, happens through the mind. That is the meaning of the parable: the serpent persuaded Eve. Only the mind can be persuaded, convinced, seduced, and then the mind can persuade the body very easily. In fact, the body follows the mind like a shadow. Once your mind has a thought, it is bound to be translated into actuality.Through Eve, Adam fell. Through Eve, he was expelled from the garden of God. Through Eve came this great adventure we call the world. Through Eve, he disobeyed.I have heard…A man was brought to a court and the policeman said, “Either he is mad or he is completely drunk, because he was just standing in the middle of the road. I told him many times to move but he would not. I was surprised because I didn’t think that he was drunk and I didn’t think that he was mad. He seemed to be sane in every way and I smelled his breath and he had not been drinking. But he would not move from the middle of the road.”The magistrate said, “Tell me. Why were you standing there? Why didn’t you move when the policeman was telling you to again and again?”The man was a very tiny man, very weak and thin. He said, “Sir, I had to choose between the law of the government and the law of my wife.”The magistrate said, “What do you mean?”He said, “My wife told me to meet her at exactly that spot at twelve o’clock. So I had to choose. Naturally I chose the law of my wife.”The magistrate laughed, “That has always been the case. You go home. If that is the problem, then one has to choose the law of the wife.”Since Adam it has been so. The woman is the principle of the inner – not, certainly, of the innermost, but of the inner. She is just in the middle. The innermost you call the soul, the outermost you call the body, and just between the two is the psyche, the mind.Adam followed Eve on this adventure into the world.Then again, the parable about Jesus is the same. Jesus is born of the Virgin Mary. Why virgin? Because if you understand rightly, virgin means a mind which is absolutely pure, uncontaminated by thought. Thoughts are represented by the serpent because the ways of thoughts are very serpentine. If you watch your thoughts, you will understand why they have been represented by the serpent. Their ways are very serpentine, they walk without legs just like serpents; they wriggle within you. They are very cunning and very clever and very deceptive – like the serpent. They hide in dark holes in your unconscious, and whenever they have an opportunity, they jump upon you. In the night, in the dark night, they come out; in the daylight they hide. When you are a little alert those thoughts disappear; when you are not so alert they come out, they start influencing you.The Virgin Mary means a mind in meditation; Eve means a mind full of thoughts, full of serpents. Jesus enters the world through the Virgin Mary, through purity, through innocence. Thought is cunning; thoughtless consciousness is innocent.If you understand these beautiful parables, you will be surprised. We have not done justice to them. They are not historical facts; they are great metaphors of the inner being of man. Through Eve, Adam fell, and through the Virgin Mary, Jesus rose and again entered the world of God.One thing more. It is said that the sin of Adam was disobedience. God had said not to eat the fruit of a certain tree, the Tree of Knowledge – but the serpent persuaded Eve, and Eve persuaded Adam. It was disobedience.You will be surprised to know that the Hebrew meaning of the name Mary is rebellion. The Hebrew word is mariam. It means rebellion. Through disobedience Adam fell and through rebellion Jesus rose. Disobedience means a reaction, going against, against God; rebellion means negating the negative, going against the world, going against the serpents. Eve listened to the serpents and went against God; Jesus rebelled against the serpents and listened to God.Disobedience is political; rebellion is religious. Disobedience only brings disorder; rebellion, real rebellion, brings a radical change in your being – a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, a conversion.But both Adam and Jesus happened through the feminine principle. In Taoist language the feminine principle is called yin and the male principle is called yang. Yang is ambition, yang is aggression, yang is desire and projection, yang is political. Yin is religious. Whenever you are ambitious it is impossible for you to be religious; whenever you are religious it is impossible for you to be political. They don’t go together. They don’t mix. They cannot mix. Their very nature is like trying to mix water and oil.Ambition and meditation never mix, they cannot mix. The politician functions through the male principle and the sage functions through the feminine principle. That’s why the sages become so soft, so feminine, so round, so beautiful. A certain grace surrounds them. And the beauty is certainly not only of the body – sometimes it happens that the body may not be beautiful at all.In early Christianity there was a principle that Jesus was the ugliest person in the world. By and by Christians dropped that idea, they didn’t like it. But it had something beautiful in it. It said that the body was ugly but still, when you came across Jesus, you would be suddenly surprised, overtaken, possessed, overwhelmed by his beauty. His body was ugly. If you saw a picture, you would see only his ugliness. But if you went to him, entered his actual presence, you would forget all about his ugliness because so much beauty was flowing, so much beauty was pouring out, raining. You would not even remember that he was ugly. So those who had not seen him used to think that he was ugly and those who had seen him used to say that he was the most beautiful person.The body is not the question. The sage does not live in the body or as the body – he lives through the body. The politician is nothing but the body, the extrovert. The body is extrovert, the psyche is introvert, and when you transcend both, Tao arises. When you are neither extrovert nor introvert, when you are not going into the outer nor into the inner, when you are not going anywhere, there is tremendous stillness – no movement because there is no motivation. Your inner flame is no longer wavering because there is no direction to go; there is no purpose to fulfill. There is nowhere to be and nobody else to be, you are absolutely content with the moment. Then you have transcended man and woman and the polarity. In that transcendence is Tao.This transcendence has been taught in different ways all over the world in different terms. I would like to explain one term to you because it will help. The term is Israel. It is not the name of a certain race – certainly not of the Jews – and it is not a name of a certain individual. “Israel” is exactly what Tao is.Try to understand. The word Israel is made of three symbols: is-ra-el. Is means the feminine principle. Is comes from the Egyptian word isis. Isis means the moon goddess; the moon is the feminine principle. Remember the word moon because in Hindu metaphors the moon is also the symbol of the feminine.In Yoga they say there are three passages in the human being: the moon, the sun, and the transcendental. Through one nostril you breathe the moon energy; through another nostril you breathe the sun energy. And deep inside, when both breathings stop, then you transcend. That is called sushumna ida, pingala, sushumna.Israel is made of three symbols. Is comes from Isis the Egyptian goddess of the moon or the Babylonian goddess Ishtar who is also the moon goddess. This is the principle of yin, the feminine. Ra comes from the Egyptian sun god. It represents the masculine principle, yang. And el comes from elohim which is the same root from which the Mohammedans derive Allah. The Hebrew word for God is elohim; el comes from there. It represents the meeting of the feminine and the masculine and their transcendence too. Israel exactly means Tao.If you are dominated by the sun, you will be aggressive, madly aggressive, ambitious, political, hot, burning will, desire and passion. If you are dominated by the moon, you will be cool, non-ambitious, non-aggressive, receptive, peaceful, silent. Both have to be transcended because both are lopsided. One has to come to a moment when one can say, “I am neither man nor woman.” That’s when a man becomes a Buddha or a man becomes a Christ or a man becomes a Krishna: when he is neither man nor woman, neither moon nor sun, neither “is” nor “ra,” neither yin nor yang. He simply is, purely is. All formulations have disappeared.But this only happens by and by. First you have to drop the principle of “ra” – the principle of the sun, the male energy – and you have to move into the feminine, into the female. And from there you have to move into the beyond.Everything happens through the feminine principle – remember it, always remember it. It is the middle principle, so whether you are going beyond or you are going below makes no difference – it is the ladder.With the body, with the sun energy, with the male, you become a rapist, you rape life. You are not a lover. Science comes out of sun energy; science is male-oriented. That’s why the East could not develop it. The East has lived through the moon principle – passive, silent, easygoing, not trying to conquer, in deep love with nature, not trying to fight. The East has never been a rapist, the West has raped nature. Hence the problem of ecology has arisen: all nature is being destroyed.With the feminine principle, with the moon principle, there is love. You love but you don’t rape. Sometimes the physical act may look the same, but the innermost quality is different.I have heard about a woman who was bringing a complaint against a man in the court. The magistrate asked, “You say that this man raped you again and again. When did he rape you?”And the woman said, “When? January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. The whole year – rape and rape and rape and nothing else.”The magistrate was surprised. He said, “How could he rape you the whole year?”The woman said, “He is my husband.”“But then why do you call it rape? Legally it is not rape.”The woman said, “It is still rape. He did not love me.”You can rape even your wife if you don’t love her. The physical act of making love to or raping a woman may be the same, but the inner quality differs.With the sun energy, science is born: it is the rape of nature. With the moon energy, poetry, art, painting, dance, music are born: it is love playing with nature. The East has lived through art, through music, dance, drama. The West has been trying to use male energy too much. The West has lost balance, but so has the East; no society has yet evolved which can be called “Israel,” which can be called Tao, which has transcended both or synthesized both in such harmony that the antagonism has disappeared.Tao is the goal: to create a human being who is fully integrated, totally integrated, and also to create a human society which is totally integrated.Now this story. These few things I have told you will help you to understand it.Hui Ang visited King K’ang of Sung. The king stamped his foot, coughed and said fiercely, “What pleases me is courage and strength. I take no pleasure in men who preach morality. What have you to teach me?”Now look at the attitude. This is not an attitude of somebody who wants to learn – it is the attitude of the rapist who wants to snatch. The king stamped his foot, coughed and said fiercely, “What pleases me is courage and strength. I take no pleasure in men who preach morality. What have you to teach me?” This is no way to learn. This is insulting. No master would agree to teach this man. In fact, no master would visit the palace of such a man. This man is unworthy even of being talked to.But this Hui Ang is a Confucian. Disciples of Confucius used to go to the courts. Their whole effort was to persuade the politicians, the ministers, the kings, the princes. They thought that if you could persuade the king, you could change the whole society. It is the oldest illusion, the ancientmost illusion – that if you can persuade the politician, it will be easy to change the society; or, if you can change the politician, it will be easy to change the society; or, if you change the ruling party, it will be easy to change the society. It has never happened.You can change the politician; you can even convince the politician about beautiful things, but deep down the politician remains the politician. He understands only one language: the language of ambition, the language of greed, the language of the world. He is outgoing, extrovert.He coughed, stamped his foot and said fiercely, “What pleases me is courage and strength.” The moment you say that, you have some prejudice. The moment you say that this pleases you and that does not please you, you can never learn what truth is because truth has no need to fit with your pleasure. Truth has no obligation to fit with what pleases you and what does not please you. You have to fit with truth; truth does not to fit with you.It is said that there are two categories of men in the world: one who would like truth to stand by their side and the other who would like to stand by the side of truth. The first category is that of the politician – the aggressive, the sun-energy, the ambitious. The second category is that of the religious, the moon principle, the non-aggressive, the receptive. Remember this: never want truth to stand by your side because whatsoever stands by your side, whatsoever is ready to stand by your side, cannot be truth. It will be a lie. Only lies are ready to stand by your side, truth never. You will have to stand by the side of truth. If you have that much courage – courage to drop your old prejudices, likes and dislikes – only then can you go into truth, otherwise not.Now what does this man say? Look at his gesture. He stamped his foot, coughed and said fiercely, “What pleases me is courage and strength. I take no pleasure in men who preach morality.” Yes, how can a politician take any interest in morality? Morality comes from the feminine principle. Look, all the great teachers in the world have created more femininity in the world – Buddha, Christ, Krishna. They have all created more and more of the feminine, the soft.Friedrich Nietzsche criticized both Buddha and Jesus; he said they were not real men. And he was right. He said that they have destroyed manliness. And he was right – right for the wrong reasons, but still right. Buddha, Mahavira, Christ, certainly have taught something which will make you less aggressive, which will make you less violent. And if you listen to them totally, you will become absolutely nonviolent.Naturally Nietzsche could not like it. He said that the most beautiful thing in the world was the soldier and the greatest music was war music. He said, “In my whole life’s experience, the moment that I remember again and again, the moment I call the most beautiful moment, was when a group of soldiers were marching on the road – their legs, their feet falling in tune, their boots making a rhythmic noise, their swords shining in the sun, erect, powerful, aggressive, ambitious. When I saw this group of soldiers marching in the sun it was the greatest moment of beauty that I know.”If such a man comes across Buddha, he will wonder how Buddha can be beautiful. Sitting under the tree he is so silent that you can almost forget about him. He is almost absent. His music is that of silence. His music is that of receptivity. He is just a cool phenomenon – no heat, no passion, no desire. Sitting there silently he is almost like a tree; flowering there he is almost like a tree. And in the East, particularly in India, we have thought of a buddha as a lotus which has bloomed fully – a one-thousand-petaled lotus. Yes, he is almost like a tree.For five hundred years in India, no statue of Buddha was made. Instead of a statue of Buddha, people worshipped a tree. Many statues were made of the tree, many pictures were made of the tree, many paintings were made of the tree, many temples were built, but there was no statue of Buddha, just the bodhi tree. Because Buddha was almost absent – he had become formless, he had become as if he were not. His music is that of silence. Nietzsche would not recognize the beauty of it; no politician would recognize the beauty of it.This king said: “I take no pleasure in men who preach morality.” The basis of all morality is to love and the basis of all politics is to hate. The moralist says, “Love even your enemy,” and the politician says, “Hate even your friend.” If you want to see a contrast you can read Jesus and Machiavelli. Or, the Indian parallel, you can read Buddha and Chanakya. It is not just a coincidence that the part of Delhi where Indian politicians live is called Chanakyapuri – it is named after Chanakya, the Indian Machiavelli. Machiavelli says, “Don’t even trust your friend. Don’t say anything to your friend which you would not like to say to your enemy.” Why? “Because,” he says, “who knows? Your friend may become your enemy tomorrow. So don’t say anything that you would not like to say to an enemy.”Look at Jesus. He says, “Even if somebody slaps you on one cheek, give him the other one too. Love your enemy as yourself.”Naturally politicians cannot be ready to listen to the teachings of morality. Morality means love and politics means hate, hatred. Politicians may smile but hidden behind that smile is a horrible face. They may show a beautiful face but behind it they are preparing for hell. They may talk about peace but they prepare for war. Their whole life depends on destruction. Love is creation; hate is destruction.Naturally the king was not interested in any kind of morality. He said: “What pleases me is courage and strength.” Why courage and strength? Why strength?Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek,” not “Blessed are the strong,” no. “Blessed are the meek, blessed are the humble, blessed are the poor in spirit.” Not the strong, not the strong-headed but those who have soft hearts; not people like rocks but people like flowers – they are blessed.Jesus is right, but no politician will want to listen to this. This is nonsense. The politician cannot understand this language. He has his own language: the language of cunningness, calculation, hatred, domination, destruction. The politician lives on evil. How can he listen to morality?Remember, the language of politics is not the language of religion and the language of religion is not the language of politics. In fact, they are so far apart that they cannot even be translated into each other. Impossible. They are not only two languages, they are two different planes, two different worlds, two separate realities.In a way the king is sincere, he is showing his real face. The king stamped his foot, coughed and said fiercely, “What pleases me is courage and strength.” Why courage? Why have people talked so much about courage – to kill people and to be killed? Why has strength been praised so much? Because without strength it is difficult to rape nature, it is difficult to rape other people, it is difficult to conquer, to dominate – it is difficult to destroy.When a religious person talks of courage, his courage has a different meaning, remember. And when he talks of strength, his strength has a totally different meaning, remember. When a religious person calls something courageous he does not mean the same thing as the politician. For the religious, courage means to be creative; courage means to be oneself; courage means to be sincere, authentic. Courage means not to yield to lies; courage means not to allow corruption to set in in one’s own being; courage means to resist all temptations of going astray. Courage does not mean the capability to kill and be killed, no. Courage means the capacity to live and to live your own life according to your own heart.And strength does not mean the capacity of violence, strength means the capacity to understand, the capacity to know, the capacity to love, the capacity to be open. When somebody hits you it is not strength to hit him back; that is very simple, anybody can do it. Even a child can do it. But when somebody hits you and you don’t hit back, it is strength.When Jesus was crucified and he prayed to God, “Father, forgive these people because they don’t know what they are doing,” it was strength – the strength of the meek, the power of the humble.Remember, the same word, if used by different people, becomes different. In fact, there should be different dictionaries: religious dictionaries, political dictionaries. There should be different dictionaries. In a better world there will be – because the same words cannot mean the same.A diner in a restaurant rushed over to a man who was standing just near the door. “I’ve been robbed!” he screamed. “I turned my head and someone stole my brown topcoat. It had buttons on the sleeves and a fur collar!”“Hmmmmmmm,” murmured the stranger who was standing at the door. “Come to think of it, I saw a man walking out of here just a few minutes ago wearing that very coat!”“Quick, quick!” demanded the customer. “What did the guy look like?”“Terrible,” the man sighed. “The sleeves were much too short for him!”Then seeing the surprised look on the robbed man’s face he added immediately, “You see, I’m a tailor.”Your language is your language. The words have no meaning in themselves, the meaning is brought by the person who uses them.A rancher applied for a loan at a bank.“How much do you want to borrow?” asked the loan officer.“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”“All right, but you’ll have to show security. How many bulls do you have on your ranch?”“Two hundred.”“That should be enough security. The loan is approved.”Several months later the rancher returned to the bank to repay the loan.“Here’s your money,” he declared, peeling off bills from a huge bankroll.“Well, sir, let me congratulate you on your sudden prosperity,” said the officer, eyeing the bankroll. And for safety’s sake, may I suggest you deposit that extra money in our bank?”Staring at him coldly, the rancher asked, “How many bulls do you have?’Everybody has his own language. The politician has a very subtle language, a definite language and morality is certainly not part of it. By any means or methods, deception, immorality, one has to fulfill one’s ambition. So even if a politician uses morality, he uses it only as a means. Sometimes a politician may look very moral if it fulfills his purpose.Mahatma Gandhi was a politician, not a religious man at all. When India was fighting with the British, nonviolence was fulfilling a purpose. When India became free the ideology of nonviolence became defunct, then it was not of much use. Even Gandhi approved of an Indian military army. And when it was getting ready to attack Pakistan he blessed it. When he saw airplanes flying over Delhi toward Pakistan he said, “Good. With my blessings.”Now what had happened? This was the same man who was against all violence, but then violence was not possible, India was not in a situation to fight the British violently. So nonviolence was in favor, and Gandhi used it. But when India became independent, he forgot all his talk about nonviolence. He did not then say, “Dissolve the army now. Dissolve the police force. Let the country be ruled by love.” He forgot all about nonviolence.That’s why I say he was a politician. If he had been a religious person then this was a real opportunity to be nonviolent. The country has become free, he should have dissolved the military, the army, the police force. In fact, he should have dropped government itself because a government is a violent organization. But he kept mum.A politician can use morality when it serves his purpose. He can say, “Honesty is the best policy,” but remember, it is a policy. It serves his purpose. Policy means politics. And when dishonesty is the best policy, then? When it serves the purpose, then it is perfectly okay. A politician is like a whore. He can change. He is opportunistic. Whatsoever serves his purpose becomes his ideal and his principle. Deep down there is only one principle: that is his ambition must be fulfilled.The king was in a way sincere.“I take no pleasure in men who preach morality. What have you to teach me?”“Suppose,” said Hui Ang, “that I have a way to make anyone, however brave and strong, miss when he stabs or strikes at you. Wouldn’t Your Majesty be interested?”Now, no Taoist would do this. First, the Taoist would not go to the king, the king would have to come to the Taoist. And even then the Taoist may not see him because he knows that the politician is the worst man possible.In Buddhist classifications they have divided man into three categories. The first they call adampurush, the lowest, the worst man. The second they call madhyampurush, the middle man, and the third they call mahapurush, the great man. Mahapurush is one who lives naturally, religiously, without any ambition and without any mind. He is just a part of this cosmos, not fighting, not struggling. He is just floating with it, flowing with it. He is in a deep let-go. That is mahapurush, the great man.Then next to him comes the middle man who is not totally in the flow but sometimes there are moments when he flows. Sometimes there are moments when he freezes, sometimes he starts fighting, and sometimes he relaxes. He has a double bind. He is in the middle. Sometimes he moves to the lower, sometimes to the higher. He is still wavering. He has not yet become decisive. His integration is not complete yet.And then comes the third category, the lowest, adampurush, the worst. He is settled at the lowest level and he does not want to move from there.The politician is adampurush, the worst; the artist is the madhyampurush, the middle man; and the religious man is the mahapurush, the great man. And beyond the three is the fourth, turiya – one who has gone beyond all categories, the non-categorized. He is in Tao. He is beyond politics, he is beyond art, he is even beyond religion. He is simply beyond.No Taoist will go to teach a king. That is foolish, stupid. The disciple has to come to the master. Why? Because, unless the disciple comes and seeks truth, he is not ready to learn.The disciple must be humble. If a disciple stamps his foot, coughs and says fiercely, “What do you have to teach me?” then it is better not to teach him. He is incurable.But there is the difference between the Confucian and the Taoist. Confucius and his followers were constantly going to the kings and the ministers and the powerful people and trying to convert them, trying to convince them. They thought that that seemed to be the easiest way to change the world. It has always been thought that if you want to change humanity, the best way is to go to the capital. No, it has proved to be wrong, absolutely wrong.For five thousand years at least, we know well that the way to transform man does not go through the capital; it goes through the heart not the capital. You can only change a person who is ready to be changed, who is willing to be changed, who is cooperative, who is ready to learn and bow down and surrender – to receive.But Hui Ang tried. He said: “Suppose that I have a way to make anyone, however brave and strong, miss when he stabs or strikes at you. Wouldn’t Your Majesty be interested?” Now he is trying to persuade the king in his own language. Never do that, because when you bring religion to the level of the worst man, religion is destroyed.Tao cannot be translated into the language of greed although this is what Hui Ang is doing. He is trying to translate desirelessness into greed.The king became interested. He said: “Excellent!” Look at the change. Just a moment before he was stamping his foot, coughing and was saying fiercely, “What do you have to teach me? I don’t want to listen to anything about morality.”“Excellent!” he said. “This is the sort of thing I like to hear.”Now this comes close. It is not going to change him because religion has come down to adjust to him; he has not gone up to adjust to religion. This is very irreligious. To do such a thing is irreligious. This man, Hui Ang, is falling into the trap of the politician rather than helping the politician to come out of his imprisonment. He himself is falling into the trap – to persuade the king he is bringing truth almost to the level of a lie.What does he say? He says he can make someone: “…however brave and strong, miss when he stabs or strikes at you.” This seems good to the ego, the greedy ego, because if this can be done, then it will become unconquerable. This is worth something. Now this comes close to ambition. This becomes a policy, this becomes a strategy.“Excellent! This is the sort of thing I like to hear.” Remember always, the sort of thing that you like to hear is always wrong because being the sort of man you are, how can you like to hear the right thing? It is very difficult to be ready to hear the truth. It shatters, it confuses, it uproots, it shocks, it dismantles, it destroys your prejudices – it hits you hard. In fact, it tries to kill you as you have existed up to now. That’s why very rare people are ready to hear the truth.If I were to talk in terms of lies, you would find millions of people around here. I used to talk to thousands and thousands of people – great crowds used to gather. But then, by and by, I recognized the fact that they gathered not to hear what I had to say; they gathered to hear what they wanted to hear. They were not there to be transformed, they were there to be consoled, they were there to be convinced. Wherever they were and whatsoever they were, they wanted to know that they were right. The moment I started saying the truth they started disappearing. Now only rarely will a few people be coming to me because I don’t make any compromise. I will say only that which is true. If you want to agree with it, good, but if you want it to agree with you then this is not the place for you.“But even if a stab or blow misses, it is still humiliating for you.”Now he persuades further. He says, “I can teach a certain art so that nobody can stab you, or, even if he tries, he will miss.” Now he sees that the king is ready, persuaded. The king says: “Excellent! This is the sort of thing I like to hear.” Now Hui Ang moves ahead. He says: “But even if a stab or blow misses, it is still humiliating for you. If somebody tries to kill you, even though he misses, the effort on your life is humiliating. I can do something for that too.”“Suppose that I have a way to prevent anyone, however brave and strong, from daring to stab or strike you.”“I can do something more. I can create such a situation that he will not even dare to stab or make an effort on your life. What about it, sir?”“But a man who does not dare to harm you may still have the will to harm you.”“He may not dare to harm you but he has the idea, it is humiliating that somebody even thinks of destroying you.”Hui Ang continues:“Suppose that I have a way to ensure that men have absolutely no will to harm you. But a man who has no will to harm you may still have no thought of loving or benefiting you.”“A man may have no thought of harming you, but that does not make sure that he wants to benefit you or has a loving attitude toward you.”“Suppose that I have a way to make every single man and woman in the world joyfully desire to love and benefit you. This is three degrees better than courage and strength. Isn’t Your Majesty interested?”“This is the sort of way I should like to find,”…said the king. Now truth is brought to the level of the adampurush, the lowest man. In bringing truth to the lowest man, truth loses its quality of being true. It becomes a falsehood. Now it is a lie. Now it is clever argument. It is no longer a statement of truth, it is a cunning device. It is sophistry. Yes, that is exactly the word for it. This man is not a sage, he is a sophist.You must have heard about sophists. They existed in Athens, in Greece. Before Socrates there was great power in the hands of the sophists. They traveled all over the country. They convinced everybody; they were greatest arguers but they had no principles. They would convince you of whatsoever you wanted to be convinced about. It was a sort of prostitution. They were paid and they became very affluent because they were ready to support anything. “Just tell me what you want to be convinced of” they would say, and they would convince you, they would give you beautiful arguments. They had schools to teach people argumentation.They disappeared from the world because of Socrates. He had a great impact on the Greek mind and he destroyed that whole prostitution.Bertrand Russell used to tell a small story again and again. I don’t know where he got it from but the story is beautiful so there is no need to worry about it.He used to say again and again that one day a sophist came to see Socrates. He had a beautiful dog with him and Socrates looked at him and asked, “Is this your dog?”And the sophist said, “Yes.”Socrates said, “Is the dog male or female?”And the sophist said, “A female.”Socrates asked, “Is the dog a mother or not yet a mother?”And the sophist said, “Yes, the dog is a mother.”Socrates laughed and said, “You are the son of it, you son of a bitch.”I don’t know where Bertrand Russell got it from but sophists were that type of people. They had no principles, they had no truth, they were opportunists. And they were ready to argue for anything. Wrong or right was not the question, they simply enjoyed argumentation. They were like lawyers. You go to the lawyer and it does not matter whether you are wrong or right, he is ready to support you, he is ready to fight for you.Mulla Nasruddin went to a lawyer and told him the whole story. The lawyer said, “Don’t be worried, your victory is absolutely certain, a hundred percent certain. Trust me. Leave it to me. You are going to win.”But Mulla Nasruddin got up and started to leave the office. The lawyer said, “Where are you going? You have not said anything.”Mulla replied, “There is no need. I have told you the other man’s story, the other side’s story. Now there is no need to fight.”But this is no way to judge. Tell any story and the lawyer says, “Yes, you are going to win.” And he will support you and he will argue for you. He has no interest in truths: his only interest is if he is paid – then everything is okay. Then what is he serving? Truth or untruth? It does not matter, it is immaterial. He serves money, prestige, power, respectability. If these things come he is ready to support anybody. He is not against crime; he is ready to protect crime if that is the way money comes.Now, this man is a sophist, he is not a sage, he is not a master – he is not even a teacher, not even an honest teacher. He is a sophist. But he has persuaded the king: “This is the sort of way I would like to find.” But there is nothing to find.“The teaching of Confucius and Mo Tzu is what I have in mind.”Hui Ang is a disciple of Confucius and Mo Tzu; Mo Tzu is a disciple of Confucius. Just as Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu were the two topmost Taoists, so Confucius and Mo Tzu were the two topmost Confucians.“Confucius and Mo Tzu became princes without owning territory…”Now he flatters the king even more, he buttresses him more.“The teaching of Confucius and Mo Tzu is what I have in mind. Confucius and Mo Tzu became princes without owning territory, became leaders without holding office. Every man and woman in the world craned his neck and stood on tiptoe in his eagerness for their safety and benefit. Now Your Majesty is the Lord of ten thousand chariots. If you were indeed to share the aims of these two men, everyone within your four borders would enjoy the benefit. You would be far greater than Confucius and Mo Tzu.”Now he is buttressing the ego of the king as much as possible. He says, “Look! Confucius and Mo Tzu were not kings but they were almost like uncrowned kings. They had no territory but they were treated everywhere as great kings. They were men of character, morality, knowledge. They were respected everywhere. They became leaders without holding office.”“Every man and woman in the world craned his neck and stood on tiptoe in his eagerness for their safety and benefit.” But if that is true, then why was Jesus crucified? If that is true, then why was Socrates poisoned? If that is true, then why was Mansoor al-Hillaj killed? No, Confucius and Mo Tzu were not real masters. They were men of character, great discipline, but a man of character is nothing but a man who follows the rules and regulations of the society. He is not rebellious, he is a conformist. The society certainly respects him, but it is because he respects the rules of the society.Jesus had to be crucified because he rebelled. Mansoor had to be killed because he rebelled. The society takes revenge if you don’t follow the rules of the society, if you start talking in ways which sabotage the foolish rules of the society. The rules are stupid, they are meaningless, but millions of people believe in them. Once a man like Jesus or Socrates or Mansoor is there and he starts talking about truth and that truth goes against the so-called truths of the society, they are bound to take revenge.But Confucius was respected. He was not a man of rebellion; he was just a conformist, a traditionalist. He followed the neurotic rules of the society; he followed the stupid ways of society to the very letter. Yes, he was moral, but he was not religious. A religious man has found his own law. If it fits with the society, good. If it doesn’t fit with the society, then he still lives his own law. A religious man is free; a religious man is freedom. He lives through his innermost core. He has no outer imposed discipline on himself, he lives in no cage. He lives like a free being – whatsoever the cost. Even if he must pay with his life he is ready to pay, but he is not ready to curtail his freedom. Freedom is his utmost value, his ultimate value. He can lose everything, but not freedom.A traditional man is ready to lose freedom for cheap things – respectability, social honor. Yes, Confucius and Mo Tzu were honored, they were really honored, but the honor was because they were not free men, not men of Tao.“Now Your Majesty is the Lord of ten thousand chariots. If you were indeed to share the aims of these two men, everyone within your four borders would enjoy the benefit. You would be far greater than Confucius and Mo Tzu.” Now he is saying, “You can become the greatest man in the world. Confucius is the last word and you can become even greater than him.”Look – that is the way society persuades everybody. A child is born and the parents start telling him, “Be moral, have character, do this and that – you will be respected and all of society will respect you. You will become a great man, famous, well-known and well respected.” What are they doing? They are creating his ego; they are helping to create the ego in the child.The ego is the principle of immorality and your so-called morality hangs on the principle of ego. It is based on immorality. But you have been taught to be this way: be the way society wants you to be and society will respect you. If you want respect, never rebel; if you want respect, bow down to the order of society.And who is this society? The mob, the crowd. The majority consists of stupid people, they control the rules. Society means the lowest mob – they control everything. Yes, society will respect you if you follow it, but following it you will become stupid yourself. If you want to be respected, then you will have to become stupid; if you want to be intelligent, forget about respectability. An intelligent person will live, live tremendously, live greatly, live joyously, but he should not hanker for respect.Disrespect is more possible than respect; poison is more possible than prestige. You may be beheaded rather than being honored – that is more likely because society has not yet come to this point of growth, it has not yet evolved so much that it can respect the real person.That must be understood… If Socrates came back, he would be poisoned again. If Jesus came back, he would be crucified again. Time has not made much difference – society remains the same. Society has not yet evolved to the point where it can respect a true person. To respect a true person would mean that society has become intelligent.The goal seems to be far away. Will it happen or not? It seems it would be almost a utopia if a day came when Socrates was worshipped. Do you remember the people who killed Socrates? Do you know anybody’s name? They were the respectable people; they were the guardians of morality in society. Do you remember the name of the judge who sentenced Socrates, who ordered him to be poisoned? Do you know who these people were? Where they came from? They were respectable people, they were the guardians of morality, they were the protectors of society, they were the leaders and the politicians and the priests. Nobody knows where they have gone, but Socrates remains.The man who was the opponent, who brought the case against Socrates in the court, said that he was corrupting the minds of the young people. That was the crime that he was doing; he was corrupting the minds of the young people. That’s the crime they say I am doing. I corrupt the minds of young people. I would like to corrupt the minds of the old people but they don’t have any! So naturally I have to corrupt the minds of the young people – only they have minds.When the man had won the case – Socrates had been sentenced and the order was declared that he would be poisoned – he looked at Socrates and said, “What do you say?” Socrates laughed and he said, “Remember one thing: for thousands of years people will think about me, but they will remember your name only because you brought the case against me – that’s all. They will know your name only because you were the man who moved the court to kill Socrates. Nothing else will be remembered of you.” And that is exactly what has happened. Nobody remembers anything about that man. Socrates will be remembered and remembered.Who were the men who killed al-Hillaj Mansoor? Their names are forgotten. And they were the pinnacles of morality, they were the paragons of morality, they were the people who were afraid that al-Hillaj Mansoor was destroying morality, religion; that he was a dangerous man and society had to be protected from him. But who remembers their names? Their names are not known. Mansoor will live. As long as humanity continues to aspire to go beyond, as long as humanity has goals of transcendence, as long as the arrow of human consciousness moves toward godliness, Mansoor will be remembered. One day, one can hope that somewhere in the future a time will come when the real man will be respected.Confucius is not a real man. Mo Tzu is not a real man. They are conventional people, conformists, traditional people, dead. And Hui Ang says: “You would be far greater than Confucius and Mo Tzu.”This is the whole trick; this is how you have been distracted from your center. You have been told not to be yourself, otherwise you will not get any respect, any honor. If you want to be yourself, nobody will give you any respect – so don’t be yourself, be that which society wants you to be. This is how you have been distracted from your center and you have become pseudo-beings, phony, unreal. You are just a mask. You don’t have any soul; you have lost your soul. The soul comes into being only when you declare, “I am going to be myself. Respect or disrespect, society or no society, honor or no honor, that is irrelevant – I have decided to be myself because this is my life and I have to live it in my own way. Whatsoever the cost I will live like a free man.” Once you declare that, you become centered.That’s what the whole effort is in sannyas, that’s what sannyas is all about: to bring you back to your center. That’s why I don’t give you any outer discipline, just an inner consciousness, an awareness; no duty, only a responsibility; no outer pattern, no style from the outside, but an inner flow, an inner glow. To live in that glow, to move into that flow and allow your life to have freedom, to be in a let-go, that’s what sannyas is. And that’s what Tao is.Hui Ang hurried out. And the king said to his courtiers,“Clever, the way he talked me round with his argument!”It is not clever, it is cunning. It looks clever because all cunningness looks clever. Remember, cleverness and cunningness are not going to help – only intelligence, awareness, alertness will.This man deceived the king, but my feeling is that you can only deceive somebody if you yourself are deceived. This man is not a master otherwise how can he deceive somebody?Let me tell you another story which is just exactly parallel.A great sage came to China, his name was Bodhidharma. The Emperor Wu of China came to receive him on the border. The emperor had been waiting for years because Bodhidharma was coming from India and he had to cross all of the Himalayas – it took years. Then he arrived. The emperor was a little puzzled seeing him because he looked to be a very strange man. The strangest thing was that he had a shoe on one of his feet and the other shoe he was carrying on his head. Was this man mad?But the king was a very polite man, cultured of course. He tried not to see it because that would be too impolite. He simply tried not to see it and not to say anything about it. That would be too impolite and this was the first meeting with this great sage – and what type of man was he?But how long could he avoid it? Bodhidharma was just standing there with his shoe on his head. The king said, “Sir, you can put it down. Why do you have your shoe on your head? It is meant for your foot.”Bodhidharma said, “I want to make everything clear from the very beginning that I am this type of man. You can think me mad or you can think me enlightened, but I am strange. And be clear from the beginning that you are meeting a strange man. I am absurd, illogical. I am as absurd as this shoe on my head. There is no reason for it, it simply happened. I enjoyed it. And the poor shoe has always been carrying me so why can’t I carry it?”This was just a Zen gesture. Bodhidharma was trying to fathom this man, this Emperor Wu who had invited him from India. He was trying to see whether he would be able to understand the illogic of truth. Truth has no argument to prove it; it is a statement, remember. Bodhidharma was standing there – he was a statement, illogical, absurd. Thousands of people had gathered to receive him and all were feeling puzzled.But he was saying, “I am not going to argue. If you are going to listen to me you have to forget all argumentation. I am not going to persuade. I am not here to convince you of anything. I am a simple statement, an absurd statement, about the truth. I will not give you reasons, there are none.”Then Bodhidharma looked at the king. The king was puzzled, he was perspiring. And Bodhidharma said, “Have you something to ask, Sir? You have called me from India and it took many years to get here. Why have you called me?”Wu said, “I had many questions but you have confused me. But I will try. The first question: I have made many temples for Buddha – thousands – I feed thousands of Buddhist monks, I have made many monasteries for Buddhist monks and Buddhist nuns; I have done much virtuous work. What will be my gain in the other world?”And Bodhidharma said, “Nothing! Nothing whatsoever! If you can escape hell that will be enough. The very idea of doing something for gain is irreligious, worldly. You have not done it because you love; you have done it because you are greedy. Greed will take you to hell. Listen, Wu, these monasteries and these thousands of monks that have gathered here are not going to help you. I know that they tell you again and again, ‘Great King, great is your virtue. God will be ready to receive you in heaven’ but I tell you, you will go to hell because greed is the door to hell and you are greedy and you are ambitious. Look at your ugly greed. If you want to make a temple, make it, but make it out of love. If you want to feed somebody, feed him, but feed him out of love. Finished! You have had the benefit. There is no other benefit beyond it. You enjoy feeding a man – what more do you need? The value is intrinsic. Act out of love.”This is how a master, a real master, is.Then Bodhidharma turned away, he didn’t enter the kingdom. Wu asked, “Why are you turning away?”He said, “When you cannot understand me, what about the others? They will not understand me. I will stay outside the kingdom. Those who want me can come and seek me.”And he remained outside the kingdom; he would not enter. He said, “If even the king cannot understand me, then what about the masses? Your courtiers are standing here puzzled and they cannot understand me, so what about the masses? And these foolish monks that are gathered here – they cannot understand me. So I will not come into your kingdom. I will wait outside. Those who are really desirous should come to me.”Then he sat for nine years outside the kingdom looking at a wall. People would come and ask, “Sir, why are you looking at the wall? Why don’t you look at us?”He would say, “It is all the same. Whether I look at you or I look at the wall is the same. I will only turn to look at you when the real person who wants to know truth has come.”Then Hui Nang came, his first disciple. He stood at Bodhidharma’s back and he said, “Sir, I have come. Turn toward me.”And Bodhidharma said, “Show the sign.”Hui Nang cut his hand off, gave it to Bodhidharma and said, “Turn around otherwise I will cut off my head – what else can I show as a sign?”And Bodhidharma turned immediately. He said, “So you have come!”One has to pay for truth with one’s life. What about respectability, prestige? All nonsense. One has to give all – only then does one become capable of knowing the truth.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,It seems to me that Gramya's question on Tuesday was practically the same as mine on Sunday, only worded differently. But you answered her very lovingly and gently and me with a thousand-pound sledgehammer. Excuse me for asking this, but I too mean to ask lovingly. Why have you become so hard on old disciples? Don't you love me anymore? I am with you whatever is the case.The question is from Ananda Prem.The first thing: you cannot ask a question that Gramya asks. Nobody else can ask the question that you can ask. Even if you use exactly the same words, the question will be different and you will get a different answer from me.I am not answering the question; I am answering the questioner – that must be understood. You can write a question in exactly the same way as Gramya and I will not answer it the same way. You are not Gramya, Gramya is not you. Everybody is so unique, everybody is so individual that never before has there been anybody like you; never again will there be anybody like you. You are simply you, there is only one you; there is nobody else like you.So how can somebody else ask a question like you? How can you ask a question like somebody else? The wording, the language, the formulation of the question is not important at all; it arises out of your consciousness, out of your mind. And you have a different mind and a different consciousness, a different character, a different past. It arises out of your past.So never compare your questions with those of others. When I answer you, I answer you personally; that’s why I insist that you write your names on the question. Otherwise the question becomes general and then the answer is in the abstract, then it is not addressed to anybody. The answer, to be meaningful, must be particular. It must be addressed to a particular individual in a specific way – only then does it apply to you, otherwise not.“It seemed to me that Gramya’s question was practically the same as mine on Sunday…” No, neither practically the same nor theoretically the same, only worded differently. Don’t deceive yourself. It was worded differently, true, but even if it had not been worded differently my answer would have been the same.Even when we use the same words we don’t mean the same thing. The meaning is not in the words, the meaning is in the mind that uses them.Meditate on this small anecdote:The businessman was told by his doctor that he had a heart condition. On the same day he was advised by mail that if he didn’t meet a heavy mortgage payment, his home would be seized. Driving nervously down the highway in a new car on which five payments were due, he rammed into the compact car of one of his best customers and made a sardine can out of it. Continuing to his office, he arrived at the factory just as the firemen were watering down the hot embers. There his bookkeeper handed him a note informing him that all his insurance policies had lapsed.Disgusted, he took a cab home, walked slowly into the living room and was greeted cheerfully by his wife. “Darling,” she said enthusiastically, “I hope you’ll forgive me but I must run; tonight is my bridge night.”“Just give me a chance to change my shirt,” answered the husband, “and I’ll jump with you!”Her bridge night. But how could it mean the same thing to the husband? In his state it could not mean the same. You speak the same words but still you convey different meanings. The meaning is given by the mind. The word is an outside thing, the meaning is an inside thing.Because of the fog, the plane was in serious trouble. All the passengers were numb with fear, except the minister aboard. He took complete control of the situation.“Let us kneel and pray,” he suggested to the passengers, and everyone kneeled except a small-time bookie.“Why aren’t you praying with us?” asked the minister.“Because,” confessed the bookie, “I don’t know how.”“In that case,” the minister advised, “just behave as though you were in a church.”So the bookie went down the aisle and took a collection.That is the only thing the bookie can understand, that is the only thing he would be interested in, in a church.Remember always that it is you who comes through loud and clear in your questions. I am not much interested in how they are worded, in how they are formulated. I look for you, I grope for you in your question and unless I get hold of you I don’t answer because then it would be meaningless.Don’t feel jealous of Gramya. It seems that Ananda Prem has become jealous of Gramya. That again shows her mind. Rather than understanding what I have said to her, she is more worried about why I have answered Gramya so lovingly and her not so lovingly. She was less interested in the answer; she was more interested in love being shown to her. That again shows her mind.The question was not asked for the answer, the question was just a trick so that I could show my love to her. Then why go so roundabout? Why not simply write: “Osho, say some beautiful things about me.” That would be easy, simple – why make such big questions? Be direct: “I need to be appreciated, applauded.” The mind is tricky. You may ask something but you may not be interested at all in the question or in the answer. There may be some secret desire lurking behind it. Seeing that desire I have to use the thousand-pound sledgehammer.But you missed. You ducked. You should have bowed down before that thousand-pound hammer, you should have received it, accepted it, welcomed it. It would have given you tremendous insight. But you missed. Rather than listening to what I said to you, you listened more to what I said to Gramya, and now you feel jealous – why have I not said the same thing to you?That was not what you needed. When you come to me I have to give you the medicine that you need. You cannot say, “Why have you given Gramya a very sweet medicine and me a very bitter thing?” You need it. The sweet medicine may kill you: it is not your need. I am a physician; I am trying to help you come out of your diseases. You may not be too interested in coming out of your diseases, but that is my only interest. I am not interested in anything else. You may be simply hankering for sympathy. Sympathy is poison and must be used only when poison is needed. Sometimes an ill person needs poison – all of allopathy depends on poison.You should not tell the doctor what medicine should be given to you; you should not prescribe for yourself. Not only have you come with a disease, you have come with a prescription also! You want me to sign it, so you will be very happy. If you can doctor yourself, there is no need for me – then doctor yourself. If you cannot doctor yourself, then listen to what I say, meditate over it – all the nuances of it, all the meanings, subtle and gross, in it. You should have meditated. That hammer would have helped you tremendously.A thousand-pound sledgehammer had to be used because, Ananda Prem, you have a very thick head. It is almost a rock. In fact, when I use the hammer I am always worried whether the hammer is going to survive or not!And you ask: “Why have you become so hard on old disciples?” That’s what the old disciple is for. You have graduated, Ananda Prem. Gramya will also graduate – wait! The older you are, the harder I will be because I hope that you will have become more capable. I hope that now you will be able to receive greater shocks.Naturally, when a new disciple comes, I cannot hit him very hard. I have to be very cautious, I go slowly. The closer the disciple comes to me, the more certain I can be of when the moment is that the disciple can be hit hard. Because deep down the whole function of a master is to behead you. The master is a sword. Says Jesus, “I have not brought peace into the world; I have brought a sword.”Buddhists have a special name for it; they have called it “Manjushree’s sword.” Manjushree was a great disciple of Buddha, and he functioned as Buddha’s sword. Whenever Buddha saw that somebody needed a real shock he would be sent to Manjushree. Manjushree was really terrible! He would simply smash you. He would not allow any illusions. He was so hard in his hitting that the moment Buddha prescribed, “Go to Manjushree,” people would start trembling. Manjushree? That meant almost death. But Manjushree was really a great, compassionate Buddha and it became famous in Buddha’s time that whenever a disciple had really grown, Buddha sent him to Manjushree the butcher.When you are older I hope that you will be capable of much more understanding. The day you are really old and you have come very close to me, I am going to cut your head off. That must be done so suddenly, so fast, that not even a drop of blood comes out. It must be done so fast. But for that you have to become by and by, more and more prepared.The work of the master is not to console you. If you have come here for consolation you have come to the wrong company. Go somewhere else. If you have come only for transformation, then be here – otherwise I am not the person for you. I know your secret desires are not for transformation; your secret desires are for improvement. Improvement and transformation are diametrically opposite. Improvement means that you remain the same but you become richer and richer, your ego becomes more and more decorated. You remain the same – whatsoever happens becomes a new layer on you but you remain the same. The new is an addition to you, but you remain the same with the old. You are for improvement. You want to become beautiful, you want to become more blissful, you want to become more knowledgeable, you want to become a buddha – this and that. The buddha disease.I am not here to improve upon you because if the base remains wrong, all improvement is going to lead you into more and more trouble. The base must be transformed; you have to be cut from the roots. Naturally it is going to be hard, arduous.Just the other day I was telling you about the Hebrew name Mariam, Jesus’ mother’s name. It means rebellion. It has another meaning also – both meanings are beautiful. One is rebellion, another is arduous, hard. The path is a razor’s edge. It is hard and arduous. Jesus comes through that arduous path, through Mariam – it is rebellious and arduous.The greatest difficulty to be encountered is the ego. Ananda Prem asked the question and she must have been listening with the idea that I would decorate her ego a little bit here and there, would give her new enthusiasm. And I took away the very ground underneath her feet. That shocked her.The older you are around me, wait for many more shocks. That’s the only way I can show my love to you.You ask: “And don’t you love me any more?” Now I have started loving you, Ananda Prem, hence the thousand-pound sledgehammer. When I love you even more I will have to take even weightier hammers. Otherwise why should I bother to hit you at all? What would it profit? By hitting you there are only two possibilities: either you receive it and you become more understanding, or you escape from me. What am I going to gain out of it? Either you are going to gain or I am going to miss you – there is no gain for me in it at all. There are two alternatives: either you escape from me and become very much afraid – then I have lost a disciple; or you become enlightened – then too I have lost a disciple. So what is the gain? For me at least, there is no gain. I am going to be a loser either way.And finally she says in a bracket: “I am with you whatever is the case.” That I know – I know your stubbornness.During a flood in a little town, a little girl was perched on top of a house with a small boy.As they sat watching, they noticed a derby hat float by. Presently the hat turned and came back. Then again it turned and went downstream and once more turned and came back again.The little girl said, “What do you think of that derby? First it goes downstream, then it turns and comes back.”The boy replied, “Oh, that’s my father. He said, ‘Come hell or high water, I’m going to cut the grass today.’”And I know Ananda Prem is that type. She is absolutely stubborn. I can trust her that much. She will not leave, so only one possibility is left. If she becomes capable of receiving the shocks that I am going to give – this is just the beginning – then there is a possibility of a new light dawning in her soul.The second question:Osho,What do you mean when you say to ponder or meditate on a parable? What is the process?PS. I can hardly even remember the parable after the discourse.That means the discourse has succeeded. I don’t mean for you to memorize it. If you have understood it, the fragrance enters into your soul. It is not a question of memorizing. This is not a university. And nobody is going to examine your memory; nobody is going to ask you how much you remember.When I say ponder over it I don’t mean repeat it, remember it, cram it – no. When I say ponder over it, I mean let the fragrance of it be released into your soul.Buddha has said that there are three steps in how to listen to a buddha – three steps. First, hearing; second, pondering; third, living. Hearing means that when you are listening to me you should simply listen; do not think about it. Do not go on commenting inside your mind: right, wrong, good, bad. No commentary on your part is needed; all commentary will be a distraction. And you will miss.When I say “Listen,” I don’t mean concentrate, because if you concentrate, you will become very tense. Meditation is not possible in a tense mind. So when I say, “Listen, hear,” the first step – it means: simply be relaxed, open, available. I am singing a song to you, let this song reach you and vibrate in you. You should not be worried whether you will be able to remember it or not – that is not the point at all. Once you have vibrated with it, something of it will have penetrated your being, will become part of you. In fact, that which becomes part of you is real knowledge and you need not cram it. The unreal knowledge is that which you have crammed and has not become a part of you.When a student goes to an examination he remembers a thousand and one things. But after three months, if you ask him, ninety-nine percent of it has gone down the drain. Somehow it was just managed, with very great tension and strain. He was keeping it, holding it, for the examination; once the examination is finished he will lose that hold and things will disappear.You can observe it in your own life. How much do you remember of that which you crammed in your university days, how much? If you are examined again you will all fail. You will not be able to remember. Even the professors who teach in the universities will all fail if they are examined again because the examination was just a momentary effort. But real knowledge is never forgotten because real knowledge is never remembered. That which is remembered will be forgotten; that which is not remembered cannot be forgotten, there is no way to forget it.There are a few things you cannot forget: for example, swimming. You cannot forget it. You may not have been to a river for fifty years, but you cannot forget it because it has never been remembered; it has gone into your being, it has become part of you. This is real knowledge. All that is real becomes part of you; it remains available forever and ever. There is no way to forget it. That which I call knowing is that which cannot be forgotten. Even if you make an effort to forget it you will fail – you cannot forget it.Watch in life and you will find two different categories. One which you have to remember but you go on forgetting again and again. Another is that which you don’t remember but is simply there – is there not as a memory but as part of your being. There is no need to hold it, it is simply there. Even if you want to throw it out, you cannot. That is real knowledge.So when I say “Hear” I am not saying “Be attentive” because in attention there is tension. The very word is from tension – attention means at tension. Your mind is narrowed. When I say, “Listen,” I mean be relaxed, open; become a sponge. Soak it up. Let it sink into you. Listen to me as you listen to the birds singing in the trees or to the sound of running water. There is no meaning in it. Or, listen to me as you listen to music. Music has no intellectual meaning. You listen to it – you simply drink it, you let it in, you allow it into your very innermost core. And you enjoy it. If somebody later on asks if you remember what music you have heard, you will not be able to say anything. You will say, “I enjoyed it, it was beautiful, it was something that thrilled me to the very core. I was refreshed through it. I became more alive through it; I felt a sudden joy bursting in my heart.” But these are the impacts that happened to you: there is nothing to say about the music. Listen to me as you do to music.So don’t be worried. If you forget, good. I am not saying these things to be remembered. I am not here to make you knowledgeable, professional pundits, no. I am not here giving you a training for memory. But an upsurge of understanding can happen. You can respond. You can respond, you can vibrate with whatsoever I am saying. And that will be real hearing. That is the first step.The second step is pondering. The first step, hearing, is through the mind door, because you have to use the ears and you have to use the mechanical device of the mind. It goes through the mind. If you are not thinking, the mind allows it. If the mind is thinking, the mind obstructs, distorts, and does many things to it. If the mind is not thinking, then mind becomes simply a pure passage, a receptivity.Hearing is through the mind, pondering is through the heart. When the mind has allowed it, all that you listen to in silence, in love, en rapport with my being – it falls into your heart and accumulates there. Remember the difference. If you want to remember it, it will be retained in the head. The memory exists in the head. If you don’t want to retain it, if you are not interested in remembering it, then it goes into the heart; it falls, pours into the heart and accumulates there.Then it has a totally different impact on your being. You will not remember it but it will surround you like a fragrance. When I say, “Ponder it,” I mean: let it reach your heart. Don’t listen through thinking; listen through feeling – that is the meaning of pondering. To ponder over it means: let your feeling be aroused – not your thought, not your logic, but your love. Let your love respond. That’s the difference.When an outsider comes to listen to me just as an outsider, he will at the most be able to accumulate something in the head. When you become a sannyasin it changes, it changes completely. Then you listen in a totally different way. Then you are not fighting with me, you are not arguing with me, you are simply enjoying the song. You dance with me, you sing with me, you are with me. Then it reaches into the heart – you feel with me.Whatsoever I say to you has nothing to do with my head. It comes from my heart. I say it because I feel for you, I say it because I love you, I say it because great compassion is here, I say it because I want to share my heart with you. It is not a lecture. I am not lecturing at you; I am not your enemy. Why should I lecture at you? I am simply opening my heart, I am allowing you to come into me, I am inviting you to become my guest, I am inviting you to partake of something of my being. That’s what Jesus means when he says to his disciples, “Eat me. Drink me.” This is a feast! When I say, “Ponder,” I also mean: eat me, drink me, feel me. Let your feelings be thrilled, stirred. Let your heart dance. Rejoice with me. It is a great tiding. I bring you a gospel.The third step is living. First hear, without thought interfering; then feel, fall en rapport with me, in tune with me; and then live it. It is not a question of cramming, remembering. Living, yes, living is the thing.You hear me. If it goes into your heart, it will become very easy to live it because from the heart where else can it go? It will go into your being. These are the three layers. The first layer is thinking, the head. Deeper than the head is the heart, feeling. Deeper than the heart is being. So if it soaks through the head, it reaches the heart. If it soaks through the heart, it reaches your being. And from there comes living.I am not saying practice it. Practice happens only when something has not reached your heart but has been retained by the head. And then you try to practice it. Practice means that you are avoiding the heart, staying in the head; and now you are thinking about what to do about it, how to manage, how to practice, how to create a character on the basis of it. If it reaches your heart, then you can relax. By and by it will start affecting your living.So what must be done about the third point? You just have to not force it and not obstruct it when it comes. Don’t stand in the way. To many people it is happening every day. Something I said to you six months ago, which you had completely forgotten, is suddenly there when a situation arises – it starts functioning and you behave accordingly.Not that you try – if you try that is not the real thing, that is pseudo – and suddenly, one day, you feel you are not behaving in the usual pattern; the gestalt has changed. Somebody insults you and you don’t feel hurt. You are surprised at yourself. What has happened? Now, if this happens allow it to happen, support it, cooperate with it; it is very new and fragile; it will need your support. Sometimes it is happening but you obstruct it because you think, “This man is insulting me and this is not the time to ponder on great things. If I allow him to insult me, he will insult me more. Today he will insult me but tomorrow he will start beating me.”Your mind starts bringing in the old pattern. Your heart is saying, “Relax, this is the moment, smile.” All those beautiful parables and all that fragrance that you have been accumulating in your heart is ready to explode; but your mind says, “Wait, this is not the moment to meditate and this is not the moment to think about great things. This is dangerous.” And you shrink. If you shrink, then that which was happening naturally has been obstructed.All that your ego can do is negative. Don’t obstruct. Hearing, don’t think, that is negative. Let it be there. Pondering in the heart is positive, feel it. Again, living becomes negative. Don’t obstruct. Let it take its own form and shape. Let it flow wherever it goes. Don’t be worried. Don’t start manipulating the energy. Allow it. Be in a let-go. When hearing is negative, pondering is positive, living is again negative.Then you will come to know the ultimate positive, the fourth step, what in India we have called turiya, “the fourth.” That is your selfless self, beingless being, being as non-being – what Buddha calls anatta, no-selfness. That is the most positive thing that will happen. Negative hearing; positive pondering; negative living; and then the ultimate positive happens – the ultimate being.But the most basic problem arises in the first step. The first step is always the most basic. The second follows easily, the third even more easily, the fourth without any problem – it comes on its own accord. But the first is the most difficult step.Have you watched a small child starting to walk? The first step is the most difficult. The child hesitates; he has never walked. He has no self-confidence; he cannot trust that he will be able to walk – how can he trust the unknown? That which you have never done before? Again and again the child starts crawling, afraid that he may fall, that he may hurt himself. The first step is the most difficult. Once he has taken the first step then it is very difficult to prevent his taking the second, his taking the third. It is impossible to prevent him. Whenever his mother is not looking he will try again. He may fall but now he has known the adventure, the beauty of it that he can stand on his own.So the first step is listening without thinking. When I am talking there is every possibility that you are continuously thinking about how to practice it. That is your greed. Beware of it. The greed will not allow you to hear.Two millionaires were discussing their personal buying habits.“I like to shop at Lord & Taylor’s. They’re very reliable,” said the first. “I tore my coat on a nail in front of their store and they immediately gave me ten dollars.”“Really?” gasped the second. “Do you think the nail is still there?”Now this man cannot listen. He has already moved into greed. “Do you think the nail is still there?” He only appears to listen but he has gone into the future. He has started planning: what to do, how to get those ten dollars. He may even be a millionaire – that doesn’t matter.When you listen to me don’t start trips in your mind. It happens every day. I can even feel when a person has gone on a trip. His face changes, he is no longer here. A certain lust can be seen on his face, a greed. He has started thinking about what to do, how to do it and how beautiful it will be if he can do it.Listening, just listen; don’t move from here. One way is to move into the future, don’t do that; another way is to move into the past, don’t do that either. When you listen to me you start thinking, “Yes, I have heard this, I have read about this. That’s what I also think.” But you have stopped listening.It was one of the greatest manhunts of all time and Detective O’Sherlock was hot on the trail of the killer. He trailed him into a department store, then he trailed him into a restaurant, then he trailed him into a trailer. But he lost him eventually.“How in God’s name did you lose him?” the chief roared angrily.“I followed him into every hole in town,” explained the great O’Sherlock, ace of the force. “Into everything from men’s toiletries to men’s toilets but I didn’t follow him when he went into the movie. That’s where I lost him.”“And why didn’t you follow him into the movie?” the chief calmly queried, bursting a blood vessel.“Because I already saw the picture.”Remember, don’t bring in the pictures you have seen before. Don’t bring your memories in. When I am taking you into something, just relax and go with me. Don’t allow the future to interfere; don’t allow the past to interfere. When the past and future are not interfering, you are hearing. When you are hearing, the second step is very easy – your heart will gather the fragrance of whatsoever is being poured into you, has been told to you. Your heart will start throbbing with a new rhythm that you had not known before, with new energy, with new vitality. The heart will start a new movement of energy.Then enjoy that, don’t be afraid of it. You are very afraid of the heart; you have been taught to control the heart. You have been taught to reduce the heart to being a slave and to make the head the master. You will have to do just the opposite, if you really want to go with me into the unknown. The head cannot be the master any longer. Instead of the head, the heart must be crowned again; the heart must become the emperor again. The heart is the master. Feeling should be the master, not thinking, because joy is a feeling, not a thought; because love is a feeling, not a thought; because happiness is a feeling, not a thought; because silence is a feeling, not a thought; because godliness is a feeling, not a thought. Let feeling be the supreme-most – the sovereign – and let the head serve it. This turn, this conversion, makes one religious.Then the third step is even easier – just don’t obstruct it. When your heart starts functioning in your day-to-day life, allow it, go with it. Take the risk. That’s what I mean when I say, “Meditate over this parable.”The third question:Osho,I am terribly scared to ask this question. Why do you mention Swami Yoga Chinmaya's name when he asks a question? And why does something in me have to ask this question?This is from Deva Nirvesh. First, Swami Yoga Chinmaya’s name makes you laugh – and it saves me a joke. That is economical. Second it makes you happy, it makes Swami Chinmaya happy, it makes me happy. You laugh, you are happy; Chinmaya is happy, his name has been mentioned; I am happy because you all are happy. So at no cost everybody is simply happy! That’s why.It is a tacit understanding now that when Swami Yoga Chinmaya asks a question it is bound to be ridiculous. So just mentioning the name is enough! He is a great seeker and when you are a great seeker you stumble upon many ridiculous questions. He goes on thinking about everything and when you go on thinking about everything you are bound to find many ridiculous questions.In fact, deep down, every question is ridiculous. Life simply is; it is not a question and there is no answer to it. It simply is. There is no question mark to life. If you look deeply, you will find there is an exclamation mark but no question mark. Life is a wonder, a mystery. But that happens only when you look at life as a poet.Chinmaya looks at life as a thinker – then the exclamation mark appears to be a question mark. That is the mistake every thinker is bound to commit. And he is a very logical thinker. He thinks logically. But logic always leads into absurdities so what can he do? He goes to the very end and then the thing turns into a ridiculous question. He is courageous to ask.So it is a tacit understanding – when I mention the name of Swami Yoga Chinmaya you can relax. You know that something beautiful is coming.I have heard…It happened that in a madhouse, a new superintendent had come to take charge. The old superintendent introduced him to the inmates. A great meeting was called of all the mad people, of which there were many.The new superintendent was very surprised. He could not believe what was happening because, instead of a speech, the old superintendent merely said a few numbers. He said, “Forty-nine,” and everybody started laughing. And they laughed so uproariously that they were bursting. They started rolling on the floor. And then he said, “Seventy-two,” and they started going mad.The new superintendent could not understand what was happening. So when the speech was finished – it had been just numbers – he asked, “What is the matter? What are these numbers?”And the old superintendent said, “l have been here for many years and they have also been here for many years so we have a tacit understanding. I have numbered my jokes. What is the point of telling the same joke again and again and again? Forty-nine – and they know, so they laugh. It is an arrangement. Seventy-two is the most ridiculous, that’s why they were jumping and rolling on the floor. Everybody knows!”The new superintendent said, “This is beautiful. I will try it tomorrow.” So he listened to a few jokes, remembered the numbers and the next day he stood there and said, “Forty-nine.” But nobody laughed. What had happened? So thinking that maybe they were not in such a jovial mood that day he said, “Seventy-two.” But they just sat there, nobody even smiled. He looked at the old superintendent and said, “What is the matter?”The old man said, “You just don’t know how to tell a joke.”So please remember, if you say, “Swami Yoga Chinmaya,” nobody will laugh. It is a number, a tacit understanding: one has to know how to say it.The woman sought the hallowed advice of the marriage counselor.“I just don’t know what to do!” She was obviously distressed. “The first year my husband spoke to me only once and we had a son. The second year he spoke twice and we had twins. The third year he spoke to me thrice and we had triplets. The fourth year, four times, and we had quadruplets. What shall I do?”“Tell him just to point, you’ll know what he means.”It is a tacit understanding by now that if I say “Swami Yoga Chinmaya” it is enough. You can trust me.You said: “I am terribly scared to ask this question.” You should not be scared. Why should you be scared? This is such a beautiful question. If you go on asking such questions, you can become a second name. I need a Ma too. Swami Yoga Chinmaya is one; Ma Deva Nirvesh can become a second. So go on, persist, persevere. You should not be scared. I have heard the rumor that Nirvesh is going with Swami Yoga Chinmaya. It is a rumor, I cannot vouch for it. Rumors go around here fast – so many women, you know. Women may not have a sense of humor but they have a sense of rumor.And you ask: “And why does something in me have to ask this question?” Now, that you have to ask yourself. You must be feeling sympathetic to Swami Yoga Chinmaya. Beware. Only wrong people feel sympathetic to Yoga Chinmaya. Beware. Up to now he has had only one great follower – Ma Ananda Prem – now you may be the second.The fourth question:Osho,Why don't I have any other question than this one? I am not enlightened so I feel my mind is becoming dull.It is just the other way round. Your mind is dull that’s why you are not getting enlightened! You are putting things in the wrong sequence completely. Don’t wait for enlightenment to come, and don’t hope that when enlightenment comes you will be intelligent.It will never come. Intelligence is a first requirement for enlightenment to happen at all. Intelligence is the preparation for it. Be intelligent. Behave intelligently. Live intelligently. Otherwise enlightenment is not going to happen at all. If you are hoping that one day enlightenment will come and then you will be intelligent, a genius, you are wrong.There are a few people who go on talking nonsense like this. One of them is old Pundit Gopi Krishna. He thinks that when kundalini arises one becomes a genius, one becomes tremendously intelligent. This is not true. If you are tremendously intelligent, only then does your kundalini arise, otherwise not. If Gopi Krishna is right, it means that a dullard, a stupid person, can make his kundalini rise and can become intelligent. That is impossible.To help your energy rise and soar high you will need tremendous intelligence, sharp intelligence. Otherwise you will not be able to bring your energy up so high. A stupid person cannot do that. Enlightenment, nirvana, moksha, liberation, the arousal of your kundalini energy, whatsoever the name – are just names, symbolic. But one thing is certain: intelligence has to precede them. You cannot afford to be stupid and hope that someday something will happen and you will become enlightened. Then you are hoping in vain. You will have to create intelligence.How to create intelligence? First become more and more alert in small things. Walking along the road, become more alert, try to be more alert. For such a simple process: walking along the road – you need not have any alertness. You can remain stupid and walk well. That’s what everyone is doing. The stupidity does not hinder you at all. Start from small things. Taking your bath, be alert; standing under the shower, become very alert. That cold water falling on you, the body enjoying it… Become alert, become conscious of what is happening, be relaxed yet conscious.This moment of consciousness must be brought in again and again, in a thousand and one ways: eating, talking, meeting a friend, listening to me, meditating, making love. In all situations try to become more and more alert. It is hard, it is certainly difficult, but it is not impossible. Slowly, slowly, the dust will disappear and your mirrorlike consciousness will reveal itself; you will become more intelligent.Then live intelligently. You live in such a confused way, in such a stupid way, that if you saw somebody else living that way you would immediately say that he was stupid. But you are doing the same things, although somehow one manages not to see one’s own life.A man came to me and he asked, “What should I do, Osho? I have fallen in love with two women.” Now, one is enough – one would do enough harm – but he had fallen in love with two women. Now both were struggling and he was crushed. He said, “I am in misery; both are fighting over me.” And naturally he was being hit from both sides. When I told him, “Choose one,” he said that it was difficult. This means that one person is riding on two horses. He said, “It is difficult to choose one.” I told him, “Then let it be; have it your own way. You will destroy your life.” Choosing two women or two men as your love object is bound to split you. You will become schizophrenic and you will start falling apart.This is stupid. It is so simple to look into the phenomenon. Maybe sometimes it is difficult, it is difficult – but then too one has to choose. You cannot go in all directions simultaneously. If you have come to listen to me you have chosen. You have missed a few things. You could have been in a restaurant sitting with friends, sipping coffee, but you have chosen not to do that. You might have gone to a movie, but you have chosen not to go there. Or you might have chosen just to lie down on your bed and relax and be a Taoist – but you have not chosen that. You have come to listen to me and to sit on this hard marble floor, cold and hurting – but you have chosen it.What will you say about a man who just stands outside his house and says, “I am in difficulty. I cannot go to the lectures and I cannot go to bed because I want to do both together. So I am standing here.” He will miss both.If you look at your life, you will find how unintelligently you have been behaving. You read a book and you accumulate knowledge and you start thinking that you know. You have learned the word God and you think you have known God. You are ready to argue – not only argue, you are ready to kill and be killed. How many Mohammedans, how many Hindus, how many Christians have been killed for something they have read only in book! Tremendously stupid people. One is fighting for the Koran, another is fighting for the Gita, another is fighting for the Bible – you are fighting for books and killing living people and sacrificing your tremendously valuable life! What are you doing?But man has behaved in stupid ways. Just because everybody else is behaving in the same way does not make it intelligent. If all are fools, it does not make you intelligent because you are following them.I have heard…A flock of birds was flying into the sky and one bird asked another, “Why do we always follow this stupid leader?”And the other said, “I don’t know. I have heard that he is the one with the map.”The map! Nobody has the map. But you go on following the pope, and the shankaracharya, and a maulvi, and a pundit, and you think that they have the map, that they know. Just look at their lives. What do they know? They may even be far more stupid than you are. Just look at the unintelligent way they are living. Watch their life. Are they happy? Is there a dance in their life? Is there fragrance in their life? Just looking at them do you feel a silence showering on you? Nothing of the sort. Just because they have a book and they have read it and studied it for years, it does not make any sense to follow them.Become a man of knowing, not a man of knowledge. Then you live intelligently.To me, intelligence is the basic morality, the basic virtue. If you are intelligent, you will not harm anybody because that is foolish. If you are intelligent, you will not harm yourself because that is foolish. Life is so precious, it is not to be wasted; it must be lived in deep celebration, in deep gratitude. One must be very careful and watchful because a moment gone is gone forever. It will never return. If you waste it in stupidity you are wasting a great opportunity. Live each moment so totally, so fully aware, that you never repent later on that you didn’t live, that you could have lived more, that you could have enjoyed more. That’s what intelligence is: to live life so totally that there is no repentance, never. One is always contented. One knows that one has lived to one’s uttermost.Then, in the uttermost state of awareness, enlightenment happens. You say: “I am not enlightened so I feel my mind is becoming dull.” No, sir, your mind is dull, that’s why you have not become enlightened. So don’t wait for enlightenment to come and do everything for you – do something so that your dullness is dropped.It can be dropped because nobody is born dull; every child is born intelligent. Can’t you see it in children? – how intelligent they are, how full of life, how full of love, how full of joy. Look into their eyes – how much shine there is in their eyes. They are the glories of God. Then the society jumps on them, and the parents and the teachers and the education system and everybody starts making them dull because the society needs dull people. Only dull people can be dominated, oppressed. Only dull people can be ordered to go here and there, to do this and that. Only dull people are needed by the society because dull people are very efficient, they don’t have any mind, they are not dangerous. Dull people are very convenient. Dull people drag their whole life.Just think if people were intelligent. Do you think anybody would be ready to waste his whole life as a clerk? Think of it. Would anybody be ready to waste his whole life as a politician? Would anybody be ready to waste his whole life as a soldier? For what? One would like to live an intelligent life of love, art, creativity. Ninety-nine percent of things would disappear from the world if people were intelligent.War would not be possible. Now war is almost the major work of humanity – it has been so for centuries. Seventy percent of a nation’s money is wasted on war – seventy percent! What are you doing? Simply preparing for war? You don’t know anything else. You know only how to kill. People have become efficient only in killing. This can only be done by dull people. Intelligent people would throw away the arms. They would dump all the atom bombs in the Pacific and they would say goodbye to all war.What is war for? Life is so short and there is so much to enjoy – the stars and the moon and flowers and men and women and the rivers and mountains. And you are simply fighting and just living a very dull and stupid life.Society needs dull people, remember it. Be aware that the society would not like you to become intelligent. It would like you to become a machine – efficient, certainly, but not intelligent. Do the work that is given to you, and then die. Drag your life from the office to the house, from the house to the office. Your whole life is from the office to the house, from the house to the office. In the house you will have a wife to nag you and in the office you will have a boss to insult and humiliate you. And on the road there is the mad traffic. Go to the office, back home, to the office, again home – and then one day you die. That is the only hope – that one day you will die!Mulla Nasruddin went on a world trip. He was on a ship for the first time. And, of course, he was suffering tremendously, terribly, from seasickness. He could not eat anything, he could not drink anything, he was continuously vomiting.Then the captain came and he said to Nasruddin, “Don’t be worried. I have been in the service for twenty years and I have never seen or heard of a man dying of seasickness. Don’t be worried.”Mulla beat his own head and he said, “That was my only hope! I was hoping to die, but now you say that nobody has ever died!”Your only hope is that one day you will die. So just a little more, tolerate it a little more, a few more days of the office, a few more days of the house. Tolerate. Death is coming to deliver you. That is your only hope.What life is this where a man hopes that death will deliver him? What life is this where people commit suicide? What life is this where people go mad, insane, just because they cannot tolerate it anymore, because it becomes too much? It breaks their nerves. No we are living very unintelligently. In this unintelligence enlightenment is not possible.But remember, basically you came with intelligence; unintelligence is forced on you by society. So there is hope. It can be dropped. It is just dust that has gathered on the mirror. The mirror is still clean and clear, it is just that the dust must be removed. Once the dust is removed the mirror will be as clear as ever. Everybody is a genius. God never creates anything else – God only creates geniuses. Everybody is intelligent, nobody is mediocre, cannot be. How can somebody come out of God and be mediocre? God does not deal in mediocres, he only makes masterpieces. But the society has forced you to become dull. So much dust has gathered on your mirror that you don’t look like a mirror at all.What is enlightenment? It is to attain to your mirrorlike quality again. It is a recovery. It is not something that you invent; it is already the case – deep down in your heart you are enlightened. Dust has just gathered on the surface, you need a good cleansing.That’s what we are doing here. A good cleansing. You need a good bath. Meditation is an inner bath. Sannyas is a total cleansing. Trying to live intelligently, whatsoever the cost. Trying to live courageously. Trying to live your life in your own way, trying to do your own thing in your own way and not bothering about what others say. With that declaration you become intelligent. With that declaration of individuality you become intelligent. And only through intelligence does the bird of enlightenment one day come. Open the window of intelligence and wait.The last question:Osho,Why are you against marriage?Why should I be against marriage? First, I have never been married, so why should I be against marriage? You need experience for such things.A youngster was thinking about getting married. So he wrote to his father for some personal advice. His father wrote back:“I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear about your impending marriage. You will find marriage the most wonderful state of bliss and happiness. As I look across the table at your dear mother, I realize with great pride how full and wonderful our years together have been. By all means, get married. You have our blessings. It will be the happiest day of your life.Sincerely,Dad.PS. Your mother just left the room. Stay single, you idiot!”I have no experience, so why should I be against marriage? Fortunately my parents were very simple people. They have also not created a sense in me to be against marriage. They have loved each other tremendously, innocently. In my childhood I never saw them fighting, quarreling, nagging. They have lived as peacefully as possible. It is very rare to find such a peaceful couple.She watched the young man have his soup with the wrong spoon, grasp the utensils with the wrong fingers, eat the main course with his hands and pour tea into his saucer and blow on it.“Hasn’t watching your mother and dad at the dinner table taught you anything?” she asked.“Yeah,” said the boy. “Never to get married.”I could not have deduced it from my parents so why should I be against marriage? Those who know are against it but then it is too late.Once a friend told Alfred Adler about a certain Miss X who was going to be married soon. Usually in such situations people inquire, “To whom?” but Adler asked, “Against whom?” He had suffered much. He knew that a marriage is not with somebody, but against somebody, so it was not right to ask, “With whom?” but, “Against whom?”What you call marriage is nothing but an arrangement, a social contract. What you call marriage is nothing but an institution. It is not good to live in an institution. It is not love; it is a poor substitute for love. If marriage arises out of love it is beautiful – but then it is not really marriage, it is a totally different thing. But if marriage is just a legal binding and there is no love in it, then you are entering into an imprisonment – and one of your own accord.Marriage as such is going to disappear from the world; it should disappear. Love should be enough cause to be together. I know that there is danger, because love is something like a breeze: when it comes it comes, when it goes it goes. It is not very dependable. It is not an electric fan whose button you switch on and the fan starts. Marriage is an electric fan, you can depend on it. Love is a natural breeze – sometimes it is there, then it is beautiful; but then it can go too, any moment it can be gone.Love is like a roseflower – it blooms and withers. Marriage is a plastic flower – it never blooms and it never withers. It is very permanent. Many people have chosen the plastic flower over the roseflower, the real flower, because they are afraid of its momentariness.Life is momentary, life is a flux. To hope that one can create something permanent in life is to hope in vain. You are asking for frustration. All of life is a continuous movement: things change. Except change, everything changes. The only thing that is permanent is change.Whatsoever is real is changing: that’s why fear arises in man’s mind. Love cannot be depended on, so you have to bring in the court and the law so that things become permanent. When love disappears the law will bind you, but anything that binds is ugly. Unity is one thing; to be tied together is another thing.One night, Mulla Nasruddin and his wife were sitting by the fireside. It was a cold night. Mulla was reading his newspaper and his wife was doing some knitting. The dog and the cat of the family were also resting by the fireside, dreaming, enjoying.The wife suddenly said, “Nasruddin look at the dog and the cat and how peacefully they live together. Why can’t we do that?”Nasruddin said, “Why can’t we do that? Tie them together and see what happens.”Once two people are tied together freedom is lost and anger arises. Freedom is lost and everything becomes ugly. Love means that freedom remains intact: marriage means that freedom has been dropped. You have bargained for permanence, for security, and you have paid for it with freedom.Marriage is going to disappear, should disappear. Now the point is coming in the history of humanity where it becomes feasible for marriage to disappear. It is already an outmoded phenomenon, it has lived too long and it has created nothing but misery. Marriage should disappear and love should flower again. One should live with insecurity and freedom. I call that intelligence.To seek marriage is to be dull; to seek love is to be intelligent. Anything that gives you a false sense of security makes you dull, makes you less alert; anything that keeps the insecurity as it is – and life is insecure, love is insecure, everything is insecure – makes you remain alert. Because then you have to be alert every moment, you cannot depend on anything, you cannot go to sleep, you have to keep aware. Then life will have a deeper significance and life will become more natural – that is the meaning of living the life of Tao. Living life in insecurity is to live the life of Tao.I am not against marriage; I am against the ugly institution that has evolved in the name of marriage. If marriage allows freedom and love to exist together, it is good but then marriage is totally different. Always be aware: never lose your freedom and never dominate anybody so that he or she loses his or her freedom. Freedom is the goal and freedom should be the very foundation of life. Love is beautiful when it flowers in freedom. When it flowers in a hothouse, closed from everywhere, it is simply a phony thing. It is not true and it cannot satisfy you. To be real the flower needs the storm, the lightning, the thundering, the clouds, the sun, the wind – it needs all these challenges to be real. When you protect it too much, in that very protection it loses all reality, it becomes pale, it becomes anemic; it is already dead before its death.I am not saying that through love your life will become more secure – no, I am not saying that. Through love your life will become more insecure. But I am all for insecurity because through insecurity is growth. When you are secure you are in your grave.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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In middle age Hua-tzu of Yang-li in Sung lost his memory. He would receive a present in the morning and forget it by the evening; give a present in the evening and forget it by the morning. In the street he would forget to walk; at home he would forget to sit down. Today he would not remember yesterday; tomorrow he would not remember today. His family were troubled about it and invited a diviner to tell his fortune, but without success. They invited a shaman to perform an auspicious rite, but it made no difference. They invited a doctor to treat him, but it did no good.There was a Confucian of Lu who, acting as his own go-between, claimed that he could cure it. Hua-tzu’s wife and children offered half of their property in return for his skill.The Confucian told them: “This is clearly not a disease which can be divined by hexagrams and omens, or charmed away by auspicious prayers, or treated by medicines and the needle. I shall try reforming his mind, changing his thoughts; there is a good chance that he will recover.”Then the Confucian tried stripping Hua-tzu, and he looked for his clothes; tried starving him, and he looked for food; tried shutting him up in the dark, and he looked for light. The Confucian was delighted and told the man’s sons:“The sickness is curable but my arts have been passed down secretly through the generations, and are not disclosed to outsiders. I shall shut out his attendants, and stay alone with him in his room for seven days.”They agreed, and no one knew what methods the Confucian used; but the sickness of many years was completely dispelled in a single morning.When Hua-tzu woke up he was very angry. He dismissed his wife, punished his sons, and chased away the Confucian with a spear. The authorities of Sung arrested him and wanted to know the reason.“Formerly when I forgot,” said Hua-tzu, “I was boundless; I did not notice whether heaven and earth existed or not. Now suddenly I remember; and all the disasters and recoveries, gains and losses, joys and sorrows, loves and hates of twenty or thirty years past rise up in a thousand tangled threads. I fear that all the disasters and recoveries, gains and losses, joys and sorrows, loves and hates still to come will confound my heart just as much. Shall I never again find a moment of forgetfulness?”This is one of the greatest parables of Lieh Tzu, pregnant with profound significance and insight. Based on a great experience of the inner world of consciousness, it is paradoxical but it indicates something absolute.Let us go into it very softly, delicately, carefully. It has much to give you; it has much to show to you. It can give great clarity to you on your path. Before we enter into it, a few paradigms of Taoism will be helpful.First, Taoism believes that memory is the problem. Because of memory we are not really alive. Memory holds us back in the past, it never allows us to be in the present. It is a dead weight. It goes on growing every day. Every day the past becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. Every day more and more experiences, more and more memories become accumulated. And they hold you back.The child is free. He has no past. The old man is not free. He has a long past. The child has nothing to look back to, he has everything to look forward to – he has the future just opening up for him, a great adventure. The old man has nothing in the future. Everything has happened. And all that has happened goes on cluttering his mind. It is a weight that pulls him down, backward, it does not allow him to go with the times. He lags behind.Memory is how you are rooted in the past. Unless you become so free of memory that you need not look back – memory no longer disturbs you, memory no longer clouds you – you will not be able to live in the present. If you cannot live in the present the future is not yours – because the future is contacted only through living in the present, the future becomes a reality only through living in the present. The present is the door by which the future enters and the past goes out. If you are looking at the past, you will miss the future because during the time you are looking at the past, the future is entering into the present and you cannot look both ways simultaneously. You have eyes to look forward; you don’t have eyes at the back of your head. Nature never intended you to look back otherwise your eyes would have been at the back of your head. Nature has intended that you should look forward, nature has not given you any instrument to look backward.When you look back you have to turn back, and during the moment you are looking back and your head is turned to the dead past, the future is turning into the present. You will miss that birth, you will always miss the future turning into the present – which is the only reality there is.Now, what happens? If you are too interested in the past, too attached to your memories, you start creating an unreal future – in the imagination. A man who is too attached to the past projects his future also. He lives in his memory and through his memory he creates an imagined future. Both are unreal. The past is no more, you cannot live it again – there is no possibility of that. That which is gone is gone forever, it is impossible to bring it back. Because it is impossible to bring it back you start imagining a similar type of future, something similar – a little more decorated, a little sweeter, a little better. You start imagining a future but that future is based on your past experience. What else can it be based on?You loved a woman. Almost everything was good in the woman except for a few things. Now you project a dream: in the future you will find a woman who will be as good as the past woman but with those wrong habits deleted, with those wrong habits dropped. In the future you will have a house as beautiful as in the past, even more beautiful, but with a few things which were not there in the past. You will manage the future.Your imagination is nothing but a modified past. This is how people are living. The past is no more and the future is nothing but a desire to repeat the past – of course, in a better way, but it is the same past. You ate something yesterday; you would like to eat it again tomorrow. Yesterday you loved a man or a woman, tomorrow you would like to love a man or a woman again. You want to repeat your past.The mind is a repetitive mechanism; the mind continuously hankers for sameness. Reality is new every moment; it is never the same. You cannot step into the same river twice. Life is constantly moving, changing. Only change is permanent, everything else is changing. Only change is not changing. That is reality. But then you create a false, a pseudo-reality of your own invention – fabricated in the mind, manufactured by your desire – and you start living in that.Taoism says that to be in reality a man has to come out of his mind, a man must become a no-mind. To be in reality a man has to uproot himself from the past; one has to forget the past. To remember that which is; the eyes have to be completely unclouded from the past – only then can you see in reality. Eyes clouded with the past are blind eyes. You are not really blind; you are just clouded by your past. You cannot see directly because of so many screens covering your eyes. Those screens have been created by your past.A man insulted you yesterday and today you come across him on the road. The past arises. A screen falls over your eyes. This is the same man who insulted you. You have to take revenge. You have to pay him back in the same coin – tit-for-tat. You start getting angry; you get into a rage. Now you are missing this man. It is possible that this man is no longer the same; in fact, he cannot be the same. He may have repented, he may have brooded the whole night, he may have decided to come to you and apologize, he may be coming to apologize now. But you cannot see him. Your eyes are clouded with anger and your anger will color your reality. Even if he tries to apologize, you will think that he must be trying to deceive you, or he has become afraid of your vengeance, or he is a very cunning man – beware, he is trying to cheat you, deceive you. Right now he is trying to befriend you, but some day he will again bring some trouble to you.All these thoughts will be there and you will not be able to see what he is, you will miss the reality. And seeing all these clouds on your face, there is every possibility that, though he had come to apologize, he may not now apologize. Seeing that you are in a rage and you will not understand, he may change his own ideas. Because we affect each other. And if he changes, your ideas are confirmed, they become even stronger. This is how things happen.A man who has clarity never carries the past. He simply looks into reality with no interference from the past. That is the meaning of this story. Dropping memory means dropping the mind. Dropping the mind means dropping the whole world. Dropping the mind means dropping the ego – then you are no longer self-centered, then you don’t have any mind whatsoever. Then you live a life with no mind of your own – that is the meaning of Tao. Then God’s mind functions through you; you don’t have your own mind. You function but now you don’t function from your own center. Now the center of the whole becomes your center. You act but you are not the doer any more, God acts. Your surrender is total.Just the other day I was reading a beautiful Hassidic parable.A young man asked an old rabbi, “In the past, in the old, golden days, we have heard that people used to see God with their own eyes. People used to encounter God. God used to walk on earth; God used to call people by their name. God was very close. What has happened now? Why is God not so close? Why can we not see him directly? Why is he hiding? Where has he gone? Why has he forgotten the earth? Why does he no longer walk on the earth? Why does he not hold the hands of people stumbling in darkness? He used to do that before.”The old rabbi looked at the disciple and said, “My son, he is still there where he used to be, but man has forgotten how to stoop down so low that he can see him.”“To stoop down…” Man has forgotten; man is standing very haughty, man is standing very proud, man is standing very erect. Man is standing separate from God. Man has become an island; man is no longer part of the universal, part of the whole – that’s why. God is exactly where he used to be. – He is still trying to hold your hand, but you are not willing. He is still confronting you, but you look sideways. He is still there, calling you by your own name, but you are full of your own noise, the inner talk, the continuous chattering – you have become a chatterbox – that’s why.Man has forgotten to stoop, to bow down.In the East, bowing down has always been a very significant gesture. The disciple goes to the master, bows down, lies down flat on the earth. That is a gesture of surrender. He says, “I am no more.” He says, “I will not exist any more as myself. Now I will be a vehicle, I will be passive. You pour and I will be a womb, you pour and I will be a receptacle. I will not fight. I surrender.” In that surrender something of tremendous value happens.With the master you start learning the ABC of surrender. Then one day, when you have learned what surrender is, you try it with God. The master is just a kindergarten, just a beginning, the beginning of surrender. When you have learned the joy of it, the beauty of it, the benediction of it, then you want to go on to deeper seas. You have learned swimming near the banks, now you would like to go to the farthest point. Then God is available. But if you exist as you, if you exist as a self, then it is impossible. Then you exist as an ego.Memory in this parable means ego. These Taoist parables are very subtle.Now let us go into it.In middle age, Hua-tzu of Yang-li in Sung lost his memory.That is a way of saying that he became a meditator.That is a Taoist expression: “…lost his memory.” It means: became a non-individual. It means: became a non-ego. It means: became loose from the grip of the mind, dropped the weight of the past. It is not something condemning, remember, it is a great appreciation.In Taoist circles, when somebody says, “Somebody has lost his memory,” remember that he is praising the man. Taoists have their own way of saying things, very peculiar ways of saying things. But the meaning of their gestures is profound.In middle age, Hua-tzu of Yang-li in Sung lost his memory. He became a no-mind, forgot all about his past, forgot all that had happened –as if all the dust on the mirror dropped away. He came to exist in the present – that’s what it means. He was no longer in the past, he did not exist through the past, he did not function through the past. He had started functioning in the immediate present. He now lived moment to moment – not gathering, not accumulating, not hoarding any knowledge or any information. Whatsoever the totality brought in the moment was all. If he felt hungry he looked for food, but he had no idea about any food that he had eaten before. And the moment his appetite was fulfilled he forgot all about it. He did not carry the idea in his mind; he had no fantasy about food, either before or after. The moment was all, the now and the here was all; there was no then and there was no there.This is the first satori – when a man becomes loosened from the grip of the past, the hold of the past, as if a snake had slipped from its old skin. He has become absolutely new, like a tree which, dropping all the old leaves during the fall has sprouted new leaves. The moment something becomes old, it is dropped immediately. One goes on slipping again and again into the present. It is a totally new style of life – the way of Tao, the way of Zen, the way of sannyas.Look for it in your own life. How do you live? Do you bring in the past again and again? Do you always live through the past? Is your life too colored by memory? Then you are living the worldly life. To live in memory is to live in the world, samsara. To live without memory is to live in godliness, to live without memory, to live in nirvana, enlightenment.Remember, by saying that Hua-tzu lost his memory, you should not translate it to mean that he became absentminded. No! That is not the meaning of it. To become absent-minded is a totally different thing. It is a disease: memory persists but becomes distorted. You know but you don’t know clearly. An absent-minded person is not a man of Tao. An absentminded person is simply absentminded. The man of Tao is very much present, he is not absentminded. In fact, he is so present that his memory cannot interfere. His presence is tremendous; his presence is so intense, the light of presence is so intense, that his memory cannot interfere. He functions out of the present; you function out of memory.When somebody becomes absentminded he looks as if he were ill – naturally – because he goes on forgetting. Not that he has really forgotten, but he remembers that he has forgotten – the difference must be understood. He remembers that he has forgotten; he knows that he knows and yet he cannot remember it. That is the man who is absentminded.I have heard many stories about Thomas Alva Edison. He was a man who could be called perfectly absentminded…One day he went into a restaurant, ate his lunch, came out and met a friend at the door on the street. They talked for a few minutes and then the friend said, “Why don’t you come with me and have your lunch?”So he said, “Right. You made me remember. I came for my lunch.”Then they went inside the same restaurant. The food was served. The friend said to Edison, “You look a little puzzled.”Edison said, “What’s the matter? I don’t feel any appetite at all.”And the waiter laughed and he said, “Sir, you ate your lunch here just five minutes ago.”This is absentmindedness.Once it happened that he forgot his own name. He was standing in a queue and when his turn came and his name was called he started looking here and there, looking for the man whose name had been called. And then somebody who was standing behind him said to him, “Sir, as far as I know, you are Edison; who are you looking for?”And Edison said, “Thank you. In fact, I had completely forgotten.”This is absentmindedness. Edison was not a man of satori; he still lived in his memory but his memory was a chaos. He could not figure out what was what. He was not a Buddha, he was not a Hua-tzu. He did not live in the moment; he still lived in the past. Of course, his past was very clumsy. Absentmindedness is a clumsy past, a clumsy memory, a lousy memory.But a man who has lost his memory in the sense that Taoists use this term is a man who functions out of the presence of his mind – presence of mind.Just a few days ago I was reading the memoirs of a very rare man. He was a saint who died a few years ago. He lived for a really long time – almost one hundred and forty years. His name was Shivapuri Baba, Shivapuri Baba of Nepal. In his memoirs he tells a story.He went to Jaipur and a very rich man gave him a box full of money, one-hundred-rupee notes. While in the train he looked into the box; it was full of rupees and he wanted to know how many he had. He started counting. In the compartment there were only two persons, Shivapuri Baba, himself a very old ancient man – at the time he must have been about one hundred and twenty years old – and an English lady, a young woman. She became interested. This old beggar was in the first class and was carrying a whole box of one-hundred-rupee notes.She suddenly had an idea. She jumped up and said, “Give me half the money otherwise I will pull the chain and I will tell them that you tried to rape me.”Shivapuri Baba laughed and put his hands to his ears as if he were deaf. And he gave her some paper and said, “Write it down. I cannot hear.” So she wrote it down. He took it and put it in his pocket and said, “Now pull the chain.”This is presence of mind! It is not functioning out of the past because this has never happened before and it may not happen again. But, in a flash, like lightning, a man who is really present will act out of his presence.You would have been in trouble because you would have looked into your memory – what should I do now? You would have started groping in your memory: is there something in the past from which I can have some idea of what to do now?In real life nothing is ever repeated. Everything is new. That’s why your responses always fall short. You act out of the past and the thing is absolutely new, it has never happened before; so in fact you don’t have any experience of it. Your experience may be of something similar but it cannot be about exactly the same thing. It is not a repetition, the situation never repeats. Maybe it was something similar: you were cheated by somebody, something similar. You were deceived by somebody, something similar. You were threatened by somebody; something similar, but not exactly the same. So when you start looking into your memory you are showing that you don’t have presence of mind.This looks like a paradox: a man of no-mind is a man with presence of mind. And a man of mind, a man with memory, is a man who is absent. He looks into the past. The situation is herenow, confronting you; it is an encounter. Respond right now, like a mirror. A mirror reflects whosoever comes in front of it. It does not look into memory: this man has been here before, in front of me, so how to reflect him? It simply reflects. When there is no memory it is not absentmindedness, the mirror is simply clear, the dust is not there, the dust is not a distraction. The reflection will be clear and out of that reflection will come the act. When you act out of the present moment your act is always total. You will never feel frustrated.Two Englishmen met in London.“I say, Derrick!” called Quincy. “How are you, old chap?”“Fine. Just fine,” said Derrick. “Lots doing. Business, grandchildren fine, weather pleasant and all that sort of balderdash.”“Jolly good. Anything else?”“Let me see. Ah yes – buried my wife.”“Really?”“Had to. Dead, you know.”Now this man is an absentminded man. Not that he has lost his memory, he has a lousy memory. Remember the distinctions. Sometimes they may look the same – they are not.This story of Hua-tzu is about a man who lost his memory, who lost his mind, who lost his past – who became unburdened. To say it in Christ’s words, “Who became a child again, capable of entering into the kingdom of God.”But to his family, to his friends, he must have posed a great problem. Naturally. They must have wondered what had happened to this old man. A calamity. They must have thought that he had fallen into a deep sleep, a sort of sleep. But exactly the contrary was the case – they were asleep and this man had awakened from sleep. But they could understand only the language of sleep so they must have thought that he had fallen asleep.A big-city sharpie made a wrong turn and found himself helplessly lost in the sticks of Kentucky. After bouncing along a rocky country road for more than an hour, he reached a large intersection. There, standing on the side of the road, was an old-looking hillbilly.“Hey, fellow!” he shouted. “Could you tell me where the road on the right leads to?”“I don’t rightly know,” the country boy answered slowly.“Well, then, I wonder if you can tell me where the road on the left would take me?”But again the boy shook his head. “I don’t rightly know that either.”A little perturbed, the city fellow barked, “You’re not too bright, are you?”“Maybe not,” drawled the hillbilly, “but I ain’t lost.”This old man, Hua-tzu, must have been thought by others to be lost. He had changed so diametrically, he had changed so tremendously, that the whole village – his relations, his friends, his family, his sons, his daughters, his wife – must have become very worried. What should they do with this man?He would receive a present in the morning and forget it by the evening…He had really become a child again. That is the quality of innocence.…give a present in the evening and forget it by the morning. In the street he would forget to walk; at home he would forget to sit down. Today he would not remember yesterday; tomorrow he would not remember today.This is not absentmindedness. He was simply no longer gathering the past. It is not that he had a lousy memory; he was cut away from his memory utterly. He was like a child.You are angry with a child and the child is angry with you. Look at his face! He is so angry and so red that he would like to kill you. He says, “I will never talk to you again. Finished!” And the next moment he is sitting in your lap again and talking beautifully. He has forgotten. Whatsoever he has said in a rage, he has not carried it. It has not become luggage in his mind. Yes, in the spur of the moment he was angry; he said something, but now the anger is gone and all that he had said in that moment has gone. He has not become committed to it forever; it was a momentary flare-up, a ripple. But he is not frozen in it, he is a flowing phenomenon. The ripple was there, a wave had arisen; now it is no more. He is not going to carry it always and always.Even if you make him remember it, he will laugh. He will say, “All nonsense!” He will say, “I don’t remember. Is it so?” He will say, “Have I really said that? Impossible!” He will say, “How I can say that? You must have imagined it.”It was a flare-up: this must be understood. A man who lives moment to moment is sometimes angry, sometimes happy, sometimes sad. But you can depend on him – he will not carry these things forever. A man who is very controlled and does not allow any emotion to arise in his being is very dangerous. If you insult him, he is not angry. He holds it. By and by he will accumulate so much anger that he is going to do something really nasty.There is nothing wrong in a momentary flare of anger – it is beautiful in a way. It simply shows that the man is still alive. A momentary flare-up simply shows that the man is not dead, that he responds to situations – and responds authentically. When he feels that the situation is such that anger is needed, anger is there. When he feels that the situation is such that happiness is needed, happiness is there. He goes with the situation. He has no prejudice for or against. He has no ideology as such. He does not have a certain idea that you should not be angry, that whatsoever the situation you have to remain non-angry.If a man tries to be non-angry in that way, what will he do? He will repress his anger. Eventually that anger will come all out of proportion in situations where it will look almost mad. He will be capable of murdering somebody or committing suicide or doing something really harmful – because when so much anger is released it is very poisonous, very destructive.Nothing is wrong with ordinary anger. In fact, a person who can become angry and forget all about it the next moment is really a very good person. You will always find him friendly, alive, loving, compassionate. A man who is always holding onto his emotions, controlling and controlling and controlling, a man of so-called discipline, is never a good person. He will always show that he is holier than you, but you can see his anger in his eyes, you can see it in his face, you can see it in his every gesture – the way he walks, the way he talks, the way he relates with people – you can always see it there, boiling. He is ready to burst any moment. These are the murderers, these are the criminals, these are the real evil-doers.If he goes on controlling, all his control will make his ego stronger and stronger. Now ego is far more dangerous than anger. Anger is human, nothing wrong with it. It is simple, it is simply a situation in which you are provoked, and you are alive so you respond to it. It is saying that you will not yield; it is saying that this is not a situation you can accept; it is saying that this is a situation in which you want to say no. It is a protest, and nothing is wrong with that.I am not against anger, I am against accumulated anger. I am not against sex, I am against accumulated sexuality. Anything that is in the moment is good, anything that is carried from the past is bad, is diseased, is illness.This man became like a child. Today he would not remember yesterday; tomorrow he would not remember today.Jesus says to his disciples, “Think not of the morrow. Look at the lilies in the field, how beautiful they are. They don’t think of the past, they don’t think of the future. They are not worried at all about what is going to happen and what has happened. They simply live herenow, that is their beauty.” That is the beauty of the trees and the rocks and the stars and the rivers. All of existence is beautiful because it has no past.Man is ugly. His past makes him ugly. Apart from man, nothing is ugly because it is only man who goes on brooding about the past and the future, and goes on missing the life that is available in the present. That is the only life there is, the only dance there is. Naturally you become ugly because you have no opportunity to live, to live authentically.I have heard a beautiful anecdote:A man was talking with his friend, the tailor, about hunting trips.“Once,” said the tailor, “I was in Africa hunting lions. I discovered one standing ten feet away – and there I was without my gun. The lion came closer. Now he was only five feet away.”“What happened?” the man asked breathlessly.“Well, to make a long story short, he leaped up and killed me.”“What? What do you mean he killed you?” the man asked. “You’re sitting here, very much alive.”“Ha!” said the tailor. “You call this living?”Even people who look alive are not really alive. They have been killed and not once, but many times. Killed by the past, the lion of the past; killed by the future, the lion of the future. And they are being killed every day; they are being murdered every day by these two enemies.There is a beautiful Buddhist parable of many meanings. All the meanings are beautiful, but today try to understand one certain meaning in it:In a forest a man is running, trying to escape from a lion who is following him, chasing him. The man comes to a precipice. There is no other way to go, so he stops. For a single moment he cannot understand what to do. He looks down. It is a very deep valley, a great abyss. If he jumps he is gone. But still there is a possibility for him – miracles happen. So he looks down more closely and there, deep in the valley, two more lions are standing, looking up. So that possibility is gone.The lion is coming closer; and he is roaring, the man can hear the roar. His only possibility is to hang from the roots of a tree sticking out over the valley. He cannot jump and he cannot stand on the precipice so he holds onto the roots of the tree. The roots are very fragile and he is afraid that at any moment they will break. Not only that, it is a very cold evening, night is gathering, and the sun is going down. And his hands are so cold that he is afraid he will not be able to hold on for long. Already the roots are slipping out of his hands. They are frozen. Death is certain. Each moment death is there.Then he looks up. Two mice are chewing through the roots of the tree. One is white and one is black: the symbol of day and night, the symbol of time. Time is running out fast and the two mice are chewing through the roots and they are really doing a great job. They are almost at the end, they are just going to finish – it is evening and they also have to go and rest so they are finishing in a hurry. Any moment the root will break away from the tree.The man looks up again and there on the tree is a beehive out of which honey is dripping. He forgets all and tries to catch a drop on his tongue and he succeeds. The taste is really sweet.Now this parable has many meanings. I have talked about this parable in different ways. This time I would like to indicate a certain meaning: this moment. In the past a lion is coming, in the future two lions are waiting; time is running out fast, death is very close by as it is always; day and night the two mice are cutting away the very roots of life, but still, if you can live in the present, the taste is tremendously sweet. It is really beautiful.The man lived in the moment and forgot everything. For the moment there was no death, no lions, no time, nothing existed – only the sweet taste of honey on his tongue.This is the way to live, this is the only way to live – otherwise you will not be living. This is the situation each moment. The parable is really very existential. This is the situation: you are the man clinging to the root of the tree, surrounded from everywhere by death, and time is running short. Any moment you will drop into death and disappear. Now what to do? Worry about the past? Worry about the future? Worry about death? Worry about time? Or enjoy this moment?“Think not of the morrow” means to let this moment become a drop of sweet honey on your tongue. Even though death is always there, life is beautiful. Even though the past was not very good, and who knows about the future – it may not be very good. As things are, it is hopeless to hope – but this moment is beautiful. Look at this moment. Let me become a drop of honey on your tongue. This moment is tremendously beautiful. What is missing? What is lacking?If you can be in this moment – that is the meaning of the Taoist expression: Hua-tzu lost his memory.His family were troubled about it and invited a diviner to tell his fortune, but without success. They invited a shaman to perform an auspicious rite, but it made no difference. They invited a doctor to treat him, but it did no good.Now that is beautiful – and meaningful. It was not a disease so no doctor could cure it. Had it been a disease then the doctor could have cured it. It was not anything physical. The man was perfectly healthy.In fact, he had never been healthier than he must have been at that time. When you forget about your past you forget all about your illnesses also. The past is a reservoir of all illnesses. When you forget the past you are neither young nor old, you simply are. And that is the moment of being healthy and whole.The man must have been very healthy so what could doctors do? The family called the doctors but they could not treat him. It was not a disease. A disease could have been treated, but this was not a disease.The family asked a diviner to tell his fortune but without success because a man who has no memory has no imagination for the future. And a man who has no imagination for the future is unpredictable. You cannot predict anything about him. He is just open. Ordinarily men are predictable because they have a certain projection into the future, some idea about the future, a seed for the future. That seed will one day sprout.That’s how the diviners, the palmists, the fortune-tellers live: they live on your imagination. If you go to a fortune-teller, he will look at your hand and he will say, “There is a great possibility that money will come – but it will not stay.” It can be said about anybody except for a man like me, you cannot say it! But it can be said about anybody – money will come. Everybody is hoping for it, so who is going to deny that it will come? That’s why he has come to the fortune-teller – for his ideas to be approved, to be confirmed. Money will come, but he will not be able to keep it. Who has ever been able to keep money? Money comes and goes.In fact, money exists only in its coming and going. If you are able to keep it, it is no longer money. You can keep a thousand notes in your house, you can hoard it underground, but it is no longer money. You could have kept stones there; it would have been just the same. Money exists only in its coming and going. When somebody gives you a hundred-rupee note, when the note changes hands, then it is money. Just for a moment it is money – when it changes hands. Then the other man is getting something out of it and you are getting something out of it. When you give it to somebody else, again it will be money. That’s why notes are called currency. Currency means movement. They should move. The more they move, the more money there is.That’s why there is more money in America and less in India. There is so much movement. Everybody is just spending – spending what they have and spending even that which they hope they will have one day. People are purchasing cars and fridges and everything on credit. Someday they hope they will have the money and then they will pay. But they are purchasing right now. There is money in America because people have come to know that money exists in its movement. Let the money change hands. The more it changes hands, the richer and richer and richer the country becomes.Let a one hundred-rupee note circulate here. If we are five hundred people and a one hundred-rupee note changes hands, it becomes five hundred notes of one hundred-rupees. Each time it comes to one person he will have one hundred rupees. But let one person keep the note and then this group will be poor. Then only one person has a hundred-rupee note. If it had changed hands and moved, then everybody would have enjoyed a hundred rupees. Of course, there would have been much wealth.But these predictions are possible only about people who have an idea of a future.There is a story…When Buddha became enlightened, he was going along the bank of a river and an astrologer passed who was coming from Varanasi. He had become a great scholar of astrology and was coming home with all the degrees and diplomas that were available in those days. And suddenly he saw the footprints of Buddha in the sand. He could not believe his eyes because in his books it was said that such a footprint is only of a man who had conquered the whole world, a chakravatin, one who is the emperor of the whole world, of all the seven continents. But why should an emperor of all the seven continents come on a hot afternoon to walk by this poor river? And walk on the hot sand without shoes? Impossible!He became very puzzled. He was fresh from Varanasi and it seemed that this first encounter was undoing all his learning. Was his science wrong? What had happened? Why should the emperor come here?So he followed the footprints. Buddha was sitting under a tree. Looking at Buddha he became even more puzzled. A beggar! And his puzzlement was even greater because he looked like an emperor – his face, the grace, the peace. He had seen emperors; in fact, nobody had looked more emperor-like than this man. But his clothes, and the way he was sitting under the tree, and not even a servant around…?He went to Buddha and he said, “Sir, this is a very decisive thing for me. Allow me to disturb you. Please tell me one single thing because my whole life will depend on it. I am carrying all these books; I am coming from Varanasi. Twenty years I have wasted studying astrology, and here you are sitting and disturbing all my knowledge. So either you tell me that astrology is useless so that I can throw these books into the river and go back home and forget all about it or tell me what has happened. These footprints are the footprints of a chakravatin, the emperor who rules the whole world, the greatest emperor, one who is the ruler of all seven continents. All the indications are here. But what are you doing here?”Buddha laughed and said, “You need not throw away your books, you can take them home. You will not come across a man like me again very easily. Don’t be disturbed. The people that you will meet, you will be able to predict. But it is true: about me, you cannot predict anything because I have gone beyond mind. All predictions are below the mind. People who live in the mind are predictable.”This is significant. People who live below the mind are predictable. People who live in the mind are predictable because they are all mechanical. You can say what they will do tomorrow because they will repeat themselves. Nothing new is going to happen. They will simply repeat their past. But a man who has gone beyond mind is unpredictable because he will never repeat anything. So you cannot use any clue from his past to predict his actions.The diviners failed. They could not say anything about Hua-tzu. And the shaman was called but he also could not do anything. The shaman can only do one thing: he can pray. He can do certain rituals to help. But a man who has gone beyond mind needs no prayer; no prayer will be of any help to him. In fact, prayer means asking God to do something, naturally asking God to do something for you. A man who has gone beyond mind has become part of God – there is nobody to pray and nobody to be prayed to. Who is there to ask? Only God is.No, these auspicious rites and rituals were of no help so nobody could help.There was a Confucian of Lu who, acting as his own go-between, claimed that he could cure it. Hua-tzu’s wife and children offered half of their property in return for his skill.Confucians are the first behaviorists of the world. Pavlov and B. F. Skinner are nothing but their disciples. Confucius says that a man’s behavior can be changed, manipulated, through punishment and reward. That is the whole technique that has been used down the ages by the moralists. You reward the child if he follows your idea; you punish him if he goes against you. Through punishment and reward by and by you condition his mind.All minds are conditioned – and what Maoists are doing in China today is very ancient there. Confucius taught it very well. The idea must be understood: that a man can be manipulated if you torture him or you reward him. Through greed and fear a man can be manipulated. That’s what you have been doing to your children; that’s what has been done to you by your parents and by your society.What are you doing to criminals in your prisons? Torturing them; trying to condition their minds. Why does the priest go on talking about hell and heaven? What is the idea of hell and heaven? It is just the simple idea of punishment and reward. If you follow the priest you will be rewarded in heaven; if you don’t follow the priest you will be punished in hell. And they have painted hell in such colors that anybody will become afraid, anybody will start trembling. Then one starts holding on to oneself, repressing oneself.This Confucian said he could cure Hua-tzu. First of all, the man was not ill, so to say that he could be cured is stupid. The same stupidity continues, even now. There are many people in Western countries who are not mad but who are being cured by psychologists. They are not mad; in fact, they have gone a little higher than ordinary man. They are what Sufis call mastas, those who have become mast, or drunk with God. But they are being treated. And what is their treatment? Electroshock, beating, torturing in a thousand and one ways. Electroshock treatment is a torture – the latest invention to torture man. These people are put into asylums and forced to live a very routine life.Many of them are farther ahead than ordinary humanity; many of them have achieved a better consciousness. But naturally they have fallen separate from ordinary humanity.The normal seems to be the rule; the normal seems to be the healthy person. The normal is not the norm, remember, the normal simply means the crowd, the mob, the mass. The mass is not healthy and the mass is not in any way sane; in fact, no individual has ever been as insane as the behavior of masses prove. Masses are more insane. No Hindu is as insane as the Hindu society. No Moslem is as insane as the Moslem society. The Moslem mob can go and burn a temple and kill Hindus, but ask each individual of that crowd and you will not find any individual who is so insane. Every individual will say that somehow it happened. He was just there, and he somehow joined in with the crowd: “It was not good.” Ask each individual and you will be told, “It was not good.” But the crowd did it. The crowd has always been insane. Wars, conflicts between religions and nations – these are all just crowd minds.The crowd mind is insane. The psychologists and the psychiatrists and the psychoanalysts try to adjust the person if he goes a little beyond society. If Freud had been available, Hua-tzu would have been psychoanalyzed. If Skinner had been there, he would have been reconditioned. That’s what this Confucian said.The Confucian told them, “This is clearly not a disease which can be divined by hexagrams and omens, or charmed away by auspicious prayers, or treated by medicine and the needle. I shall try reforming his mind, changing his thoughts. There is a good chance that he will recover.”He said that he would recondition, re-form, he would recondition his mind. How do you recondition a mind? You start torturing the body. When the body is tortured, the consciousness that was flying beyond has to come down to look after the body, naturally. You exist in the body; the body is your vehicle. If your body is harmed, you naturally cannot fly very high, you have to come back to protect your body. That’s the way to recondition. And that’s what he did.Then the Confucian tried stripping Hua-tzu…It may have been winter and he stripped Hua-tzu naked; naturally, when he started shivering, his mind would suddenly come back: “You are shivering, Hua-tzu. Find your clothes.” And he would start looking for his clothes.…and he looked for his clothes, tried starving him, and he looked for food, tried shutting him up in the dark, and he looked for light.His consciousness was flowing higher than the mind. If you torture the body, the consciousness has to come back to the body. Have you noticed it? If a small thorn enters your foot, your consciousness will go there. A small thorn in your foot, and your consciousness has to go there, it is a safety measure. Otherwise the thorn will become poisonous, will become septic. It is part of your life-survival mechanism that consciousness has to go there and look after it and take the thorn out. When the thorn is there you forget everything else.Haven’t you noticed it? If your teeth hurt you forget everything else. Then your whole consciousness gathers around your teeth. That pain must be tackled first. When you have a headache then everything else is forgotten. Somebody may be playing beautiful music, but you cannot hear it. Somebody may be dancing, but you cannot look at it. There may be beauty all around, but how can you look at the beauty? You are not free. Your headache is pulling you down into the body.This is what the Confucian follower did. He starved the man, stripped him naked, put him in the dark – naturally he started looking for light, looking for warmth, for clothes, for food.The Confucian was delighted and told the man’s sons:“The sickness is curable, but my arts have been passed down secretly through generations and are not disclosed to outsiders – so I shall shut out his attendants and stay alone with him in his room for seven days.”They agreed…The art is not much of a secret. The art is simply to threaten the man with death – either to beat him or to jump on his chest with a spear. So the man is threatened with death. In that moment he has to come back to his body. When one comes to one’s body, the mind starts functioning again because mind is part of the body. The mind is a subtle mechanism of the body.This man, Hua-tzu, had lost his contact with his mind but the mind was there – the mind is always there. Even when a person goes beyond mind, the mind remains there, dormant, sleepy, in the body. If you are pulled back into the body, the mind is stirred again and starts functioning.They agreed, and no one knew what methods the Confucian used, but the sickness of many years was completely dispelled in a single morning.When Hua-tzu woke up he was very angry.In fact, he was awake all this time, but now he has fallen asleep. But to the Confucian mind, or to the ordinary mind of humanity, it seems as if he woke up, as if he had fallen asleep. When Hua-tzu woke up he was very angry. Naturally, what is sleep to us was not sleep to him.It used to happen in Ramakrishna’s case. Singing the song of Kali, dancing before Kali, many times he would fall and become unconscious. He would be unconscious to us, but to himself he would be superbly conscious. From the outside it looked like he was in a coma. If you had asked psychoanalysts, they would have said this was hysteria, a hysterical fit.If you ask the psychiatrist about Ramakrishna, he will prove that he was neurotic. They did the same to Jesus, so they would not leave Ramakrishna alone. Jesus was neurotic, they say. Ramakrishna would have been even more neurotic to them. Sometimes for six days he would remain unconscious – unconscious to us. Let me remind you again and again: to himself he was superbly conscious. In fact, he was so conscious within himself that his whole consciousness was involved there; all consciousness was taken from the outside to the inside, it came to the center. That’s why on the outside he appeared unconscious.You are conscious on the outside because inside you are unconscious. In the deepest core of your being you are fast asleep and snoring; that’s why you look so awake on the outside. Things change. When a man like Ramakrishna moves into his core from the outside, he falls asleep on the outside and inside he becomes awake. To us it would seem that he has forgotten all; to him it seems he has remembered all.When Hua-tzu woke up he was very angry. The same used to happen to Ramakrishna. People would try to bring him back. Naturally the disciples would become very afraid – would he come back or not? And they would massage his feet with ghee and camphor, and they would massage his head and his whole body and they would try to bring him back somehow. Sometimes the disciples would even do something which looks ugly and cruel. They would suffocate him by closing his nose because when the body is suffocated and a great need for air arises, the consciousness has to come back.Or sometimes they would burn very bitter things around him and the smoke would get into his nose and he would suffer terribly. He would start moving, moaning, and then he would come back. And these were disciples, not enemies. Sometimes you can do harm even while thinking you are doing good.When he came back he would start crying and the disciples would ask, “Why are you crying?” He would say, “What have you done? Why have you brought me back? I was so tremendously happy inside. I was in a totally different world. I was in the world of God. God was very much present. I was showered by bliss. Why have you brought me back? Let me go again.”When Hua-tzu woke up he was very angry. Naturally. Obviously.He dismissed his wife, punished his sons, and chased away the Confucian with a spear.Maybe that was the same spear that the Confucian had used to threaten him to death.The authorities of Sung arrested him and wanted to know the reason.“Formerly, when I forgot,” said Hua-tzu, “I was boundless; I did not notice whether heaven and earth existed or not. Now suddenly I remember, and all the disasters and recoveries, gains and losses, joys and sorrows, loves and hates of twenty or thirty years past rise up in a thousand tangled threads. I fear that all the disasters and recoveries, gains and losses, joys and sorrows, loves and hates still to come will confound my heart just as much. Shall I never again find a moment of forgetfulness?”What you think of as remembering is forgetfulness for a man who has arrived home. What to you looks like forgetfulness is really remembering for a man who has awakened to his soul. Remember this paradox.The languages are different. You are asleep but you think this is waking, you think this is a state of awareness. You are mistaken. Therefore, when a person becomes really aware, it seems to you that he has fallen asleep. You are so self-conscious that when a person loses his self and really becomes conscious you think he has gone mad. It appears as if he is ill. He has become whole, he has become healthy.Hua-tzu said, “I was boundless formerly, when I forgot. There was no boundary to me; there was no definition to me. I was all, I was whole, I was one with the universe, nothing separated me. I was in a tremendous unity – unio mystica – there was oneness. And it was beautiful, it was a benediction. Now suddenly I remember; and all the disasters and recoveries, gains and losses, joys and sorrows, loves and hates of twenty or thirty years past rise up in a thousand tangled threads. Now I am back to madness. All of my past is again opening its doors. It is a nightmare.”Now he has tasted a few moments of forgetfulness, or self-remembering. Now he is in a state of mind to compare, that’s why he is angry. You cannot compare because you have not experienced anything beyond the past, beyond memory, beyond mind. You have never tasted anything, not a single drop, of no-mind. That’s why you cannot compare.This will happen one day if you continue meditating. One day suddenly you will see that you have taken off from the mind. The airport of the mind is left far behind, and you are soaring high in the sky. Then for the first time you will say, “How beautiful life is. How beautiful existence is.” You will feel tremendously grateful. Then to come down back to the mind you will feel as if you are coming back into the madhouse. Memory is a madhouse.Everything is rising up: “…in a thousand tangled threads. I fear that all the disasters and recoveries, gains and losses, joys and sorrows, loves and hates still to come will confound my heart just as much.” This is past and now the future is coming and he will be burdened more and more because the past will grow every day.“Shall I never again find a moment of forgetfulness?” In that forgetfulness you come home. In that forgetfulness you remember. In that forgetfulness you become aware for the first time. In that forgetfulness you are in the present, herenow. You enter eternity. That forgetfulness is the door to eternity.Kabir said, “When I was, God was not. Now I am not and God is.” Kabir said, “When I used to think, I used to miss. Now I have forgotten how to think and all is available. First I used to seek and there was only frustration and frustration, now I am no longer there to seek and he is there seeking for me. I have forgotten all, and in that very forgetfulness I have remembered.”To forget means to forget the world, to forget means to forget the non-essential, to forget means to forget the dust and remember the mirror, remember consciousness.The mind is continuously fabricating, imagining. The mind is a liar; it goes on lying to you. The lie is that it gives you something which is not real, something which looks as if it is real but is not real. Are you not fed up with it? A man becomes religious when he is fed up with the mind.Listen to this small anecdote:“Why should I buy that mutt for twenty bucks?” the TV producer asked the agent.“Because he is a talking dog,” said the agent.“Listen, I’m sick and tired of that talking-dog routine,” said the producer. “Take the mutt and get lost.”Suddenly the dog jumped up onto the producer’s desk. “Please, sir, I know I don’t look like the most attractive dog in the world, but it’s not my fault. My present master never feeds me. He’s a cheap, conniving, dishonest agent. He has made a fortune booking me into the largest theaters and concert halls in the world. I have entertained kings and noblemen, presidents and premiers. I assure you that if you buy me I’ll make you half a million the very first year.”The producer was amazed at the dog’s fluency, his power of speech, his intense projection.“This dog talks like a Harvard graduate,” he said. “Why do you want to sell him to me for twenty dollars? Have you gone mad?”“Because,” said the agent, “I’m fed up with his constant lying.”The mind is a lying mechanism. It never allows you to see the truth. Either it is lying about the past or it is lying about the future. And remember, whatsoever you memorize about the past, it is not true. It is touched up; it has been created again and again by the mind. Much is dropped, much is added and the mind goes on touching it up every day. You can never be certain with the mind – it is a lying mechanism.When a person is really fed up with this mechanism then the turn, the conversion, the quantum leap, becomes possible. This parable is about the mind and how, because of the mind, we have forgotten godliness, we have forgotten Tao. This parable says that unless you get out of the mind you will never be able to know the truth. If you want to know the truth there is no other way than to get out of the mind. That’s what meditation is all about – how to get out of the mind, how not to allow the mind to constantly interfere with reality.This is a great parable. Ordinarily the so-called religions are nothing but moralities. They condition your mind. Tao is a process of unconditioning. Ordinary religions hypnotize your mind; Tao is a process of de-hypnosis. One simply peels the mind away, just as you peel an onion, and you find layer upon layer, layer upon layer. Go on peeling, go on peeling, and a moment comes when nothing is left in your hand. That nothing is what Tao is. That nothing is all, what Buddha calls shunya, that nothingness, that emptiness.That emptiness is the source of all. Once you have touched, lived, been in that emptiness, only then will you know how much you were missing. For the first time you will become aware that you were asleep for centuries, for lives together. Right now you are asleep.Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples that they were somnambulists – moving, walking, talking in sleep. The first thing to do is not about morality but how to shock you into awareness. Gurdjieff’s greatest disciple was P. D. Ouspensky. P. D. Ouspensky dedicated his book In Search of the Miraculous to his master with these words: “To Gurdjieff, to my master, who has disturbed my sleep forever.”Yes, the master is there to disturb your sleep. Your sleep is nothing but the mind; mind is another name for your sleep. This is the distinction between Confucian thought and Lao Tzuan thought. Confucius is an ordinary moralist, a puritan, one who believes in conditioning people, in disciplining people. Lao Tzu is a rebellious man who believes in taking people beyond all conditionings – unconditioning people. Only in freedom is godliness possible, only in utter freedom is truth possible.Seek this utter freedom. Destroy conditionings. Destroy, by and by, all the layers that hold you down. Take off. The whole sky is yours – in fact, not even the sky is limiting.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You have talked much on love, relationship, union, etc. Is there a merging between the Tao and Tantra?Tantra means technique, and Tao can have no relationship with any technique whatsoever. Tao is non-methodological, non-technical. Tao means spontaneity. How can spontaneity have a technique? You cannot practice it; if you practice it, you miss it. There is no way to cultivate it; cultivated spontaneity could be anything else but it could not be spontaneity.Tao means a let-go. Wherever your energy moves, allow it to move. Don’t swim – float with the river. Swimming is a technique, but if you are just flowing with the river, what technique is needed? Technique means that you have a direction, you want to reach somewhere. Technique means that you want to impose your will on reality, you want to be someone, somewhere, in some state; you have a desire, you have a projection.Tao says you are already there, you are already that. There is nowhere to go and nothing else to be, so just relax and let things happen. Whatsoever happens is good. There is no denial in Tao, no rejection, no repression. It is the greatest rebellious attitude possible. Never has man’s intelligence risen higher than in Tao. But there is no way to it. You cannot be guided to it.Buddha has talked about five ways to reach truth. The first he calls the way of sheela, the way of morality, character, virtue. The second he calls the way of knowledge. The third he calls the way of dhyana, meditation; the fourth he calls the way of devotion; and the fifth he calls ashiksheya, that which cannot be taught.That fifth way is Tao. It cannot be taught. Yes, it can be learned but it cannot be taught. And when I say that it can be learned, I mean that if you relax, if you allow life to happen to you, if you don’t create a barrier, if you are ready to go wherever it leads, you will learn it. It is the most dangerous path because you will not be in control. Your mind cannot manipulate; your mind cannot prepare in any way. You will have to live moment to moment – as the trees live, as the stars live, as the mountains live. You will have to live in the same way, the same natural way. Tao is nature.So the Indian Tantra cannot have any merger with Tao. The Indian Tantra is very scientific. It is the science of how to transform sexual energy into spiritual energy; how to create the dynamo that changes, transforms, transmutes energy; how to move from the lower to the higher; how to go from earth to heaven. It is a way from sex to super-consciousness. It is very technological.Tao has no technique – this is the first thing to be understood. But there is another thing of great importance: that is, Tao has its own Tantra. But it is not a technique.There is no meeting possible between the Indian Tantra and the Chinese Tao, no meeting is possible. They are far apart, poles apart, and it is impossible to mix them. If somebody tries to mix them, Tao will be destroyed; Tantra will not be destroyed. Always remember whenever you mix a higher viewpoint with a lower, the higher is destroyed; the lower is not destroyed. It is always the higher that loses because the higher is delicate, the higher is very, very vulnerable, fragile, like a flower. If you crush a flower with a rock, the rock is not going to be destroyed. The rock may not even know that there has been a clash. But the flower will be gone – crushed, destroyed. Tao is the highest possibility and Tantra can destroy it. So remember not to mix them.But Tao has its own Tantra because Tao is a total world view. It has everything that is possible. It is the world. So there is something in it for love, for sex. What is Taoist Tantra? I have to use the word Tantra, remember, but I am not using it in the Indian sense. What is Taoist Tantra? It is spontaneity in sexuality; it is spontaneity in love.For example, if you read a Tantra manual, an Indian Tantra manual, there is great ritual in it. Every step is very clearly indicated. It is not easy to practice Indian Tantra – you have to become adept at it. Don’t fool around. Don’t think that while you are making love to a woman you are practicing Tantra. Tantra is difficult. It is a long process. And it takes years to get trained in it.The greatest training that is involved and the most difficult problem that arises is that Tantra allows a man to make love to a woman only when he has lost all sexual attraction toward her. There is no sexual attraction at all. That is the whole process. The woman becomes almost a mother to you, or a sister to you – a goddess. She must be worshipped. In tantric ritual the woman must be worshipped like a goddess. And for months together one has to practice that worship.The woman sits naked in front of you on a throne and you worship and you bow down and you pray to her. And you create the idea in your deepest core of consciousness that she is just a representative of all womanhood, motherhood. She is a goddess.One day, slowly, slowly, you lose all sexual interest in her. You become auto-hypnotized with your own idea. The day you lose all sexual interest in her body and you can look through and though her, and her body is no longer a thrill, her body is not even seen at all, she becomes luminous, she is just a presence, only then does the master allow you to make love to her. Now love will have a totally different quality. There is no sex involved in it, no attraction involved in it, no physicality involved in it. It is absolutely spiritual – a meeting of two souls.But that is a long process. Many rituals, many prayers, many yantras, many meditations are needed. After years of training you come to the point where the woman is no longer a woman to you, she has almost become a mother – “motherhoodness” has arisen. You have projected that motherhoodness on her. You see her breasts but they no longer provoke any sexuality in you, just the idea of a mother. You see her body and you start feeling that you are part of her body, just as you were part of your mother. It is recreating the mother, and it is a long process. Tantra is very procedural, ritualistic, and a great experiment in hypnosis, auto-hypnosis.It is a great experiment in getting rid of the idea of sex. It is not sexual at all, as it is commonly understood. It is a totally different attitude, not sexual at all. It is very prayerful. When you make love to a woman after you have become an adept in Tantra, the master allows you; and it has to depend on the master’s agreement, it does not depend on you. The master sees in your eyes that all lust has disappeared, that your body has become almost asexual; he sees that now you are standing before the woman as a small child, unaware of sexuality – you are naked, she is naked but you are not at all interested in sexuality. When the master confirms it, when he gives you a signal, then you are allowed to have intercourse. It depends on the master. He has to watch, watch carefully. It takes months, sometimes years, to prepare for it.Tao has its own Tantra. First of all: Tao never divides into lower and higher, that is the beauty of it. The moment you divide reality into lower and higher you are becoming schizophrenic. The moment you say something is sacred and something is profane you have divided. The moment you say something is material and something is spiritual, you have divided, split reality. Reality is one. There is neither matter nor spirit. Reality is one. It expresses itself in many forms – on one level as matter, on another level as spiritual. The spiritual is not higher and the material is not lower – they stand on the same level. That is the Taoist attitude. Life is one. Existence is one. It is a tremendous oneness and there is no valuation.The first thing in Tao is to drop duality. Sex is not lower, and samadhi is not higher. Samadhi and sex are both expressions of the same energy. There is nothing laudable about samadhi and there is nothing condemnable about sex. Tao acceptance is total, absolute. There is nothing wrong with the body and there is nothing beautiful in the spirit – they are both beautiful. The Devil and God are one in Tao, heaven and hell are one in Tao, good and bad are one in Tao; it is the greatest non-dual understanding. There is no condemnation and no preparation. Prepare for what? One has simply to relax and be.If you can love a woman spontaneously… In fact, Tao will say that Tantra has a wrong attitude in this way because you have to prepare for it. Preparation means that you are preparing for the future. Tao knows only one time – which is now; and only one place – which is here. Now is the only time, and here is the only place. Here is heaven and now is nirvana. So don’t prepare.If in some moment love flows, love takes possession of you, go with it. Don’t push the river. Don’t try to give it any shape. Don’t try to fix it into any ritual. Just go with it. In deep trust, in deep gratitude, go with it. While making love to a woman don’t try to prove anything – as people try to do in the West. Don’t try to prove anything because when you start trying to prove something, your mind comes in. While you are making love to a woman forget that you are a man and she is a woman. Let boundaries merge and mix. Don’t remain a man; otherwise you will miss because again a dualism comes in: you are the man and she is the woman. Nobody really knows why two people make love. Many times it happens that the man becomes the woman and the woman becomes the man. Why bother who is who?If you are thinking about it, then the mind is there and the mind is a barrier; it does not allow the unison to happen totally. So Tao says, simply go spontaneously, with no ritual, with no idea to prove. And remember, never use sexuality for anything. Tantra uses it as a step toward samadhi. Tao says, never use anything as a means. Everything is an end in itself. The moment you start thinking of somewhere to go, something to reach, some result to attain, you are not total – you are divided, your mind is already in the future. There are no means and no ends. Everything simply is an intrinsically beautiful an end unto itself.In Tao this is very basic. Love, eat, go for a morning walk, swim in the river, sit in the sun, watch the stars, but let everything be simple, not for anything else. Sing a song, but not for any result. Look at the trees, but not for any result. Go for a morning walk, but not for health. Don’t be a naturopath! Just go for a walk; it is beautiful. Health is a by-product; you need not worry about it – it happens. Lie down in the sun, enjoy it; not for anything else. Lie there for its own sake. That is what Tao is.In that relaxed attitude life starts pouring into you from everywhere. All doors open, all windows open. Existence flows into you, you flow into existence.Tao is very simple; and hence very difficult because we are very complex people. Simple things don’t appeal to us. Tantra appeals to many people; Tao does not have that much appeal. Tao appeals very rarely. If Tao appeals to you, consider yourself fortunate. The very possibility of your getting interested in Tao is a great blessing.Translate everything into terms of Tao and it becomes spontaneity.The second question:Osho,Can you summarize your teaching in short because I am here only for a day or two.It is impossible. In the first place I have no teaching to summarize. I am not a teacher; I am a presence. I have no catechism. I cannot give you ten commandments – do this, don’t do that.Whatsoever I say today, I may contradict tomorrow because my commitment is to this moment. Whatsoever I said yesterday, I am no longer committed to. The moment I said it I became free of it. Now I don’t bother about it, I don’t look at it again. Whatsoever I am saying to you right now is true this very moment; tomorrow I will not be committed to it. Whatsoever tomorrow brings, I will say it. Whatsoever today has brought I am telling you now. And if they are contradictory, who am I to make them consistent? I don’t make any effort on my own.My commitment is to the moment. I am never committed to the past. I am like a river: where I will be tomorrow nobody knows, not even I myself. You will be surprised; I will also be surprised.The question must be from someone who comes from the country I call “Acirema” – it is America in reverse. America is topsy-turvy. Everything has gone chaotic. People are in such a hurry that they have forgotten that there are a few things which you cannot get in a hurry about, for which patience is a must.Truth you cannot get in a hurry. Patience is a basic condition for it. It is not like instant coffee and it does not come packed in tins. It does not come ready-made. Truth is not a commodity that somebody can give you. It grows in you.That’s what I mean: I am a presence, I am not a teacher. If you are here, something may grow in you. I say may because it depends on you. I am here. If you are ready to receive me, something will start growing in you. It is like a child becoming a young man. Yes, truth is like that. The false personality drops and a true being arrives. It is a child becoming a young man, a young man becoming an old man. There is no way to hurry the process. You cannot make a child grow up fast in one night, in a day or two. It will take time. And it is good that it takes time because only through time do things become seasoned.But in America there is a hurry, a mad hurry.I have heard…An American bride and a French bride were discussing love. “A Frenchman is very subtle when it comes to love,” the French girl explained. “He begins by kissing the fingertips, then he kisses the shoulder, then the back of the neck…”“Boy!” the little American bride interrupted. “By that time an American husband is back from his honeymoon!”In America things have gone crazy. Everything must be done with speed, and fast. Speed seems to be the only value. It has never been a value anywhere else before, it had to wait for America to be discovered to become a value. Speed has become a value. If you are doing something fast, it is good – nobody bothers about what it is or why you are doing it. If you are doing it fast, perfectly good. If you are driving fast, nobody cares where you are going. You may not be going anywhere in particular but if you are going fast, everybody is happy. You may be going directly into death but everybody is happy – going so fast! Beautiful!No, I cannot do that, I cannot summarize. I have no teaching. And even if I had a teaching, I would not summarize it because the more you summarize something, the less alive it becomes. Love is vast, life is vast; law is limited. Law can be summarized; love cannot be summarized. Law is defined but life is excessive. You cannot summarize life, there cannot be a synopsis of life. You can summarize law. I am life. There is no way to summarize me. And I am still alive so whatsoever you summarize I will destroy tomorrow.I have heard…A Hollywood producer studied the large script submitted by a new writer and complained, “It’s much too long. Just give me a synopsis.”The next day the writer returned with a five-page synopsis.“It’s still too long,” insisted the producer. “I’m a busy man. Just give me a digest of this.”An hour later the writer returned with a sheet of paper on which was written: hero is a lieutenant; heroine is married to his colonel. Madly in love with each other. Commit suicide.“It’s no good,” said the producer. “It’s Anna Karenina word for word!”When you summarize, by and by things become absurd.Never summarize anything that is alive. I am still alive. When I am gone and dead then people will summarize my words. And I am going to give them a hell of a lot of trouble. It will not be an easy thing. They will go nuts. It will be impossible to put me into a synopsis.It has always been so. You cannot summarize Buddha. Because of summaries many schools were born. Buddha died, then the question arose. People wanted to summarize. For forty years the man had been teaching – morning, afternoon, evening – for forty years. He had talked a lot, he had said many things, and now the master was gone and he had to be summarized.A great assembly was called. Five hundred of the oldest disciples gathered together and they started reciting whatsoever they had heard the master say. There were many contradictions. One said something and somebody contradicted him, saying, “I heard him say exactly the opposite.” Then there was great debate, discussion – and splits. Thirty-six schools were born out of summarization, and those thirty-six have by now become three hundred and sixty.When there is a man like Buddha, he is talking to different people in a different way because everyone’s need is different.Truth is not something like a commodity. When you come to me, if you really want to know what my truth is, you will have to be here. I can express my truth to you only when I have come to know your truth too. When I have come to know you and you have come to know me, in that meeting will be the glimpse. It cannot be given to you. You will have to receive it and you will have to prepare for it. You will have to become a very relaxed being. You will have to be able to soak me up and allow me to sink deep into your heart.No, I cannot supply a catechism as Christians do. That is not possible. And it would not be of any use to you.Recovering from a severe operation, the man believed that the doctors were withholding from him his proper share of food. All he got each mealtime was a teaspoon of custard.“Is that all I get?” he asked the nurse.“That’s all for a while,” she answered.He swallowed it with a good deal of grumbling.“Nurse,” said the patient later, “bring me a postage stamp. I want to do a little reading.”Summarized, it will be a postage stamp. It will not help. It will not be enough to read. If you want to read, read me. Don’t bother with summaries. Time will be needed because it is a love relationship between the master and the disciple. It needs time to grow, to become intimate. Only in deep intimacy can something be revealed, can be transferred. It is a transfer of energy, not of words.So please, if you are going in a day or two, you can go, you are free. But don’t carry any idea about what I am teaching here because that will not be understanding; or, even worse, it will be a misunderstanding. If you have heard me say something, forget it, because in a day or two you could not have heard anything significant. And whatsoever you feel you have heard will be very non-essential.It happened…In the Amsterdam National Museum an elderly couple came to see Rembrandt’s masterpiece The Nightwatch. When, after a long walk through the many corridors, they finally reached the famous painting, the usher overheard the man say to his wife, “Look, what a beautiful frame!”The frame may have been beautiful, but can you see that something is missing in the admiration? Something essential is lost. I am not saying that the frame was not beautiful, the frame may have been the most beautiful frame in the world, but to go to see Rembrandt’s masterpiece The Nightwatch and then to talk about the frame is absurd. Even to see the frame is foolish, stupid. The painting is not the frame. The frame has nothing to do with the painting.What I am saying is just a frame, what I am is the painting. Look at the masterpiece and don’t be bothered with the frame.The third question:Osho,Can the master really save the disciple?Certainly, absolutely. If the disciple is really a disciple he is already saved. It is not that first you have to be a disciple and then you will be saved. In your very being a disciple you are saved, in your very surrender you are saved. It is not that the master will save you afterward because you are a disciple – just by being a disciple you are saved. In that very surrender you have dropped the ego. That ego was the barrier; that ego was hindering the path. When the barrier disappears you are saved.In fact, you have always been saved. You were carrying an unnecessary load and because of that load you could not fly into the sky. Now you can fly. The master is just an excuse. It is difficult for you to drop your ego without a master because you need some excuse. Otherwise how can you drop it? Where will you drop it? At whose feet can you drop it? The master is just an excuse.You fall in love with a man. A man like Jesus, or a man like Buddha naturally attracts thousands of people, seekers, who fall in love. And the man is so tremendously beautiful that you would like to surrender all to him. That is just an excuse. Once you have surrendered you will know that you are not saved by anyone else; you are saved by your surrender. But it will be known only when you have surrendered, not before. To become a disciple is to be saved.You ask: “Can the master really save the disciple?” It is very simple. There is nothing to fuss about. Sometimes it has even happened that a disciple has saved the master because, in fact, it is love that saves. Sometimes it has happened that the master was not really a master, but was a charismatic man, a man of great magnetism, and was not himself enlightened. Somebody surrendered to him and through surrender became enlightened. Many times it has happened that the disciple became enlightened before the master. You will be surprised because you think that you can only become enlightened through an enlightened master. All rubbish! You become enlightened through surrender. Even if you have surrendered to somebody who is just a pseudo-master, who simply pretends that he is a master, if your surrender is total you are saved. It has happened sometimes that the master was saved by the disciple when the disciple became enlightened.Let me tell you one beautiful Hasidic parable:Elisha Ben Abuya was a great religious scholar. But he was just a scholar. He attracted many people, many talented people. His name was known all over Israel. Many people came and surrendered to him. But he was just a scholar, a pundit, he was not a real master. He knew about God but he had never encountered God. It happened that late in his life he turned a skeptic and became rebellious – became irreligious, turned against God. He was a great logician and well versed in scriptures; it was very difficult to defeat him. When he started talking against God he was as impressive as when he was talking for God. He was a real intellectual.His chief disciple Rabbi Meir tried many times to bring him back to the fold. The disciple tried to bring him back to the fold. Rabbi Meir, who was Elisha Ben Abuya’s disciple, had become enlightened.The disciple tried many times to bring Elisha Ben Abuya back to the fold, but the old man was really a logician and it was impossible to argue with him. The disciple suffered very much because he loved the man. He knew that he was not enlightened and he knew that he was not a real man of knowing. But he loved him and felt grateful because he had become enlightened through him. Whosoever he was, whatsoever he was, Rabbi Meir had become enlightened through surrendering at Elisha Ben Abuya’s feet. How could he be ungrateful?Rabbi Meir, however, persisted in his attempt. When he heard that Elisha was dangerously ill he went to visit him.Rabbi Meir again asked him to repent and Elisha asked, “Will he receive me now? Will God receive me now? Will he forgive me?”“Yes,” replied Rabbi Meir. Elisha wept and died.A few days later Rabbi Meir was told that a fire was issuing out of the grave of his master. He went there, covered it with a mantle and said, “Slumber tonight, for perchance the Lord will save you, and if not, I will save you. Sleep until morning.”This is of tremendous beauty. He says, “Sleep tonight, for perchance the Lord will save you. And if not, I will save you. Sleep until morning.” That’s why I say it is very simple for a master to save you because sometimes even the reverse has happened – that a disciple has saved a master.But remember, it is love that saves; it is surrender that saves. Remember that love liberates. If you can remember that love liberates, that is a mantra: love saves, love liberates. Fall in love with a master and you are saved.The fourth question:Osho,Lieh Tzu devastates Confucius with few words and subtly. You have been devastating him discourse after discourse with a cannonade of words and have virtually clubbed him to death. I doubt if anyone in the ashram would defend Confucianism. Please let Confucius and me rest.Both together? It is impossible. If you want to rest, Confucius must be killed utterly. With Confucius there is no possibility of rest.Whatsoever I am saying or whatsoever Lieh Tzu is saying has nothing to do with the historical Confucius – remember it. I am not against that poor man, Confucius. Why should I be? He was a beautiful man in his own right.Why am I trying to destroy Confucius so deeply? Because Confucius is part of your mind, he is a part of everybody’s mind. Confucius has ruled over humanity. You may not have even heard his name – that doesn’t matter; you may not know who he is, but deep inside, Confucius is the ruler.In India, Manu is the ruler. He is the Indian counterpart of Confucius. All over the world there are counterparts of Confucius. Confucius is symbolic. What does he represent? He represents the legal mind, he represents the formal mind, he represents the ritual mind, he represents the conventional mind, the “straight” mind. He represents tradition.I am destroying tradition, convention, the legal mind, the structure of the conformist. Confucius is the conformist par excellence. And you all have it in your minds.Lao Tzu rarely enters your mind. He is rebellion. He is going beyond tradition. He is going beyond the past. He is going beyond all structures. Confucius is a structure; Lao Tzu is no-structure. Confucius is character; Lao Tzu is characterlessness, freedom. Remember it. All character is an imprisonment enforced on you by the society, enforced on you by the state, by the priest and the politician. This character that you carry around you is a cage. Lao Tzu says there is a different character which is not imposed by the society; a different discipline which is not enforced from the outside but comes from inner awareness. Only that is true. Follow only that. Follow only your own inner, small, still voice.Confucius says, “Listen to the scripture, listen to the ancient masters, listen to tradition.” Lao Tzu says, “Listen only to your own inner voice and follow it, wherever it leads. It is God’s voice. It is Tao.”You say: “I doubt if anyone in the ashram would defend Confucianism.” In fact, everybody is defending it. Nobody says it, but deep down you are defending it; otherwise you would all become enlightened. The moment you are not defending Confucius there is no barrier for you to becoming enlightened. You are enlightened! When Confucius is dropped you become enlightened; when Confucius goes out one door, enlightenment enters from another door.If you are not enlightened, you must be defending Confucianism. It may not be very conscious; it may be just an unconscious habit – you have been conditioned for it. That’s why you ask me: “Please let Confucius and me rest.”I cannot help you rest. I am here to help you rebel. Only after rebellion will real rest come. Whatsoever you now call rest is nothing but slumber, is nothing but a sort of sleep. Not all sleep is rest; in your sleep you dream of a thousand and one things and you go through many nightmares.I would like for you to have real rest – what Jesus meant when he said to his disciples, “Come to me and I will give you rest. All those who are heavy laden, come to me. I will give you rest.” That rest is a totally different thing. It is not the rest that comes by living in a crowd with the herd, following the herd. Certainly you feel okay, but okay is just okay. No problem, no inconvenience – you live comfortably and you will die comfortably. That is not the rest I am leading you toward. Real rest means you have come into your own being – centered, grounded. You have been daring enough to assert that you are yourself, and you are no longer trying to imitate anybody else; you are not trying to become a carbon copy; you have become an authentic person, an authentic being. Then the rest comes, the real rest.With Confucius that is not possible. With Confucius you will always be in conflict – Confucius means conflict. He will always say, “This is bad and this is good. Choose the good against the bad.” Then what will you do? You will have to repress the bad and enforce the good. You will become a hypocrite. Follow Confucius and you will be a hypocrite. Follow Lao Tzu and you are not following anybody; you are following yourself. And you will become an authentic being.To be authentic is the only rest there is.The fifth question:Osho,I like to listen to your talks very much but I hate the meditations. Is it okay? Perhaps my path is that of prayer.If you really enjoy my talks, you will enjoy the meditations too because they are interconnected. In fact, my talks are nothing but appetizers. If you enjoy the appetizer and you don’t enjoy the lunch, you are going to die sooner or later. You will die starved. The talks are just to prepare you for the meditations. If you hate the meditations then you have not heard me. Then you may think you have heard me but you have not.Hearing me, what else is there to do? If you have heard me, you will be ready to go deep into the meditations. Whatsoever I am saying will become a real experience only when you have gone into the meditations. It will become your experience. Listening to me it will remain borrowed, listening to me you may be thrilled by the possibility of it; listening to me it is as if I am talking about the beautiful Himalayas – you listen to me and you enjoy it. But you have never been to the Himalayas and whatsoever I say is nothing compared to the beauty of the Himalayas. How can it be put into words? You will have to go.If you are really listening to me, one day, suddenly, you will feel, “Now the time has come and I have to go for the adventure. I have to take the risk.” Meditations are a real journey. Here I simply seduce you for meditation. It is not the end, it is the beginning.I have heard…A movie-house usher was astonished to see a big, brown bear sitting in the front row, munching peanuts.“Say, you!” he shouted. “You’re a bear! What are you doing in here?”“Why, I enjoyed the book so much,” replied the bear, “I thought I’d like to see the picture.”If you are really listening to me and enjoying it, one day you will want to see the picture too.If it is true that you enjoy whatsoever I am saying, then how is it possible that you hate the meditations? I am not an entertainment. Maybe you are using me as an entertainment. Maybe sitting here for one and a half hours every day you forget your worries; for one and a half hours you are transported into another world, into my world. And you see beautiful things – at least you visualize, imagine them – and then you are gone. Then you become addicted to it. Every day you have to come and listen to me. Then it is just an intoxicant. It is not going to help.I am talking about the food – just talk about food is not going to help. The menu is not the food. The talks are just the menu, then you will have to order.It happened…The American playboy checked into one of the most exclusive hotels in gay Paree. He told the room clerk he wanted the best room in the place.When he reached the room he was impressed with its exquisite furniture and tasteful decor. However, he spied a number of colored buttons on the wall. “Tell me,” he asked the bellhop, “what are the buttons for?”“Well, monsieur,” said the bellhop, “when you press the gold one, a beautiful blonde appears.”“Go on,” said the playboy gleefully.“When you push the red one, a redhead appears. And when you push the brown, a beautiful brunette appears.”“Let’s forget about the room,” said the playboy. “I’ll take the buttons.”But the buttons come with the room; just taking the buttons home won’t help – then you can go on pushing the buttons but nobody will appear.In the memoirs of Lawrence of Arabia he writes that once he took twelve Arabs to France with him. This was the first time they had gone out of their country. There was a great exhibition in France and Lawrence had taken them to see it.But he was very puzzled. Once they entered their bath they would not get out. They remained for hours in the bath! He thought, “It is natural. They come from a desert country where water is very scarce so they are enjoying their tub and their shower.” They jumped and danced in the bathroom and were not at all interested in the exhibition. The moment they would come back – and they were always in a hurry to come back to the hotel – they would say, “Let us go upstairs.” And they would run into the bathroom and enjoy themselves.The last day, when everything was packed and put into the cars and they were leaving for the airport, all the Arabs suddenly disappeared. Lawrence inquired where they had gone because they were about to be late. Suddenly he remembered that maybe they were back in the bathroom. So he rushed upstairs and they were all there trying to take out the faucets.He asked, “What are you doing?”They said, “We thought why not take these faucets? We will enjoy them in Arabia.”They thought that the water came out of the faucets. It was a miracle! They were not aware that there was a pipeline and a great mechanism behind it and you couldn’t just take the faucets – they would not be of any use.What I am saying to you is just a faucet. There is a great source behind where it all comes from. Unless you go there, just listening to me is not going to help. It may be a solace, a consolation, an addiction, but it is not going to bring any revolution in your life.You ask: “Is it okay?” It is not okay at all. You are wasting your time. If you stop listening to me and continue the meditations, that is far better than stopping the meditations and only listening to me.Then you say: “Perhaps my path is that of prayer.” Don’t try to deceive yourself. Have you done any prayer? Have you been praying? You say perhaps; you have not even tried that. Maybe you are using the word prayer just to avoid meditation. Prayer itself is a meditation and to avoid meditation in the name of prayer will not help. These escapes are for weaklings. Don’t be a coward.People come to me. If I gave them prayers and I told them, “Do this prayer,” they would come and say, “Osho, maybe prayer is not my path.” If prayer were given to them, they would say that prayer was not their path, that it is difficult to pray. If meditation is given they think that meditation is not their path. In fact, you don’t want to do anything; you don’t want to grow, you don’t want to be transformed.There is a story about two ministers who were crossing one of the Scottish lakes:This was in the days before roads and automobiles; a person got to his destination by getting into a boat and being ferried across the lake. Those lakes are sometimes treacherous. Storms can come up suddenly and within five minutes a boat can capsize and the people in it drown, even on what had been a beautiful and calm day.The two ministers wanted to cross the lake. One was a tall, husky, six-foot countryman with muscles like a blacksmith, and the other was a small, weedy, studious townsman – the long and the short of it. They hired a boat, the old boatman got out the boat and got out the oars and they started off.In about five minutes’ time a terrible storm came up and churned up the lake. The boat was rocking and the boatman said, “Me lads, you’ll have to help me. Grab hold of those other oars if you expect to come out of this alive.” So the two clergymen picked up the oars and began to bend their backs. It was pretty hard work, but for a few minutes they kept the boat straight into the wind.Suddenly the storm got worse. The husky minister threw down his oars and said, “Let us pray.”But the boatman yelled, “No, no, the little one can pray, but you keep on rowing.”Don’t be a coward. Let the little ones pray. You take the challenge of the meditations. It is a challenge. Prayer seems to be easy because you have nothing to do; you just have to say, “God, do this, do that.” In prayer you give God work to do, and if he does not do it then he is responsible. You asked it, so what more can you do?Meditation means to do the work yourself. And my feeling is that if you do your work to your uttermost capacity only then does God start working on you – never before it. Unless you help yourself, no help ever comes from God.If you understand my approach… When your meditations succeed, only then can prayer start. Never before. When you have done all that you can do, when you have not saved anything, when you have put yourself totally at stake and you feel that nothing is happening, then you are entitled to ask the sky, “Now help me. What more can I do?” And the help comes.Not doing anything on your own, just saying a prayer every night when you are going to sleep, when half asleep, just saying, “God do this, do that,” these things will not help you at all. If you really want God to do something to you, first you have to try your uttermost; at the optimum, help happens, never before it. When you are doing all that you can do, absolutely all that you can do, immediately, help is available.The sixth question:Osho,Recently you talked again about the adverse aspects of marriage. Would you please talk about what you mean by intimacy? Particularly, when is staying together through difficult times positive and when is it negative?Marriage is a way to avoid intimacy. Creating a formal relationship is a trick. Intimacy is informal. If a marriage arises out of intimacy, it is beautiful; if you are hoping that intimacy will arise out of marriage, you are hoping in vain. Of course, I know that many people, millions of people, have settled for marriage rather than for intimacy because intimacy is growth – it is painful.Marriage is very secure. It is safe. There is no growth in it. One is simply stuck. Marriage is a sexual arrangement; intimacy is a search for love. Marriage is a sort of prostitution, a permanent sort. Somebody goes to a prostitute; another has gotten married to a woman or to a man – it is a permanent prostitution. The arrangement is economical, not psychological, not of the heart.So remember, if marriage arises out of intimacy it is beautiful. That means that everybody should have lived together before they got married. The honeymoon should not happen after marriage, it should happen before marriage. One should have lived the dark nights, the beautiful days, the sad moments, the happy moments together. One should have looked into each other’s eyes deeply, into each other’s being deeply.How do you decide? If your intimacy is helping you to grow and to become mature, then it is positive and good and healthy, wholesome. If it is destructive and it is not allowing you to become mature – rather, it is helping you to remain childish, immature – then it is unhealthy. Any relationship that keeps you childish is evil. Get out of it. Any relationship that gives you challenges to growth, to go on an adventure, to go deeper and higher into life… I am not saying that a positive marriage will not have problems; it will have more problems than the negative marriage. A positive relationship will have more problems because every day new challenges will be there. But each time a problem is solved, you will have gone a little higher; each time a challenge is met, you will find something has become integrated into your being.A negative relationship has no problems – or at the most pseudo-problems, so-called problems, not real problems. Have you noticed it? A wife and husband are fighting over such trivia. These are not problems. Even if you fight, it doesn’t give you anything, it doesn’t help growth. Look at wives and husbands; look at yourself. You may be a husband, a wife.Just watch. If you are fighting over trivia – small things which don’t mean anything anyway – then you will remain immature, childish. Real problems, authentic problems, which really have to be faced, create great turmoil in your being; they bring a cyclone. One has to face them. Never avoid them. The trivial questions are an escape from the real questions. A husband and wife will fight over very small things: which film to go to and which not to go to; what color car should be purchased, what model, what make; what restaurant they are going to this evening. Such trivia! It does not make any difference. If you are making too much of a fuss, your relationship is not going to help you, will not give you any integrity, any center. I call it negative.The positive relationship will face real problems. For example: if you are angry or if you are sad, you will be sad in front of your wife, you will not smile a false smile. And you will say, “I am sad.” This must be faced. If, walking on the road with your wife, you see a beautiful woman pass by and a great desire and longing arises in your heart, you will tell your wife that this woman created a great desire, stirred your heart. You will not avoid her; you will not avert your eyes. And you will not pretend that you have not seen the woman at all. Whether you pretend or not your wife already knows it! It is impossible for her not to know because immediately your energy, your presence, changes. These are real problems.Just getting married to a woman doesn’t mean that you are no longer interested in any other women. In fact, the day you are not interested in any other women, you will not be interested in your wife either. Why? What has your wife got that is so special? If you are no longer interested in women, you will not be interested in your wife either. You are in love with her because you are still in love with women. She is just a woman. And sometimes you come across a woman who enchants you. You will say it to your wife, and you will face the turmoil that will arise. It is not trivia; it will create jealousy, it will create a struggle, it will disturb all rest, you will not be able to sleep at night. Your wife will be throwing pillows at you.To be true creates real problems. To be authentic creates real problems. Say whatsoever is the case – never demur, never look sideways – look straight into it and be true. And help your wife to be true, too; help your husband to be true as well.Yes, there are problems in real intimacy, more problems than in a negative state of intimacy, more problems. Because if you are really intimate with your woman, how can you avoid the fact that you become interested in another woman? You have to say it. That’s part of love, part of intimacy. You denude yourself, you expose yourself totally, you don’t hold anything back. Even if during the night you dream a dream about another woman, in the morning you will relate it to your wife.I have heard about a film director…During the night he started talking to his girlfriend in his sleep, and he had the habit of talking loudly. So he was saying beautiful things and his wife started staring at him. When you are married, even in your dreams, you remain afraid of your wife. Suddenly he became afraid. What was he saying? He felt his wife looking at him and with great presence of mind he said, “Cut! Next scene.”…as if he were directing a film!If you really love your woman, in the morning you will tell her your dream – that you made love to a woman in your dream in the night. Everything must be shared. Your whole heart must be shared.Intimacy means that there is no privacy. You don’t carry anything private now – at least with the person you are intimate with. You drop privacy. You are nude and naked. Good, bad, whatsoever you are, you open your heart. Whatsoever the cost that you have to pay for it, and whatsoever the trouble you go through with it, you go through it. That brings growth.And you help the other person also to drop all inhibitions, screens, masks. In an intimate relationship one comes to see the original face of the other and one comes to show his own original face. If a relationship helps you to find your original face, then it is meditative, then it is religious. If your relationship simply helps you to create more and more masks and hypocrisies then it is irreligious.Try to understand my definition. If my definition is understood then out of a hundred marriages, ninety-nine are irreligious because they are simply creating more and more falsity. From the very beginning the falsity starts.I have heard…The minister, casting an appraising eye over the bridal couple before him and the goodly crowd come to witness the ceremony, intoned, “If there is anyone here who knows why these two should not be joined together in wedlock, let him speak now or forever hold his peace.”“I’ve got something to say,” a voice rang out bold and clear.“You shut up!” snapped the minister. “You’re the groom!”From the very beginning! They were not even married yet. The minister said, “You shut up! You are the groom!” That’s how the life of a married couple starts.People keep quiet. They don’t say anything. They don’t say the truth at all. They pretend lies. They smile when they don’t want to smile; they kiss when they don’t want to kiss. Naturally, when you kiss and you don’t want to kiss, the kiss is poisonous. Naturally, when you don’t want to smile and you have to smile, your smile is ugly, it is political.Then somehow one gets accustomed to these things, one settles for the falsity, for the inauthenticity of life. And one consoles oneself in a thousand and one ways.“Oh, we’re very happy,” insisted the husband. “Of course, once in a while my wife throws dishes at me. But that doesn’t change the situation one bit. Because if she hits me she’s happy and if she misses me I’m happy!”One comes to such an arrangement by and by – both are happy.The car in which the elderly couple was riding went over the cliff. It was an awful wreck.“Where am I?” moaned the man when he opened his eyes. “In heaven?”“No,” said his dazed wife. “I’m still with you.”These settlements are very hellish. What you know in the name of relationship is just a pseudo-game.So remember it as a criterion: if you are growing more and becoming an individual, if life is happening more to you, if you are becoming more open, if more beauty is felt in existence, if more poetry is arising in your heart, if more love flows through you, more compassion, if you are becoming more aware in your life, then the relationship is good. Carry on. Then it is not a marriage. Then it is intimacy.But if the reverse is happening; if all poetry is disappearing and life is becoming prosaic, if all love is disappearing and life is becoming just a load, a dead load, if all song is dying and you are just living as a duty, then it is better to escape out of this prison. It is better for you and it is better for your partner with whom you are living.The seventh question:Osho,Was the man in today's story (where a man had no memory) enlightened? Or had he a glimpse? Do we get it and forget it and get it and forget it and one day maybe not forget?Yes, the man had a glimpse. If he had really become established, then there would have been no way to bring him back – you cannot bring a buddha back. He only had a glimpse. He was just entering the door and he was pulled back. If he had entered the temple, then he would have been gone, gone forever.Many times a glimpse will come and will disappear. It is natural because if enlightenment suddenly came like lightning, like thunder, you would be crushed. You would not be able to receive it. It would be too much. You would go mad.Glimpses come and prepare you. Glimpses will come, more and more, and by and by you will become acclimatized to a totally different world, a totally different dimension of being. Otherwise you would go mad. Sometimes it happens that a man who has been working alone without a master, and is not aware that one should not rush into it, rushes into it and goes mad.The master is needed for many things. But he is most needed when you are coming very close to enlightenment. Then he is needed very, very deeply because he will allow you to go only so far. Slowly, slowly, in quantities, he will help you to absorb the vastness of the experience, the tremendousness of it. It is a mysterium tremendum. You are just like a drop and enlightenment is like an ocean dropping into you. One cannot be greedy. First the master pushes you into it; and then he holds you back and allows you to go very slowly into it.The man in the story must have had only a glimpse.You ask me: “Do we get it and forget it and get it and forget it and maybe one day maybe not forget?” No. One day one forgets both getting and forgetting. Then, only then is it there. One day one forgets both getting and forgetting; one day one simply recognizes that it is your innermost nature, that it is not something that you can get or that you can forget.You can get something from the outside, you can forget something from the outside, but this is your own flowering. It is you, it is your fragrance. How can you get it and how can you forget it? One day one forgets both getting and forgetting. Then one has come home.The last question:Osho,Six hours of sleep every night. An hour and a half of satsang – playing the beautiful spiritual game with you. Then suddenly switching over from the cold marble floor to a swivel chair – playing the orange airline executive! Spectacular evening performances – changing daily. From absurd comedy to heavy melodrama. Many roles, many plots. Always extempore. Playing father, husband, friend, stranger, wise man, fool!The one real factor in all this which isn't a game is a deep, deep love for you. This is what makes all the games exciting. Can this be what they call working with the master?Yes, that is exactly what is meant by working with the master – to live suffused with the presence of the master, to live suffused with the love of the master and to play all the games that God wants you to play. To go on playing where God has placed you. Everything becomes a game. Yes, that’s exactly what it is. Love remains the only reality, everything else becomes a game. If you can play the many games of life without being serious, without being identified, remaining a witness and enjoying the fun of it, you have understood.To be with a master is to learn that all of life is a game, a maya. Nothing is serious. Nothing must be avoided. Nothing must be chosen in particular – whatsoever happens, allow it to happen. Remain alert and allow it to happen and your alertness will by and by help you to slip into totality.Remain aware and go on playing the games. Never escape, never run away. To run away from the world means that you have rejected God. To reject the world means that you have rejected the God who has made the world. Love the world, because that is the only way to love God. And enjoy. And whatsoever he wants you to do, wherever he has placed you – enjoy that place. Sometimes it is on the marble floor, sometimes on a swivel chair; sometimes as a wise man, sometimes a fool. Sometimes it is this, sometimes that – remain fluid. Move into one role, then to another; flow, don’t get frozen.Seriousness freezes. Remain non-serious. Take life as a joy and it becomes prayer.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Mr. P’ang of Ch’en had a son who was clever as a child but suffered from an abnormality when he grew up. When he heard singing he thought it was weeping; when he saw white he thought it was black; fragrant smells he thought noisome, sweet tastes he thought bitter, wrong actions he thought right. Whatever came into his mind – heaven and earth, the four cardinal points, water and fire, heat and cold – he always turned it upside down.A certain Mr. Yang told his father: “The gentlemen of Lu have many arts and skills, perhaps they can cure him. Why not inquire among them?”The father set out for Lu, but passing through Ch’en he came across Lao Tzu and took the opportunity to tell him about his son’s symptoms.“How do you know that your son is abnormal?” said Lao Tzu. “Nowadays everyone in the world is deluded about right and wrong, and confused about benefit and harm; because so many people share this sickness, no one perceives that it is a sickness. Besides, one man’s abnormality is not enough to overturn his family; one family’s to overturn the neighborhood, one neighborhood’s to overturn the state, one state’s to overturn the world. If the whole world were abnormal how could abnormality overturn it? Supposing the minds of everyone in the world were like your son’s, then, on the contrary, it is you who would be abnormal. Joy and sorrow, music and beauty, smells and tastes, right and wrong – who can straighten them out? I am not even sure that these words of mine are not abnormal, let alone those of the gentlemen of Lu, who are the most abnormal of all; who are they to cure other people’s abnormality? You had better go straight home instead of wasting your money.”Tao is a unique vision. It is a vision, mind you. It is a darshan, not a philosophy. It is a clarity, a transparency, but not an ideology. It does not propose any system of thought – it does not propose anything at all. It neither proposes anything, nor supposes anything. It is not a system of thought; it is just a way of looking directly into reality, into that which is.Not projecting anything from the mind; not allowing the mind to interfere, compare, interpret, it is wu-wei – non-interference with reality. Whatsoever is, is; it cannot be altered, it cannot be changed; whatever is, is, and whatever ain’t, ain’t. Things should be left untouched, as they are. The moment man enters and tries to change or improve things, confusion arises.Tao is a great acceptance, Tao is a tremendous acceptance, an unconditional tathata. Whatsoever is, is – nothing can be done about it.There is no need to do anything, either. The moment you start doing, you create mischief – the doers are the mischievous people. The non-doers are the real people; through non-doing, one can know what is. When you start doing something you bring your mind in, and the moment mind comes in there is confusion – all clarity is lost. Try to understand this as the basic, fundamental Tao.Then today’s parable will be very easily understood. It is of tremendous beauty. It can open a new vista, it can open a door in your being, it can give you a vision of reality. But the fundamental rule is: do not interfere. That is real nonviolence.If you go to Lao Tzu and say that somebody is a thief, he says, “So what? Somebody is a thief. Let it be so.” Lao Tzu is unworried about reality. If somebody is mad, Lao Tzu will say, “So what? Let it be so. If that’s how the whole wills it, then that is how it must be. Who are you? Who has given you the authority to change anything, to transform it? Leave reality to itself and everything goes beautifully, rhythmically. Interfere, and everything is disturbed.”You have heard about the nonviolence of Mahavira, you have heard about the nonviolence of Buddha, but they are nothing compared to Lao Tzu. In their nonviolence there is a subtle violence still – the violence of interference. The good must be brought in, the bad must be destroyed; the immoral must be changed into moral, the wrong must be put right. They are still not in wu-wei, non-interference. The violent person is trying to change reality violently, the nonviolent person is trying to change reality nonviolently, but both are trying to change reality. And to change is to be violent. That is Tao’s understanding: to accept things as they are, to accept with no mind at all.If you have a mind, you cannot accept. You will judge, you will compare; you will say that this should not be so, it cannot be so; you will say that this can be improved, this can be changed and made better.The very idea that the world can be made better is the very root of all ego trips. The world is perfect; there is no way to make it better. If you try to make it better, you will make it worse. Things are in perfect rhythm. Nothing is bad; nothing is good. Good and bad are man-created concepts. Nothing is right; nothing is wrong – those are our conceptions. Reality simply is neutral, neither good nor bad, neither beautiful nor ugly. It simply is. This isness is Tao.Now, enter this parable. We will go into it very slowly. Taste it step by step – it can become a revelation.Mr. P’ang of Ch’en had a son who was clever as a child…Every child is born clever. No child is ever born idiotic. To become an idiot one needs to be educated. To convert people to idiocy, schools and colleges and universities are needed. It is a great achievement. Idiocy is not natural; it must be learned, it must be earned. Great effort must be made before you can become stupid. A Buddha or a Lao Tzu or a Jesus are the people who somehow escaped from society, who somehow managed to prevent society from changing them into stupid people. They look rare because all of society has become stupid, otherwise they would be the norm. It should be natural to be clever, intelligent – as natural as breathing, as natural as health.Watch a child, any child, black, white, Indian, Chinese, German – yes, even German! Watch any child. All children are intelligent and all children are beautiful. Have you ever seen an ugly child? The phenomenon does not exist at all. Have you ever seen a stupid child? Their intelligence is tremendous.Society starts to cripple the child because society cannot allow that much intelligence. That much intelligence is dangerous. An intelligent child is a dangerous person. Society immediately jumps on the child from the very first day. The child is not even allowed the freedom to breathe on his own – the doctor slaps him on his bottom and society has started. The child is not even allowed to breathe on his own. You should wait. There is no need to slap the child.Go and see a maternity ward. When the child is born, the doctor will take him by his legs, hold him upside down and slap him on the bottom to help him breathe. As if nature is not enough – your help is needed. Nobody slaps the animals – and they are all breathing, breathing beautifully. No doctor is needed, no nurse is needed, no midwife is needed. Just wait!But the society cannot wait. Within seconds the society enters. Society has to slap the child. Now people who have been studying the phenomenon of slapping the child say that the first slap comes as a shock because the child is very delicate. For nine months he has lived in a very protected environment – that slap is like a great shock. His life starts with a shock. Then there are even crueler people. Jews and Muslims will do a circumcision – it is a great shock to cut the foreskin of the genital organs. You have started violence; you have started butchering the child. Society is on the way. Immediately everything must be forced on the child. Then the mother is told when to breast-feed the child and when not to breast-feed the child – after three hours.As if every child is a Ford car, just like another Ford car. Each child is an individual. His needs are different. One child will find that he is hungry within two hours; another child will find that he is not hungry after five hours. This average of three hours is dangerous. One child will not be hungry but the mother will force him to feed because three hours have passed. Another child will be hungry and crying and weeping, but the mother will wait and look at the clock, and because three hours are not over yet she cannot feed him.These are subtle tricks to destroy the delicate intelligence, the delicate life in the child. Then he must be trained about everything. From toilet training to God, he must be trained about everything. He is not allowed any spontaneity. Intelligence thrives in spontaneity, intelligence dies in discipline. The more disciplined the child, the more stupid he will be; the more intelligent the child, the more rebellious he will be. Rebelliousness and intelligence are synonymous; stupidity and discipline are synonymous. If you have succeeded in ordering the child to obey you and in making him conform to your ideas, you have succeeded in killing his intelligence.Your schools, your colleges, your universities, all teach nonsense because they are all against sensitivity. Nowhere is sensitivity taught – nowhere. In fact, sensitivity must be destroyed. It is dangerous to allow the child to be sensitive and intelligent because if he remains sensitive, then society will not be able to force him to do foolish things throughout his life.For example: a person goes on being a clerk his whole life, just piling up files. To do such a thing you need to be very insensitive. If you have any sensitivity, you will want to break out of this nonsense, you will want to go into the fields, into the forest. You may want to become a gardener, you may want to become a farmer, or a fisherman, or a carpenter, or a sculptor, or a poet – but you will not want to become a clerk in an office. Why would one want to be a clerk? When the sun is so bright and the flowers have bloomed and when the birds are singing and you are just doing a clerical job! It will not be possible. Society has to kill your intelligence, your sensitivity, so that you can be put into any job. When you are dull it is easy to force you in any direction. Then a person can keep on doing any nonsense job. When you do a nonsense thing for your whole life, naturally, by and by, you lose all possibilities of being intelligent.A person can be sent into the army. If people were intelligent, who would go into the army? Why would they kill others and be killed? Life is to live, not to be killed and not to kill. Life is to enjoy; it is a divine gift. But millions of people are in the army, just getting ready to be butchered or to butcher. And their whole life – from morning to evening – is spent parading, polishing their rifles, following some foolish man’s orders: left turn, right turn. Doing this their whole life! Not even for a single moment do they think about what they are doing – what they are doing with their lives. Is life meant for this? Is this the destiny of life?If you are singing and dancing, maybe it is meaningful, but turning left and right, doing the same march every day, just preparing for death – how can life be just a preparation for death?Brutality, violence, insensitivity are taught so that millions of people can be turned into slaves. You think you are free people? Slavery has only become more sophisticated, that’s all. Slavery still exists. No society up to now has ever been a free society. All societies have been slave societies.Yes, one thing is certain: slavery changes its forms. First it was very gross, now it is very subtle. And remember, subtle slavery is far more dangerous than gross slavery because you can rebel against gross slavery, it is so apparent, so obvious. But when the slavery is very subtle then you are not even aware of it. If you are a Mohammedan, if you are a Hindu, if you are a Christian, if you are a Jaina, you are a slave. Your mind has been conditioned to be a Hindu, to be a Mohammedan, to be a Christian, and you have become that.You have never questioned it. Why should you be a Christian? Why should you be a Mohammedan? You were not born as a Christian, as a Mohammedan, you were born as pure consciousness. Why these limitations? Who has forced these limitations on you? You were born as a pure human being. Who has made you an Indian and who has made you Chinese? You are slaves. If you are Chinese or Indian or English, you are a slave. Slavery is very subtle.If you are doing things which others want you to do, and you never do the thing that you always wanted to do, you are a slave. You go on loving a person you don’t love; you go on sleeping with a person you don’t love; you go on living in a relationship which is simply destructive, horrible, a hell, but you go on. You are a slave; you are not a free man.A free man is one who takes back his intelligence, who takes back his sensitivity. To me, that is what sannyas is: to take back your intelligence, to take back your sensitivity – to become again sensuous, alive, to become again intelligent, to become again a child.Mr. P’ang of Ch’en had a son who was clever as a child… All children are clever. No child is ever born who is not clever. Even if you sometimes think that a child is not clever that is just your thinking.I have heard…A boy was sitting on the fence watching his father working in the field. A bull came running. The child shouted, “Papa, a bull is coming!”The father jumped out of the way and saved himself.But he was more surprised at the child than at the bull because the boy had not spoken for seven years – he was seven years of age and he had not spoken a single word.So the father said, “Forget about the bull. You surprised me more! Why have you not spoken up to now? And you spoke so suddenly – ‘Papa, the bull is coming!’”The boy said, “There was nothing to say before, so there was no point in speaking.”Even when a child appears to you to be stupid, beware of making judgments. It may only be because of your own stupidity. Whatsoever you have become, you compare from that viewpoint. If a child is not clever in mathematics you think he is stupid. But there can be a society where mathematics is not valued – music may be valued and the child would have a tremendous capacity for music. Then in that society he would be valued as intelligent. In your society a boy who can do mathematics well is valued and nobody bothers about his musical qualities. He may be absolutely non-musical. It depends. What society values is not a natural value, it is a chosen value.In some societies silence is valued – then to be silent is to be intelligent. In some societies talking is valued, so to talk is to be intelligent. It depends. In some societies dance is valued greatly and one who cannot dance seems to be stupid. In another society dancing is not thought about at all. Then nobody bothers whether you can dance or not. If you can be good at mathematics, at the three R’s, reading, writing, arithmetic, then you are intelligent.For thousands of years man has lived without these three R’s, yet people have been intelligent, otherwise they could not have survived. In fact, surviving today is very simple, problems have almost disappeared. To survive in the jungle, when there was no house over your head, no food supply, no security, and you were constantly in danger, man had to be very, very intelligent, otherwise there would have been no possibility of his surviving. Man is not a very strong animal, other animals are far stronger, but still man has survived because of his intelligence, his sensitivity. He can feel more, he can become more aware and more alert.Remember this: you were born clever, talented – a genius. God never creates less than that; God always creates geniuses. This beautiful whole always creates perfect people, how can imperfection be born out of perfection? Have you thought about it?In the Upanishads they say, “Perfection comes out of perfection. Perfection is born out of perfection.” God is born out of God – nothing else can be born out of God. You are gods and goddesses because you come from that source of divineness.Each child brings heaven into the world again but we jump on him, and we destroy him, and we destroy his heaven and his paradise. Again and again each child loses his paradise, that’s why we go on seeking and searching for it. If we had not known it, how could we seek and search for it? We can only seek that which we have known before. Each child has known something which has become lost, so again we start seeking it. We have lost our own inner capacities; we have lost our own inner kingdom.…but suffered from an abnormality when he grew up.Everybody becomes abnormal. It is very difficult to find a grown-up person who is normal because whatsoever you call the growing-up process is the process of turning people abnormal.For example: a man is obsessed with money; he is abnormal. Why should one be obsessed with money? You cannot eat it, you cannot love it, you cannot be loved by it. It cannot give you life, it cannot give you beauty, it cannot give you joy. But there are millions of people who are madly in love with money – money is their God, their only God. Now these are abnormal people.Once this abnormality settles, there arises another abnormality: a few people renounce money and become great mahatmas. First these mad people are obsessed with money, then a new obsession arises from that obsession – they become obsessed with the fear of money. If you take money to Vinoba Bhave he will not touch it. Now, what is wrong in touching money? A poor currency note is just paper; why are you so afraid of touching it? There is some deep fear. And fear is nothing but lust standing on its head; deep down there is still some desire. The fear is: “If I touch the money, I may again become interested in it.” A man who is free of money will use money and not be obsessed either way, for or against. He will live in the world, he will not renounce the world – there is no need.You cannot drop out of one madness by creating another – you are simply changing your madness. Your so-called money-mad people are mad, and your mahatmas are at the other extreme of the same madness. They are not different. Somebody who is mad for prestige, power, pull, is abnormal. You can sit on a very high chair that is not going to make you happy; you can become a president and you can become a prime minister but that is not going to make you happy. And life is to be happy, life is to celebrate.You will become more and more unhappy, the more power you have – because the more power you have, the more you will constantly have worries, constantly be in conflict. You cannot be at ease because others will be rushing toward you; they will be ready to overthrow you because they also want the same chair, the same power. Power is scarce and everybody wants power. So you will be in a madhouse.If you really want to see a madhouse, go to New Delhi. In India that is the greatest madhouse. Right now, because the elections are coming, you can see how many people are mad in this country.To find a grown-up person who is still intelligent is very difficult, very rare. You can become intelligent only if you become very conscious of what has been done to you, of how your intelligence has been destroyed or covered up. You will have to rediscover it.When I say these things, remember: I am not saying them only about others, I am talking about you. Notice your own being, watch how you behave, what you do with your life, and you will find many, many mad obsessions. Those mad obsessions have been given to you by society. You have been made ambitious, and ambition destroys intelligence. You have been put on a wrong track, you have been made competitive, you have been made jealous of others, you have been taught only one thing: to compete and to be first.Life has nothing to do with being first. You can enjoy it wherever you are. You can enjoy it right this moment; there is no need to postpone it. To postpone life is to become unintelligent. You say, “Tomorrow I will live,” so tomorrow you will be intelligent. Intelligence comes only when you live; intelligence is a function of living. When you live tremendously you become intensely intelligent; when you postpone life, dust gathers on the mirror of your being.You have been postponing. You say, “Tomorrow,” always, “Tomorrow.” People come to me and they say they want to take sannyas, but not today, tomorrow. They say they will come again. But why? Why wait? What are you waiting for? And who knows? Tomorrow may come or may not come. This moment may be the last moment to breathe, you may not breathe again. So why not live this moment as totally as possible?A person becomes intelligent when he starts living moment to moment totally – as if this were his last moment. Then there is a great passion, a great intensity. One becomes aflame with life. In that aflame state of consciousness one is intelligent, otherwise one is dull, dragging. Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, one is going to live – so what is the need of being intelligent today? Today you can afford to be stupid. Tomorrow, when you will try to live, you can become intelligent.But if you are stupid today, you are creating a trend of stupidity, and there is every possibility that tomorrow will not be different from today because it will be a prolongation of today, a continuity of today.Mr. P’ang of Ch’en had a son who was clever as a child but suffered from an abnormality when he grew up. When he heard singing he thought it was weeping; when he saw white he thought it was black; fragrant smells he thought noisome, sweet tastes he thought bitter, wrong actions he thought right. Whatever came into his mind – heaven and earth, the four cardinal points, water and fire, heat and cold – he always turned it upside down.That’s what everybody is doing. Look at your life and you will find that you have turned everything upside down. That which is valuable has become valueless and that which is valueless has become valuable.Look at your life, and be very true and honest in looking because if you deceive anyone, you deceive only yourself and nobody else. Look straight into your own being and you will be surprised. What have you been doing with yourself? Everything has become upside down. You are living for the non-essential and you have forgotten the essential. You are living for things, and things will be taken away when death comes. Money, power, prestige – nothing is going to be with you when death comes.A person only lives when he lives in such a way that death cannot destroy anything; who creates his inner being in such a way that death cannot take anything away from him; who lives in eternity which death cannot touch; who lives in consciousness – only that man is intelligent. Otherwise everything has been turned upside down: you see white as black and you see black as white; you think fragrant smells nauseous; sweet tastes bitter. You have settled on the artificial. Plastic flowers – yes, that’s where you have settled.Instead of moving into love you have settled with a marriage; instead of searching a real religion you have settled for Islam, Christianity, Jainism. Instead of searching for God you have settled for words about God. Instead of looking into existence you are carrying dead books. Instead of really living life you have only ideas about how to live life. Just ideas – nothing else.You have not lived at all; you only carry a few ideas. That’s what I call mistaking the menu for the dinner. You may call the menu the Vedas, or you may call it the Koran, or you may call it the Bible, but it is a menu, it is not food, it cannot nourish you.So if you are feeling unnourished, if you are feeling weak, if you are feeling death-like, it is natural. Nobody else is to be blamed for it.…he always turned it upside down.A certain Mr. Yang told his father, “The gentlemen of Lu have many arts and skills, perhaps they can cure him. Why not inquire among them?”Remember the last story? It was also concerned with the gentlemen from Lu. This town Lu was a Confucian town. It was almost like Varanasi. In India, if you come from Varanasi, if you can say that you come from Varanasi, you are already a great scholar. It has prestige. It is the Hindu citadel. The town of Lu was exactly like Varanasi. It had Confucian scholars. It was a sort of Confucian university where Confucius lived with his disciples and created much scholarship, created many scholars and pundits. It had become very famous.A certain Mr. Yang told his father “The gentlemen of Lu have many arts and skills perhaps they can cure him. Why not inquire among them?”The father set out for Lu but passing through Ch’en he came across Lao Tzu and took the opportunity to tell him about his son’s symptoms.One thing to be remembered of this parable at this moment is that the mind always looks for the Confucian. It comes across a Lao Tzu only accidentally. The mind is basically Confucian. The mind looks for a structure, an ideology. The mind looks for a principle. The mind looks for some technology so that it can become more powerfully in control. The mind looks for power. It is only accidental that you come across a Lao Tzu: you were not really looking for Lao Tzu, you were looking for Confucius.For example: you have come here. You were not looking for me; you were looking for a mahatma. Only accidentally have you come across me. You may have been in search of a guru, a mahatma, but you accidentally have come across me. You were not looking for me; the mind cannot look for me. For the mind to look for me is simply to commit suicide. The mind looks for something that helps it to become stronger.The father set out for Lu… He was in search of some Confucian man who would be able to help cure his son. One thing was certain to the father: his son was ill. He had not taken any time to think about it, to ponder over whether he was really ill, whether he was really abnormal. He had simply accepted the idea that he was abnormal. He did not know anything about what normality was or what abnormality was.When you make such assumptions, be a little more aware. You think that somebody is mad? Don’t be in such a hurry. He may not be mad; on the contrary, you may be the mad one. Don’t judge. You immediately assume that somebody is a criminal – he may not be. On the contrary, you may be the criminal. The criminal may not be the criminal; the magistrate may be the criminal. The judged may not be the criminal; the judge may be the criminal. Things are very complicated; don’t make assumptions. Don’t fall victim to easy assumptions.The father had taken one thing for granted: his son was abnormal. Beware of taking things for granted. Never take anything for granted. The moment you take anything for granted you are falling from intelligence. Intelligence never takes anything for granted. It examines it and it remains open. It never creates a prejudice. Who knows?You must have heard the story about a woman who was brought to Jesus because she had committed a sin. Those who were condemning her were ready to kill her because the old law said that if a woman committed the sin of adultery, then she had to be killed by throwing stones at her. She had to be stoned to death. They came to Jesus. It was also a good opportunity to judge Jesus. Would this man follow the old law, or was he against the old law?They asked, “What should we do?” And Jesus said, “Do one thing first. Those who have never committed any sin, those who have not even thought about committing adultery, should take stones in their hands. They are allowed to stone this woman.” The people started disappearing. Nobody was left: there was not even a single man who had not committed adultery, even if only in his mind.Within minutes the crowd was gone and Jesus was left with the woman. The woman started crying. She felt tremendous respect for this man who had saved her. She said, “I am guilty. I have done wrong. Please punish me.” And Jesus said, “Who am I to punish you? Who am I to say that you a sinner? That is something between you and your God. I am nobody to judge.”Jesus said, “Judge ye not, that ye be not judged.” All judgment is stupid. Only stupid people judge hastily. The more intelligent you are, the less judgment you carry. If you are really intelligent, all judgments disappear. Then suddenly you see whatsoever is before you. But you don’t carry any judgment; you don’t say, “This man is bad and this man is good.” You don’t say, “This man is a sinner and this man is a saint.” These are all judgments. Who are you to judge? Who has given you the authority to judge?When you don’t judge anybody, when you drop all judgments, suddenly all of life looks so beautiful, so immensely beautiful, so divine. The Devil disappears the moment your judgment disappears.This man came across Lao Tzu by accident so he: …took the opportunity to tell him about his son’s symptoms. He was not aware who he was talking to.Lao Tzu is superb, unsurpassed. Unsurpassed before, unsurpassed after. There has never been such clarity in any man anywhere. Such total understanding, such absolute transparency! Even in a Buddha, even in a Mahavira, even in a Krishna, you will find a little judgment – but not in Lao Tzu.“How do you know that your son is abnormal?” said Lao Tzu.He raises a very fundamental question. Who is normal? What is the norm? And how do you decide? The crowd? Many people are like that, so is that normal? But the whole crowd can be mad.There is a Kahlil Gibran story:A magician came to town and threw some medicine into the town’s well. He said that whosoever drank from the well would go mad.There were only two wells in the town: one for the ordinary people and one for the king.By the evening the whole town had gone mad. They had to drink from the well, even though they knew they would go mad, because it was the only well available to them. It was a hot summer day, and they tried not to drink, but how long can you try? By and by they yielded. By the evening the whole town had gone mad.The king was very happy. Standing on his palace terrace he looked around and he said to his prime minister, “Grateful we are to God that we have a separate well, otherwise we would also have gone mad. The whole town has become mad.” People were dancing, singing, jumping, screaming, howling. The whole town was simply unbelievable. What had happened? It was a nightmare. People were doing all sorts of things they had never done before.But within hours the king’s happiness disappeared because the people came to the palace and they started shouting that the king had gone mad. The king’s army was also in the town and they went mad, and his bodyguard and his cook, and his servants. Only the king and the queen and the prime minister, three persons, were left.Now what can you do against a whole town when it is mad? The king became very afraid and asked, “What should we do now?”The prime minister said, “There is only one thing to be done. I will try and prevent them for a few minutes. Run and drink from that well. There is no other way. You must go fast.”The king went, drank from the well, and when he came back he was dancing. The crowd shouted in joy and they said, “Thanks be to God. We are grateful to God. Our king’s mind has come back!”If the whole crowd is mad, the sane person will look mad.How do you know that all people are not mad? The exceptional looks mad; the common seems to be the norm.Lao Tzu asked: “How do you know that your son is abnormal?”I have heard…A Brit was having tea on his lawn when a spaceship appeared in the sky. He watched calmly as it circled and came to earth nearby. A weird-looking creature stepped from the craft and slowly approached. The thing had two heads with one eye in the center of each head. It had only one arm which protruded from the middle of its chest. It had no legs but walked on a pair of short flippers.“Earthman,” the apparition squeaked, “I wish to see your leader!”The Englishman stirred his tea and gazed with distaste at his visitor.“Nonsense, old man,” he said calmly. “What you want to see is a good plastic surgeon.”The exceptional seems to be abnormal. He may be a normal person from another planet. If some day you go to some other planet, you will be abnormal; they will immediately send you to a plastic surgeon.Lao Tzu asked: “How do you know that your son is abnormal?” What criterion is there? What standard do you follow? Norm means the standard. But how do you decide who is normal? Is Buddha normal? Is Jesus normal? Jesus was not normal to the people among whom he lived. They murdered him because he was abnormal, because he was talking about things which should not be talked about. Socrates – was he normal? Athens poisoned him because he was abnormal. If you look down the ages, all great people were abnormal. The ordinary seems to be the normal.Lao Tzu wants to destroy the criterion. He wants to tell you that there is no criterion to judge. Each individual is unique – that is the vision of Tao. Each individual is so unique, so incomparably unique, that there is no way to judge who is normal and who is abnormal. Look at the freedom Tao gives: you can only say that people are different – nobody is normal, nobody is abnormal. People are simply different.Once you understand that people are different you drop the idea of inferiority and superiority for the first time. For the first time, comparison becomes: “Somebody is this way, somebody else is that way.”Somebody asked Bokuju, “Why are you so good and I am not so good? Why are you so silent and I am not so silent?”Bokuju said, “Come out with me into the garden.” And he took him into the garden where there were two trees. One was very tall, almost touching the clouds, and another was very small. He said, “Look. This tree is small and that tree is tall, but I have never heard any discussion between them. The tall one has never said to the small one, ‘Look, I am superior.’ And the small one has never said to the tall one, ‘Because I am so small, I feel very inferior standing by your side.’”No, the small is small and the tall is tall; there is no comparison. The small is beautiful in its smallness, and the tall is beautiful in its tallness. The tall is close to the clouds, the small is close to the earth. The tall enjoys tallness; the small enjoys smallness. What is wrong in it?Nothing is wrong – that is the Taoist vision. Everything is good as it is.Comparison comes from the human mind. The birds are birds; they are not worried about why they are not animals. The rose is a rose; the rose is not worried about why it is not the lotus. Hence they are not neurotic. Otherwise the rose will become neurotic because he is not a lotus, and the lotus will become neurotic because he is not the rose. And the small bush will lie down somewhere on some psychiatrist’s couch because he is not the Cedar of Lebanon. “Why? Why am I not the Cedar of Lebanon? Why has God made me so small – just a bush? What karmas am I suffering from?” He will make some philosophy to console himself, “I have created bad karmas in my past life, that’s why.”All rubbish! All theories are rubbish! They are needed because you ask rubbish questions. So somebody has to supply rubbish answers. There is a law in economics: whenever there is a demand there is the supply. If you ask a foolish question some wise guy is going to give you a foolish answer.It is very simple. Things are as they are. Things are different, certainly, but they are not unequal. Let me repeat it: things are different but they are not unequal. Everything is unique. You cannot find a single leaf in the whole world which is like another leaf. You cannot find a single pebble on the whole earth which is like another pebble. No, nothing is similar, but nothing is unequal. Each thing exists in its own way. That is the meaning of the saying that each thing has its own soul. That uniqueness is what soul means; that uniqueness is the meaning of the saying: “A man has a soul.” It simply shows that he is unique. The tree has a soul; it shows it is unique. The mountain has a soul; it simply shows it is unique. Nothing else is just like it.“How do you know that your son is abnormal?” said Lao Tzu. “Nowadays everyone in the world is deluded about right and wrong, and confused about benefit and harm…”First: because of these comparisons people have started to become imitations. Because you don’t recognize your uniqueness, you are not respectful toward your being. You are disrespectful.A woman came to me and she asked, “What should I do? I am fat.” She was not very fat. Nothing… If she had not said so, I would not have thought that she was fat. But she herself goes on saying it. You must know her. She is called Veena and now she has become known as Fat Veena. And she is not fat. She is nothing like it. She does not know what a fat woman can be.I have heard about one:She came out of a hotel and said to the doorkeeper, “Please call me a taxi.”The doorkeeper looked at her and said, “Okay, if you say so. I will call you a taxi, but you look to me more like a truck!”But even if a woman is that fat she has a unique soul.There is no need to be worried. Comparison should not be brought in. One should be respectful toward one’s own being. Comparison comes through others. You see somebody who is lean and thin and a comparison arises. You have a nose which is a little too long and somebody has one with exactly the desired proportion. Now a problem arises.You may not have heard that even Cleopatra was worried. She had a nose she thought was a little too long. Cleopatra is thought to be one of the most beautiful women of the world, but she was always conscious of her nose. It was a little too long. So she was very worried. Her whole body was in proportion, but her nose created the trouble.If you compare, you are going to be neurotic. Somebody has beautiful hair, somebody has a beautiful nose, somebody has beautiful eyes, somebody has beautiful legs and somebody has the right proportions and somebody has the right complexion and somebody is more intelligent and so on and so forth. All these people will create inferiority in you. Or, if your start thinking the other way round, you may start feeling superior. Both are illnesses. To feel inferior is ill, and to feel superior is ill; just to feel one is oneself is healthy. Not comparing is healthy.This constant comparison creates imitation; people start becoming like others. You dress the way others dress, you purchase the cars that others have, you decorate your drawing room as others have decorated theirs – you go on imitating. And an imitator is never happy because an imitator becomes untrue.Now what has happened to this man? He thinks that his son is abnormal – maybe his son is not like the son of his neighbor, that’s all. The comparison is bringing trouble to his mind. Maybe his son is not like him – but why should the son be like the father?I have heard…Three girls were arrested for soliciting. And a peddler, newly arrived in this country, was arrested for peddling without a license. They were brought before the court.“What do you do for a living?” the judge asked, pointing to the first girl.“Your honor, I’m a model,” she answered.“Thirty days,” was the sentence. Then he turned to the second. “What do you do for a living?” he asked belligerently.“Your honor, I’m an actress.”“Thirty days.” Then he turned to the third girl. “What do you do for a living?” he demanded.“To tell you the truth,” she answered, “I’m a prostitute.”“For telling the truth,” he said, “I’m going to suspend sentence.”Then he turned to the little immigrant peddler. “And you,” he said, “what do you do for a living?”“To tell you the truth,” the peddler said twisting his ancient cap in his hands, “I’m a prostitute also.”That’s how people go on imitating and they think that by imitating you can be true. By imitating, nobody can ever be true. Imitation is the basis of all falsehood.“How do you know that your son is abnormal?” said Lao Tzu. “Nowadays everyone in the world is deluded about right and wrong, and confused about benefit and harm…” The mind is confusion. The moment you start thinking about what is right and what is wrong you will be confused. The moment you start thinking about what is harmful and what is beneficial you will be confused.Haven’t you heard the story about the centipede?A centipede has one hundred legs.A rabbit saw him and could not believe it! It was almost impossible! A hundred legs. How does he manage? Which one must be moved first and second and third and fourth? A hundred legs. How does he manage?The rabbit was very puzzled and said, “Uncle, I am very confused. I cannot imagine how you manage. If I had one hundred legs, I would never be able to walk. I would get so confused.”The centipede had never thought about it, hence he was not confused. But now he said, “I have never thought about it, I will think over it.” And he pondered over it. For the first time he became self-conscious. He looked at his legs and he was confused. He fell down!And he said to the rabbit, “Never ask such a question! I have always walked, and there was never any problem. Now you have confused me. Now I will never be able to walk correctly. The problem will haunt me. Which one first? Which one second? And there are one hundred legs!”Lao Tzu says that the mind is confusion. The moment you think, you are confused. Thinking is confusion; hence nobody can get out of confusion by thinking. Thinking will make you even more muddled. One comes out of confusion by non-thinking, by dropping all thought, by dropping all distinctions between right and wrong, between harm and benefit. How can you know, how can the part know what is beneficial and what is harmful? The universe is so vast that one never knows what will finally be the result of your act.You go and save a man who was drowning in a well; you make an effort and you get him out. And then the next day he commits a murder. Now, was your saving the man right or wrong? If you had not saved him, there would have been no murder. Now the murder has happened. You are also part of the crime. Without you it would not have been possible. But you never thought that way. You were just saving the person. Your whole idea was to help the person who was dying. So what is harmful and what is beneficial?Sometimes poison becomes beneficial, and sometimes nectar can prove poisonous. Sometimes the person who wants to do good to you may do harm, and sometimes the person who wanted to do harm to you may do good. Things are very complex; in fact, almost incomprehensible by the human mind. Life is so deep and so complex and we are so small, so tiny, there is no way to figure it out.So what does Lao Tzu say? Lao Tzu says: “Nowadays everyone in the world is deluded about right and wrong, and confused about benefit and harm.” How do you decide what is right? What is the criterion? Was Mohammed right when he took up a sword? He was not right according to the Jainas. To take up a sword is wrong. But according to the Mohammedans he was right because he took the sword in his hand to save religion. According to the Mohammedans, Mahavira is an escapist. When people were suffering he was standing there and meditating. When people were being exploited he was selfish. He escaped to the forest.When Arjuna sad to Krishna in the Gita, “I don’t want to kill so many people; this seems to be the greatest sin that can be committed. I want to renounce the world and go to the forest and become a forest dweller,” was he right or wrong? If you ask the Jainas he was right. But Krishna says, “No, this is wrong. Don’t go. This is your duty. Do it. God wills it this way, so let it be this way. Escaping from your duty will be going against God. You did not arrange this war. It is happening. Just be instrumental in it. Go into it, but not as a doer, go into it just as an instrument. There is no need to escape anywhere.“And, Arjuna, even if you do escape, you cannot escape because your whole training, your whole discipline of life, is that of a warrior. You cannot escape so easily. Where will you go? You are not a brahmin, you are not a meditator, you are a warrior. You have to attain your reality only through yourself. Svadharme nidhanam shreyah, it is good to die into one’s own nature; paradharmo bhayavaha, it is very dangerous to follow somebody else’s religion. To be a warrior is your religion. That is what you have trained for your whole life. Each cell of your being is that of a warrior. You cannot meditate, Arjuna. Even if you go into the forest and sit under a tree, if you see a lion passing by, you will immediately search for your bow, and you will kill it. You will become a hunter; you will not become a meditator. That is not right.”Now, what is right and what is wrong? And who decides? If Arjuna had asked Mahavira, Mahavira would have blessed him. He would have said, “Right. For the first time reality has dawned upon you.” But Krishna says, “You are an escapist, a coward. This is cowardice.” Now who is right and who is wrong?Ask Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu says that even the distinction between right and wrong is not possible. You simply live, whatsoever – as naturally as possible for you.I have heard…A man hired a taxi to the station. From the hotel to the station it was a fixed rate of one rupee. When the man got out of the taxi he gave one rupee to the taximan but the taximan looked unhappy. So the man asked, “Is it not right? Is it not correct?”The taximan said, “Sir, it is correct but not right.”You see the distinction? It is correct but not right. “You have paid me. Legally it is correct. But it is not right. You have not tipped me. That is not part of the formal law but it is a convention.”So what is right? What is correct? Law is limited and life is excessive. If you live according to the law, you may be correct but you may not be right. If you live according to life, you may be right but you may not be correct.Lao Tzu’s standpoint is that to make the distinction, to bring the distinction in, creates confusion. One should live spontaneously, naturally, and one should not try to follow any right and any wrong. One should remain surrendered. One should live out of a let-go.“…because so many people share this sickness no one perceives that it is a sickness.”This confusion has become so common that nobody now thinks it is a sickness. All are ill with the same sickness, the same confusion. Not only those who follow but those who lead as well: they are also in the same boat.Hungry, exhausted and frightened, the hunter dropped his rifle, stumbled forward, and threw his arms about the man who had just emerged from a patch of timber.“Am I glad to see you,” he cried. “I’ve been lost for two days!”“What are you so glad about?” mumbled the other hunter. “I’ve been lost for a week!”Leaders and followers, the teachers and the taught, are all in the same boat. Whom to ask? All are ill. The confusion is so common that people have completely forgotten that it is an illness.“Besides one man’s abnormality is not enough to overturn his family…”And then he asked, “Why be so worried? Even if you think one man is abnormal, what is wrong?”“Besides, one man’s abnormality is not enough to overturn his family; one family’s to overturn the neighborhood; one neighborhood’s to overturn the state; one state’s to overturn the world.”So why be worried? A single individual, even if you think he is abnormal, even if it is agreed that he is abnormal, why be worried? He cannot overturn the whole world. He can be accepted the way he is. Why try to change him?“If the whole world were abnormal, how could abnormality overturn it?”Then, as far as Lao Tzu’s own vision is concerned, he says the whole world is abnormal. People may be abnormal in different ways, but the whole world is abnormal. But nobody looks at one’s own abnormality. It is very easy to think about the other as abnormal; it is very difficult to think about yourself as abnormal. It is very easy to have a condemnatory attitude about somebody else. Have you ever seen a madman who thinks that he is mad? Never. You can go to the madhouse; you can ask, and they will laugh. They will say, “Are you mad?” A madman never thinks that he is mad. He cannot. If a madman can think that he is mad, then it is certain that he is not mad. Such a man, a man who can think that he is mad, cannot be mad.A few anecdotes…In a crowded restaurant the psychiatrist was approached by a woman. “See that man over there?” she whispered. “He’s my husband and he needs your help. He thinks he’s a traffic light. All night long he keeps opening one eye, then closing it, then opening it…”The headshrinker nodded and said, “I’ll go over and have a talk with him.”“No, wait,” shouted the woman. “The light’s against you!”It is very difficult to see that you are mad and it is very easy to think that the other is mad. It is part of the mad mind to think the other is mad.The woman pleaded for help from the psychiatrist. “My husband thinks he’s a washing machine. He rolls his head around and around and back and forth and soap and hot water come out of his ears.”The psychiatrist said, “I know it’s distressing, but I can’t see that this hallucination is doing any harm.”“You don’t understand, Doctor,” the woman said. “He isn’t getting the sheets clean!”Whenever you think of somebody as mad, wait a minute. The greater possibility is that you are mad. A really sane man like Lao Tzu says that nobody is mad.People are simply different. Many people are suffering unnecessarily in hospitals, in madhouses, in asylums – suffering unnecessarily. They are not mad; they are different. Certainly they are different. They look at things in a different way, but there is nothing wrong in it.Van Gogh painted trees so high that they touched the stars. He painted the sun and the moon so small and the trees so big – they go higher and higher and touch the stars. Somebody asked, “Are you mad? Where have you seen such trees? And suns and moons so small and trees so big?”Van Gogh said, “Whenever I look at a tree, I see the desire of the earth to touch the sky. The tree is the desire of the earth to touch the sky. It is the ambition of the earth. So why be a miser? What the earth cannot do, I can do in my paintings. That’s the way I see it: desires of the earth to touch the sky.”That is a way of seeing things: nothing is wrong in it. It is very poetic. A man of real understanding will be neutral. He will be like the sun. The sun shines as beautifully and as poetically on the dunghill as on the diamond. No distinction is made. That’s how real understanding is.Nobody is sane; nobody is insane. If someday the Tao vision becomes the universal vision, many people will be saved from unnecessary suffering. Who decides it? As yet there are no criteria. If you go to a psychiatrist he cannot decide who is mad. All that they decide is that this person is too different from others – that’s all. But why should he be mad?And the psychiatrist cannot help much. Even when he tries to bring an insane person to sanity, what can he do? At the most he forces the person to adjust to the view of the crowd. He makes him less individual. He destroys his individuality. Nothing much changes.A man met a friend who had been under psychiatric care. “How are you progressing?” asked the man.“Fine,” said the friend. “For months I thought I was a fox terrier, but analysis has helped me.”“Are you cured?” asked the man.“Not exactly,” his friend replied, “but I have stopped chasing cars.”At least this much can be done. Certainly you will think that a person who thinks he is a fox terrier is mad, but what about Adolf Hitler? What about Josef Stalin? What about Chairman Mao Zedong? They didn’t think they were fox terriers but they were more dangerous. The man who thinks he is a fox terrier, what can he do? Even if he chases cars it is very innocent. He is not doing any harm to anybody. It is an innocent idea. Nothing wrong in it. But this man will be put into a madhouse and Josef Stalin will become the dictator of Russia and will kill millions of people. Nobody will think that he needs psychiatric help.This is a very strange world. Innocent people are thought to be mad but nobody thinks the real culprits are mad. Adolf Hitler killed many people, but nobody thought that he was mad while he ruled Germany. Politicians, power-addicted people, money-mad people – nobody thinks them mad. But if somebody sitting under a tree starts laughing for no reason at all, you think he is mad. He is not doing any harm to anybody. He may have some reason to laugh which may not be apparent to you.And, finally, what is wrong if somebody laughs without any reason? Why is a reason needed to laugh? In fact, a reason is needed to be miserable but no reason is needed to be happy. Happiness should be natural – for no reason. It should be bubbling up. One should be radiant, in tremendous joy, for no reason at all.“If the whole world was abnormal, how could abnormality overturn it? Supposing the minds of everyone in the world were like your son’s, then, on the contrary, it is you who would be abnormal.”He is raising a beautiful point. He is saying, “Just think! If everybody was like your son, then you would be abnormal. Now everybody is like you, so your son is abnormal.” The question seems to be only one of numbers. Who is in the majority? Whosoever is in the majority is normal and whosoever is in the minority is abnormal.But is this a criterion for judging? Then all buddhas are abnormal – that’s what psychoanalysts really say. They say that Buddha was abnormal because he was so rare. He must have been abnormal. Mahavira was abnormal. Jesus was abnormal. You don’t find so many Jesuses; no crowd of Jesuses exists. Then he must have been abnormal. If the majority means normality then Jesus and Buddha and Mahavira and Krishna were abnormal.What do you want to be? Would you like to be a buddha, or would you like to be just a part of a mob? Even if Buddha was abnormal, one would like to be a buddha because he was so happy, so serene, so calm, so tranquil.Lao Tzu is saying to drop these ideas; they are meaningless. These distinctions and judgments are foolish.“Joy and sorrow, music and beauty, smells and tastes, right and wrong – who can straighten them out?”He says that joy and sorrow are indefinable, so are music and beauty. Who can figure out what is what? Nobody has yet been able to define what beauty is. And nobody has yet been able to define what good is. Good remains indefinable – so does beauty and so does music. What is music to one is just a maddening noise to another. If you are trained for classical Indian music, modern Western music will look insane. If you are trained to listen to modern Western music – jazz and others – then Indian music will look very boring, dull. It depends on your training. What is music? Nobody has yet been able to define it. All that is significant remains indefinable. “Who can straighten them out?”“I am not even sure…”Look at the beauty of it. Lao Tzu says:“I am not even sure that these words of mine are not abnormal…”What can I say? This is Lao Tzu’s absolute health. Only such a healthy person can say, “I am not certain that my words are abnormal or not. There is no way to say.” Only a really sane person can say, “Maybe I am mad.”Recently a girl we know found an old love letter which her father had written to her mother when they were courting. The daughter copied the letter, signed a masculine name to it, and mailed it to herself. Then she showed it to her father. There was an explosion like that of an erupting volcano. The father could scarcely express himself. He snorted, “That fellow is the biggest fool I have ever heard of. You better not let him come poking around here or I’ll make mince-meat out of him. We don’t want such a simp in our family. Any ding-busted, fat-headed idiot who would write such a mess of sickly, silly hogwash to any girl deserves to be ducked in a mud hole – and I’d like to do it!”Now, he himself had written that letter. Haven’t you done foolish things when you are in love? Haven’t you written foolish letters when you are in love? Haven’t you observed that lovers always look mad to other people? And the same will happen to them; when they are in love, others will think that they are mad.Religious people have always looked mad to the non-religious; worshipping and praying in a temple, you look mad to an atheist. You look like a fool, foolish. What are you doing? To whom are you praying? There is no God. A happy person looks mad to unhappy, miserable people.Those miserable people sometimes accidentally come here too, and when they come here they see a great crowd of mad people around me laughing, dancing, enjoying, singing. They cannot believe it! They are so miserable, how can they believe it? You only believe that which you are. More than that looks impossible, cannot be, should not be. You think that you are the limit of existence, or, you are the definition of existence.Lao Tzu says:“I am not even sure that these words of mine are not abnormal, let alone those of the gentlemen of Lu who are the most abnormal of all.”About Confucius and his followers he is absolutely certain – they are the most abnormal people. They are the moralists, the puritans; they are the most abnormal people in the world. In fact, they have driven all of humanity to abnormality. They have not allowed spontaneity; they have not allowed people to be natural. They have condemned everything; they have condemned so much that people are simply at a loss as to how to be, what to be. They have condemned reality so much that all of humanity has become fake, pseudo. Everybody is wearing a mask. And everybody has lost their original face.Two women met on the street for the first time in several months. One of them asked, “How’s your son?”“Haven’t you heard?” the other asked. “It’s all over town. My son’s a schizophrenic.”“Really?” her friend said. “Where’s his office?”All schizophrenic people have now become psychoanalysts. The question “Where is his office?” is relevant. All mad people have turned into moralists, moralizers. They are trying to change the whole world. Whenever you come across a person who is trying to change the whole world, escape from him. He is dangerous. Nobody is needed to change the whole world. Missionaries are the most mischievous people in the world.Live your life, enjoy your life. If, through your enjoyment and delight, somebody else’s life becomes a little more beautiful, good. If not, that too is good.“…let alone those of the gentlemen of Lu who are the most abnormal of all. Who are they to cure other people’s abnormality?”Who are they to cure, to help, to manipulate? Who are they to change others? Don’t become self-appointed dictators.Moralists are self-appointed dictators. They are ready to change everybody. They are ready to sacrifice their lives to change your life. And they do sacrifice their lives! In sacrificing they are insane. Then they cling to your neck, they suffocate you. The do-gooders are suffocating. They try to kill you. And you cannot even defend yourself because they say, “We are doing you good. We are servants of the people. We serve.”These servants are the enemies. They have poisoned all of nature. Not only is the atmosphere poisoned, humanity is also poisoned. Scientists have poisoned the outside nature and the so-called religious people have poisoned inner humanity. The whole ecology is disturbed, outer and inner, both.“Who are they to cure other people’s abnormality? You had better go straight home instead of wasting your money.”Look at this advice. You may not be able to understand immediately, but the message is very simple. The message is: don’t interfere. The message is: don’t judge. The message is: you are nobody to change somebody else. That is not your responsibility. You are not meant to do that. Live your life and allow others to live their lives. Let everybody have the freedom to do his thing.All judgment is immoral, and all effort to change somebody is destructive and violent. That’s what your mahatmas and your saints have been doing up to now. That’s why I say that Lao Tzu is incomparable, unique, unsurpassed – before and after. His vision is the ultimate vision of spontaneity, suchness, nature. If you understand him, your life will start moving in a totally different rhythm. You will become a non-interference, wu-wei. Only when you don’t interfere in another’s life do you respect life – that’s what reverence of life is all about.My teaching is exactly the same. I cannot say that about anybody else, but about Lao Tzu I can say that my teaching is exactly the same. With Buddha I have differences, although I may not say them. With Mahavira I have many, many differences, although I may not talk about them. But with Lao Tzu I am absolutely in agreement. The agreement is unconditional and absolute because he seems to be the only one who has looked at life without any mind, who has looked at life straight, who has no idea, no ideology.You can also have exactly the same clarity and transparency. That will be the day of benediction, that will be the day of enlightenment. That’s what enlightenment is.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/tao-the-pathless-path-vol-2-06/

The first question:Osho,You have helped me to be in touch with my spontaneity, yet it is the most dangerous quality of life I have ever encountered – especially in relationships. I lose myself. And what hassles you have created through it! Now I feel totally helpless, too vulnerable, possessed by you and this spontaneous union. Where is the center of this cyclone?There is no center to this cyclone, the cyclone is the center. We have a chronic habit of dividing things into two. We have a chronic habit of duality: God and the world, body and soul, the lower and the higher the good and bad. The habit persists. Now it is the center and the cyclone.Let me insist on it: the cyclone is the center and there is no other center to it. Once you understand this oneness of life, then all tensions, anxieties, anguish, disappear. The anxiety is created because we are always dividing. Through division we become split; through division we become schizophrenic. Now you think that you are on the circumference of the cyclone and the center has been lost, so now the center must be found.It is the old habit of duality. The “center and the cyclone” is new language, but the habit is very old, the gestalt is very old. It is always that wherever you are, you are not right, you should be somewhere else.My whole emphasis is that whatsoever is is right. There is no other right. There is nowhere else to go. This is the only life there is, the only dance there is. Only then can you be spontaneous, really spontaneous.Why have we lost spontaneity? By what trick? The trick is in dividing. You cannot be spontaneous today because you have to think about tomorrow. You cannot be spontaneous this moment because you have to think of the coming moment. You cannot be spontaneous in this life because you have to think about the afterlife. You cannot be spontaneous in your actions because you have to think about the consequences. It is always a division of now and then, of here and there. Hence spontaneity is lost.Who is spontaneous? One who lives in this moment as if it is all is spontaneous. And this is all. In the beginning it will be just “as if.” Slowly, slowly, as you get in tune with it, you will come to know that it is not as if, it is the only reality there is.The second thing: spontaneity is dangerous. It will be better if we say spontaneity is danger. To say “dangerous” means that dangerousness is a quality, accidental. So I say that it is better to say, spontaneity is danger, then it is not a quality but the very intrinsic nature of spontaneity. There can never be spontaneity without danger: danger is spontaneity.What do I mean? The first thing: when you are spontaneous you are not in control, you cannot be in control. If you are in control, then the act is not spontaneous, then you are thinking of the consequences, the results, this and that – a thousand and one things. You are managing. A spontaneous act is one in which you are not the manager; in which God manages. The whole manages – call it Tao – in which you are no longer in control; you have dropped your control, you have surrendered your control. Now you don’t know what is happening, you don’t know where you are going, you don’t know what will be the outcome – and you are not worried about it at all, not even a bit. You are simply herenow, totally. The act is so total that you are absorbed in it; you are not standing outside it. To control something you have to be outside it. A controller can never be inside an act; a controller is always on the outside – hence the controller can never enjoy. To enjoy, you have to disappear in the act. That disappearance is danger. Now you will be vulnerable – naturally so, obviously so. Now you don’t know. Anything is possible. You are not in control so you cannot direct. That is the danger. There is no direction any more. You are completely drunk with the moment, drowned in it, so relaxed in it that you cannot even feel that you are.Remember, the feeling “I am” is the feeling of a tense mind. When the tenseness disappears the “I” also disappears. The ego is nothing but accumulated tension of the past, of the future. Haven’t you noticed some moments in your life when you were not? Those were moments of benediction, moments of great blessing, beautitude. In those moments, heaven opened for you.Heaven opens only when you open; and when you open there is danger. The danger simply means that now the future is not in your hands, the future becomes unpredictable. You are at the mercy of the whole – this is what danger is.So right, your feeling is absolutely right. “You have helped me to be in touch with my own spontaneity, yet it is the most dangerous quality of life I have ever encountered.” In fact, this is the first time you have encountered life, because life is spontaneity and life is danger.Have you ever heard of any man who has lived without danger? To live means to be in danger; to die means to be out of danger. Those who are in their graves are out of danger, out of all danger. Now nothing can happen to them: nobody can insult them, nobody can kill them, nobody can rob them. Death is not even possible. They are absolutely beyond all danger.People who are too afraid of danger start living in a sort of grave; they create a grave of security around themselves, and they start living in that grave, a subtle grave, a mind grave. They feel protected. But against whom are you protected? Against life. The moment you protect yourself you are creating barriers against life and then life will come less and less. A person who is secure is a person who is dead.To live means to live dangerously; to live means to remain available to all possibilities. The possibilities are infinite. You are not limited to any possibility; you have an unlimited being, unbounded. You can be anything; the next moment can bring anything. Deep down each individual is a whole humanity – not only a whole humanity, a whole existence. The tree exists in you, the dog exists in you, the tiger exists in you; all past exists in you and also all future. In a very atomic way, all that has happened in the world and all that is going to happen potentially exists in you. You can be in millions of ways, hence to live means to live dangerously, to live means to live through change, movement. One remains a river.If you are secured you become a pool of water; there is no movement, no dynamism. Static and stagnant, the pool of water becomes dirty and dies by and by. A river is alive and nobody knows what will happen. It may get lost in a desert. What is going to happen is unpredictable. A predictable life is a mechanical life; unpredictable, you are throbbing with life, pulsating, vibrating. Then God, or Tao, or the whole, lives through you.You have come across life for the first time; don’t lose this contact whatsoever the cost. I know it is costly to be alive and it is very cheap to be dead. It costs nothing to be dead; it costs much to be alive. One has to pay for it.“…yet it is the most dangerous quality in life I have ever encountered – especially in relationships.” Yes, it will become clearer in relationships because when you are alone you don’t have any mirror. Just as you need a mirror to see your face, so you need the mirror of relationship to see your being. Love functions as a mirror, it shows you where you are, what you are, who you are. Hence many people become afraid of relationships. They are cowards. They escape to the Himalayas, or to Tibet, or to the monasteries, or to the caves. Why are they escaping, and from what? They are escaping from mirrors.I have heard about an ugly woman who would never look in a mirror because she used to think that mirrors were against her. While she thought she was one of the most beautiful women in the world, they showed her ugliness. If somebody presented her with a mirror she would simply throw it away or break it immediately. She would never go into a room where there was a mirror because she felt that mirrors had always been against her.These are your mahatmas. They escape from relationships because relationships show their ugliness, relationships show where they are, who they are. Sitting in their caves in the Himalayas they feel perfectly beautiful because there is no mirror.Never escape from relationships. That’s why I have introduced sannyas with relationships, not without it. There is great meaning in it. Never on the earth has sannyas existed with relationships, that’s why I say that sannyas has not really existed; or the sannyas that has previously existed was anemic, bloodless. People thought they were beautiful; without the mirror they thought they were beautiful. It is very easy to fool yourself when the mirror is not there.When you are in relationship with people, in a thousand and one ways you are provoked, challenged, seduced. Again and again you come to know your pitfalls, your limitations, your anger, your lust, your possessiveness, your jealousy, your sadness, your happiness – all the moods come and go, you are constantly in turmoil. But this is the only way to know who you are.Self-knowledge is not the knowledge of a dead self. Self-knowledge is the knowledge of the process of the self. It is an alive phenomenon. The self is not a thing, it is an event, it is a process. Never think in terms of things, the self is not there inside you, like a thing waiting in your room. The self is a process: changing, moving, arriving at new altitudes, moving into new planes, going deeper into new depths. Each moment much work is going on, and the only way to encounter this self is to encounter it in relationship.Love is the mirror. Let your meditation be mirrored in love. If you find that something is missing, meditate more – but never escape from love; let it be mirrored in love again and again, because that will be the only criterion of whether you are growing or not. If you are really growing in love, soon you will see that love has remained and jealousy has disappeared; love has remained and possessiveness has disappeared; love has remained and hatred has disappeared. A great purity arises, a great innocence. A fragrance is released into your soul. Go on meditating and go on loving. Let love and meditation be two wings. Let them help each other.I am showing you the path which is arduous, which is really arduous. Love alone is good because there is nothing to reflect, meditation alone is simple because there is no mirror to reflect. But meditation and love together – I am throwing you into the very eye of the storm. That is the only way one comes home.When things become silent after the storm, the silence is alive; it is not the dead silence of a cemetery.“…especially in relationships. I lose myself. And what hassles you have created through it!” That’s my whole work here – to create hassles for you, to send you on hazardous journeys, to push you into new ways of being, into new styles, into the unknown, the unfamiliar, the strange. You would like to remain with the familiar because there you have become very efficient. My whole effort here is to push you again and again out of the familiar into the unfamiliar, because wherever you have become efficient you have become mechanical. Machines are efficient. So when you become efficient, know well that now you have to move. Now this efficiency is no longer of any value, you have to move. You have learned it, now move and learn something else.If a person remains a learner each moment of his life, from birth to death, only then does enlightenment come, otherwise not.So never stop anywhere. Somebody asked Buddha, “What is enlightenment?” And he said, “Charaiveti, charaiveti” – go on walking, go on walking, never stop, become an eternal journey. Yes, you can stop for an overnight stay. You can rest under a tree, but don’t make your house there. Let eternal growth be your only house. There is no end to it – that is the meaning of the saying that God is infinite. There is no end to it. You go on arriving and arriving and arriving but you never really arrive. You go on coming closer and closer and closer but you can never say that you have arrived – reality is so infinite, how can you claim it in your fist?“Now I feel totally helpless…” Good. Blessed are you. To be totally helpless is to be in the hands of God. If you still feel that a little help is possible through your own effort, then God will not be available.There is a beautiful story:Krishna was taking his lunch, he had just started, he had taken a bite, he was chewing. Suddenly he jumped up and ran toward the door.Rukmani, his wife, said, “What are you doing, my Lord? Where are you going? What is the hurry? This is so sudden!”Then Krishna stopped at the door, waited for one moment, then came back, looking very sad, sat down again and continued eating.Rukmani was even more puzzled. She said, “Now you have puzzled me even more. Why did you jump up so suddenly to go to the door, and why did you come back? You jumped up as if the house was on fire. I didn’t see anything happening anywhere. And why have you come back if there was something happening?”Krishna said, “There was something. One of my devotees is walking on the earth in a certain city. And he was singing my song, playing on his veena, dancing in the street, but people started throwing stones at him and blood was flowing from his forehead. He was not reacting at all, he was absolutely silent, absolutely centered, absolutely helpless. I was needed; I was needed to help him immediately.”And Rukmini said, “Then why have you come back from the door if you are needed so urgently?”Krishna said, “There is no need. The moment I reached the door he took up a stone in his hand. Now he is helping himself. My help is not needed.”This is a beautiful parable. God helps you only when you are really totally helpless, absolutely helpless. In your absolute helplessness ego is completely gone. What is helplessness? Egolessness. Egolessness is helplessness. You cannot do anything. How can you be when you cannot do anything? The ego functions through the doer. If you can do a little bit still then the helplessness is not total. And God only comes to you when you are totally lost. When you are really helpless, help comes.Become totally helpless. I don’t think that you are totally helpless. You are feeling helpless but not totally. Go a little deeper into it. And a moment will come, the moment of transformation will come, when you disappear and the whole takes everything in its hands.“I am feeling too vulnerable, possessed by you and this spontaneous union. Where is the center of this cyclone?” Nowhere. The cyclone is the center. Lose yourself in this cyclone. Losing yourself in this cyclone you will find the center. But the center is not separate from the cyclone. God is not separate from the world. The soul is not separate from the body, and the mind is not separate from matter; the outer is not separate from the inner, the lower is not separate from the higher – it is one reality, one solid reality. Lose yourself in it and you will find that the cyclone is the center. The moment you have found that the cyclone is the center, you have found a great truth. You have arrived at the door where you can enter the innermost shrine of life, love, meditation, existence.The second question:Osho,What is in my womb – a ghost, or a goat, or God?A difficult question because I am not a womb-reader. You can wait a little. Time will show who is in your womb.An old man had a set of monkey glands installed in his system and shortly thereafter was married. In due course his wife was in the maternity room while he waited outside the door. When the doctor opened the door the husband besieged him.“What is it,” he begged, “a boy or a girl?”“Don’t be so impatient,” said the doctor. “Wait till it comes down off the chandelier and I’ll tell you.”If you have monkey glands installed in you then a monkey is born. So the doctor said, “Don’t be so impatient. Wait till it comes down off the chandelier and I will tell you.”Wait a little; I don’t know how you have managed, what kind of soul you have called into your womb. But a few inferences can be made. They are just inferences, guesswork.You must have heard the proverb: Hope for the best and expect the worst. So I hope it is a God and I expect it is a ghost. But these are extremes, and extremes generally don’t happen; what happens usually is in the middle, so the greater possibility is that it is a goat. A goat is just midway between a God and a ghost, a cross between a God and a ghost. But, in a way, a goat is better than either because if a God is born, I will not find a new sannyasin because God need not be a sannyasin. And if a ghost is born, it will be difficult to persuade him, he is already in the service of the Devil.But if a goat is born, it will be a beautiful sannyasin: Swami Goatananda Paramahansa.Wait!The third question:Osho,If Krishnamurti is enlightened he must see what you are saying himself, right? So why doesn't he just come here and find himself a chair and a case of cold sodas and lean back and forget all that?He sees what I am saying and I see what he is saying, but neither will he come here nor will I go there. I am doing my thing, he is doing his thing.Remember, even after enlightenment the uniqueness of the individual remains intact. That uniqueness is so deep that it never leaves you. When a man becomes enlightened his uniqueness blooms rather than disappears. It comes to bloom. A buddha becomes enlightened in his own way. The enlightenment is the same, the experience of the light is the same, the experience of truth is the same, but the experiencer has an individuality, a unique individuality.For example, during the night, on a full-moon night, the moon is one – but it will be reflected by the sea in one way, it will be reflected by the river in a different way, it will be reflected by a cool, placid pool in a different way. The moon is one but the sea will reflect it in its way – great waves will be arising. The river will reflect it in its own way – small ripples, small waves will arise. A placid pool, a silent pool, will reflect it in its own way – no ripples will arise. The moon is still the same, the reflections are also not different, but the medium of reflection is different.So what I am saying, Krishnamurti sees; what he is saying, I see. But I will go on doing my work and he will go on doing his work. There is no other possibility. When Buddha became enlightened he functioned in his own way. When Meera became enlightened she functioned in her own way. Buddha could not dance and Meera danced so beautifully. Buddha sat silently under the bodhi tree, there was not even a slight movement, he was almost like a statue.When the first statues were created of Buddha, it cannot be just accidental, he looked so statuelike. In fact, in Arabic – Urdu – the word for statue is budh and the word itself comes from buddha. Those were the first statues ever created of any man. It is difficult to create a statue of Meera; she is such a movement, a dance. Buddha’s statue is very simple and the marble reflects him perfectly well. Even when he was alive, sitting under the bodhi tree, he was almost a marble statue; there was no movement, no wavering. That is beautiful, it has its own beauty, it has its own variety. Meera is also beautiful.Mahavira became naked when he became enlightened; Buddha continued to use his clothes. Mahavira’s nakedness is beautiful – such innocence. Krishna is totally different; Christ is totally different. And then there is this man, Lao Tzu. No two enlightened persons have ever been the same, cannot be. Unenlightened people are not even the same, how can enlightened people be the same? Even unenlightened people, imitating each other, cannot completely and utterly destroy their individuality. They react in their own ways even though they try to efface themselves.Society wants you to efface your individuality completely; society does not like individuals. It likes you to become a member of the society, not an individual. It does not want you to become independent, it wants you to be a dependent link, and it wants you to live the way others are living. The moment you assert your individuality, society comes in and puts you back into your place; it forces you to be just like others. There is a danger when you assert your individuality because you are becoming chaotic, you are becoming anarchic. No, you have to follow the order.Even unenlightened people, forced by society and the state and the church, still retain their individuality. There is really no way to drop your individuality utterly. Something unique is there – what can you do? You can hide behind the same clothes, you can hide behind the same masks, you can hide behind the same words, same philosophies, same slogans, same flags; but still, all this is just skin deep. Scratch a person and you will find an individual soul, unique. Never before has there been such a person, never will there be again.Two hipsters were visiting a small Alaska town when they heard some rumbling in the distance.“Hey, Cat,” one hipster said to a native. “What’s that crazy noise?”“That noise means an avalanche is starting,” said one of the locals. “In the past we’ve had to leave here for safety’s sake.”“Man,” said the second hipster, “I don’t dig this. Let’s beat it.”“You can go if you want to,” screamed hipster number one, “but I’m staying. I’ve got a feeling this town is really going to move tonight!”If you watch people, you will find that in absolutely alike situations, or even in the same situation, they react differently, they respond differently.So what can you say about two enlightened persons? They are each like peaks, peaks of the Himalayas, absolutely alone, unique. Never compare two enlightened persons. If you understand me, never compare any two people; but at least never compare two enlightened ones, otherwise whatsoever you think will be wrong.It is very natural. If you are close to me, you fall in love with me, and naturally you start thinking that this is the only way to be enlightened. Other enlightened people then start looking somehow wrong because you have a fixed idea of enlightenment. How can they be enlightened? If you are with Krishnamurti, the same will happen there – you will fall in love with him and you will start thinking that this is the only way a person can be enlightened.Beware of this stupidity. There are as many possibilities for enlightened people as there are for unenlightened people. Every person will be unique when he becomes enlightened. He will be a flower, new, incomparable. And always remember that God loves variety. That’s why there is so much variety – there are millions of forms and never any repetition.Krishnamurti is beautiful, so is Buddha, so is George Gurdjieff, so is Raman, and so is Ramakrishna. They are all beautiful. If you fall in love with one enlightened person, don’t let that love make you blind. It you are alert, you will go on loving me, but that will not make you blind. You will be able to understand that there are other possibilities too. Not all the possibilities are exhausted by me, cannot be exhausted by me. Nobody can exhaust all the possibilities.It is beautiful that nobody can exhaust all the possibilities, otherwise Buddha or Lao Tzu or Mahavira or Mohammed would have exhausted all the possibilities. Then what would we be doing here?The fourth question:Osho,What is the difference between being special and being unique?Being unique is everybody’s nature; being special is relative. When you start feeling that you are special you are comparing yourself with somebody. Special is in comparison to somebody; unique, there is no comparison. Unique means you are alone as you are – how can you be compared? You cannot compare a car with an elephant. They are so different, how can you compare them? Each individual is so different from any other individual that there is no possibility of comparison.Uniqueness is everybody’s nature, but specialness is comparative. Uniqueness is religious, specialness is political. When you claim that you are special you are claiming that you are higher, superior to others; that others are lower, inferior to you. You bring the other in when you use the word special and this is violent. To compare yourself with somebody in any way is violent because he is he and you are you, and you are both so different. The very idea of comparing is stupid.Through comparison misery arises: either you feel you are inferior, then there is misery, or you start feeling you are superior, then too there is misery. If you feel superior, ego arises – and ego hurts. If you feel inferior, ego is wounded – and those wounds hurt. You may feel superior to one person but what about others? You may one day or other come across somebody to whom you feel inferior. With one person you may feel intelligent, with another you may look like a pygmy. With one you may feel beautiful, with another you may start feeling ugly.When you carry the idea of comparison you are carrying seeds of illness which will create misery and nothing else. Comparison creates hell. Heaven is an inner space where you live an uncompared life. You simply live yourself; it is your life, you are you. Just think of the beauty of it, the tremendous purity of it. You are simply you. Then you are beautiful. Are you ugly? Are you intelligent, or unintelligent? If you are simply you, and there is no comparison, how can you say you are this or that? Then both disappear. There arises neti-neti, neither this nor that. Then you are simply there.Just think: the whole world disappears and you alone are left. God takes away the whole world and only you are left, nobody else. Then what will you be – strong, weak, intelligent, unintelligent, beautiful, ugly? Then who will you be? All comparisons will disappear, you will simply be yourself. That is the way to be.Right now, be that! Don’t create unnecessary misery for yourself and for others. Start living your unique life.Uniqueness is everybody’s nature. With the feeling of being special ambition enters, comparison enters, jealousy enters, conflict enters. You become political. Then you start pulling others down because you have to be superior. Then you start fighting, struggling, and then you start using all sorts of means. You have to prove and perform and your whole life is wasted in this nonsense.Three ambitious politicians were walking along the beach, planning a strategic move to defeat a powerful rival, when they came upon Mulla Nasruddin looking for crabs. As each crab was caught, the Mulla put it into a wicker basket.Looking into the container, one of the politicians warned Nasruddin, “Mulla, you should cover your basket. If you are not careful, the crabs will climb out and run away.”“Ah, I don’t need any cover,” explained Nasruddin. “These crabs are born politicians and if one crab tries to climb up, the others will pull him down.”This is what is happening in life. You are pulling others down, others are pulling you down, and your whole life is wasted in this unnecessary struggle. Just be yourself and you are unique; that uniqueness is nonviolent.Never try to be special. The very idea of being special comes from feeling inferior. Having the very idea of being superior to somebody or inferior to somebody, you have lost contact with yourself, with your uniqueness. In that very idea you become your own enemy. Now your life will be in trouble, you will create more and more misery for yourself and for others; you will create ripples of misery all around you.A man who simply relaxes into his uniqueness is a man who creates ripples of bliss around him. He lives in bliss and he creates pulsations of bliss for others. If you are around such a person you will suddenly be showered with great peace and love and silence and happiness because he is happy. The moment you accept your uniqueness, your individuality, how can you be unhappy?Just think of it in this way: God has never created anybody else like you and he will never create anybody like you again. God has created only one you – only one you, mind – and he is never going to repeat you again. This is your uniqueness. Feel grateful, feel thankful. Once you start comparing, you feel ungrateful. Why has he created somebody more beautiful than you, or somebody more intelligent than you? You are bringing misery upon yourself. He has created only you; he has conferred uniqueness on you. It is a gift. Uniqueness is a gift of God; specialty is your own effort. Your effort is not going to be of much use: your doing always proves your undoing.Ambitious persons become cruel and hard; ambitious persons become rock-like, they lose their softness, they become closed. Their heart is no longer like a flower. How can you be like a flower when you have to fight and struggle? It is a very difficult world then – cut-throat competition everywhere. Everybody is at your neck and you are at everybody’s neck; everybody is trying to destroy you and you are trying to destroy everybody. Where will you find a creative break? Where will you find a breakthrough? Where will you enjoy, and how?No, all your moments of so-called joy will be when you are able to crush somebody, when you are able to destroy somebody. But how can destruction bring joy? It is not the law of life.A grocer was delivering some groceries in his wagon one morning when he ran down and badly injured an old lady. The old lady sued him and collected big damages. A few weeks later he ran down an old gentleman. The old gentleman also sued and collected big damages, which almost ruined him.One Sunday the grocer was sitting at home when his son came running through the door. “Father! Father!” the little boy cried. “Mother’s been run over by a four-hundred-and-eighty-horsepower limousine.”The grocer’s eyes filled with tears and, in a voice trembling with genuine emotion, he cried, “Thank the Lord, the luck’s changed at last.”His wife is dying on the road but he says, “Thank the Lord, the luck’s changed at last.” Now he can sue somebody and get all the money back.An ambitious mind, a greedy mind, a jealous mind, becomes hard, stonelike. And remember, if you are stonelike you will hurt others, but that is only secondary – you will be continuously hurting yourself. Only sometimes will your stone hurt others, but your stoniness will hurt you continuously, twenty-four hours, day in, day out, year in, year out. The stone will be there in your heart, pinching, hurting, wounding.One is happy only when one is flowerlike – delicate, soft, a lotus: To remain a lotus one has to drop all comparisons, all jealousies – and they are stupid anyway, meaningless.The fifth question:Osho,I have been here two years doing nothing to improve myself, just reading, eating, sleeping, drifting. Now I feel as empty and lost as the day I came. Is there any point in staying longer?This is from Sambuddha.The first thing, you have not been just reading, just eating, just sleeping, just drifting. If you had been doing that, you would have been enlightened by now. That is the ultimate relaxed state – just eating, just reading. No, you must have done a thousand and one other things too. While reading, you must have been thinking many, many things; while eating, you must have been thinking; even while sleeping you must have been dreaming.One thing: if you can really do this, then nothing else is needed – that is all. The very ultimate in sadhana is just to do the thing that you are doing in that moment, with no other thought interfering. Eating, you are simply eating. Not a single thought moves in your mind. Eating, you are just an eater; walking, you are just a walker; listening, you are just listening.But no, when you are listening you are not just listening, you are interpreting, criticizing, appreciating, saying yes, saying no, agreeing, disagreeing. You are not listening, you are doing something else. You are hearing, certainly, but you are not listening.A small boy was brought to a psychoanalyst. The mother who had brought the boy talked for a long time and the psychoanalyst was getting bored. Then, when he got the chance, he talked about many things. The boy was getting very bored, and the psychoanalyst, seeing that the boy was not listening to what he was saying, was somewhere else, said, “Have you some difficulty in hearing me?”The kid said, “No, I have no difficulty in hearing but I have a lot of difficulty in listening.”Your hearing is perfect. If your ears are healthy, you hear perfectly well – but hearing is not listening. Listening has a depth to it; listening means that the mind is quiet, still, no thought waves in it. Otherwise you go on interpreting, and you will certainly interpret in your own way.An old lady, who was walking her dog, decided to go into the local supermarket which didn’t allow dogs. She tied the animal to a fire hydrant. No sooner was the dog tied up than every dog in the neighborhood that was loose started sniffing the defenseless animal. The cop on the corner, observing what was happening, called to the old woman and told her that she couldn’t leave her dog there alone.She asked him why and he replied, “Lady, your dog is in heat.”She answered, “Eat, she’ll eat anything.”He countered, “The dog should be bred.”The old lady replied, “She’ll eat bread, cake; anything you give her, she’ll eat.”In complete frustration he said, “That dog should be laid!”The old woman stared directly into his eyes and answered. “So lay her. I always wanted a police dog.”How you listen depends on you. Your mind is continuously creating your own interpretations. No, it is not possible that you have been just reading, eating, sleeping, drifting. If you could do that, then nothing else would be needed.The second thing: “I have been here two years doing nothing to improve myself.” That’s what I told Sambuddha – to do nothing to improve. But he must have been watching out of the corner of his eye again and again to see whether any improvement is happening or not. When I said to you, “Don’t do anything to improve yourself,” you agreed – just to improve yourself. You agreed and yet you don’t agree. You said, “Okay, if that is the way to improve, I am ready.”But you missed the point! You missed absolutely. You said, “Okay, if that is the only possibility for improvement.” Deep in your unconscious, that’s how the logic went: “Osho says drop all ideas of improvement, so I will.” And then you continuously waited for something to happen. One month passed, two months passed, one year passed, now two years have passed, and improvement has not happened.It cannot happen because you are still looking for it. It can happen only when the whole idea has become simply foolish, when you have dropped it. If the idea of improvement continues, no transformation is possible because the very idea comes from the ego. The ego wants to improve.Remember the difference between improvement and transformation. I am here to help you to be transformed, transmuted. You are here to improve yourself – that’s where our languages are different. You are here to add some more experiences to your life, to become a little more loving, a little more meditative. You are here to decorate yourself a little more, to succeed in life, to have more pleasures. You are here to improve, you are not here to die and be reborn.My whole effort here is to destroy you utterly so that you can be created in a totally new way. I would like to create a discontinuity in your life, but you want the same continuity. Sambuddha wants Sambuddha to improve, he wants some more decorations, some more gold medals – but the original center remains the same. That’s the problem, and that’s why transformation cannot happen.Even if you improve, nothing will happen.I have heard…An old woman went to a theater. Suddenly her ears started buzzing. She was an old woman and something went wrong with her ears so she stopped hearing anything. She thought that it must be because she was sitting so far away from the stage that she could not hear.So she changed her seat and went to the front, but there also she could not hear anything.Naturally she thought, “What is the matter? The acoustics of this hall are not good. Maybe the people in the balcony can hear.” She looked up and the people were looking very interested so she went to the balcony. Again she could not hear.The manager, seeing that she had changed her seat again and again, came to her and asked her what the matter was. She said, “Something is wrong. The acoustics of this theater are not good, because wherever I go I cannot hear.”And the manager said, “Lady, maybe something is wrong with your ears.”Now if something is wrong with the ears, you can change your place but nothing will happen, no improvement will happen. You will have to change something inside you. If the ego is there, you can improve; if you are poor, you can become rich, if you are immoral, you can become moral, if you are a sinner, you can become a saint. You can move from the ground floor to the balcony, but nothing will happen because the ego is there. You will remain in the same suffering. Maybe the labels change, the names may change, but the suffering remains the same.My effort is to help you to drop the ego. Now the greatest difficulty for the ego is to drop this plan to improve. The ego exists by planning: how to improve, how to become more and more, how to become great, how to become a hero, how to become a buddha. That’s how the ego exists – by projecting.I told Sambuddha to drop all projections – just to be. Now, after two years, he says: “I have been here two years doing nothing to improve myself…” No, you were doing nothing only to improve yourself. That’s what you were doing, and that’s why you have failed and you will fail continuously.Look into the whole phenomenon, go deep into your own mind and see what you have been doing. On the surface you were not doing anything, but you were waiting for the transformation to happen. What I am saying is: forget about the future and live the now. Now is the only time and here the only space. Live now and here.There is no improvement, and forget about all transformation. Then one day it happens – but only when you have completely forgotten it, only then. If you remember it, you function as a barrier.“I have been here two years doing nothing…” Doing nothing is not so easy. Doing nothing means allowing the whole to do things – allowing Tao to happen. Doing nothing is the greatest thing in the world. If a man can do nothing, then everything happens, then all is possible, because to do nothing means one becomes nothing, nobody, emptiness. And out of that emptiness arises all that is, all that is possible, all that is potential. Out of emptiness the lotus of being opens.“Now I feel as empty and lost as the day I came.” You have been changing seats but, because you are deaf, you can go to the balcony, you can go to the front row, you can go to the back and nothing will change. Yes, in two years or two hundred years or two hundred lives, nothing will change. Change comes only when you are no longer interested in change, when you are no longer interested in any improvement, when you are in total acceptance, when suchness happens.But one thing has happened. When you came two years ago I knew well that you were not aware of your emptiness. Now you are aware of it. That is something that has happened. Now you are more aware of your emptiness, more aware of your misery, more aware that you are not going anywhere, that nothing is happening. This is good. This awareness will become more and more penetrating, will become more and more crystal clear; and one day this awareness will come to a point, to a conclusion, where you will see that nothing ever happens.Right now you think nothing is happening to you: this is the beginning. One day you will come to understand that nothing ever happens. Nothing has ever happened – not only to you, but to anybody. Nothing has ever happened. How can anything happen? All that is, is. What else can be? And in that moment all happens.Buddha searched for enlightenment for six years. Remember, you have been here only two years. For six years he searched hard and he did all sorts of things; whatsoever he was told to do he did: fasted, meditated, did yoga, did everything he was told to do, did everything that he had heard, did everything that was traditionally available. He tried it all. He went to many masters, and he was such a great seeker that each master to whom he went became interested in him. His search was so honest, he was so earnest, his thirst was so authentic, that even though he had not arrived at the goal, the masters all wanted him to succeed them, to be their successor.Wherever he went every master told him, “Be here. Don’t leave me. You will be my successor.” But he said, “What am I going to do as your successor? I have not attained yet. I don’t know exactly what life is. I am not interested in being a successor or becoming a great master, I am interested in knowing. I am not even a disciple yet so how can I be a master?” And he left.After six years of hard struggle, of strenuous, arduous struggle, one day he came to understand that nothing is possible, nothing ever happens, nothing has ever happened to anybody, that he had been searching in vain, the whole search was futile. This was not a frustration, remember, this was not a hopelessness, it was a great understanding. A great light came to him – that nothing ever happens, whatsoever is, is. What is, is; and what ain’t, ain’t.So he sat under the bodhi tree and forgot all about his struggles – and that very night he became enlightened. The moment he dropped all struggle and became non-tense, anxiety disappeared. There was nowhere to go so he was there in that moment, total, no desire left, no nirvana, no moksha, no enlightenment. Nothing ever happens; whatsoever is, is.He rested. After six years he slept without a dream because dreams come only because you desire. Dreams are reflections of your desires. No dreams. He slept the whole night. He slept for the first time – it was almost samadhi. In the morning when he opened his eyes there was no effort even to open his eyes. Listen well: there was no effort; the sleep was complete so the eyes opened. That’s how the Buddhist scriptures say it: he did not open his eyes, because he was no longer there. With sleep complete, the eyes opened. The doer was gone, utterly gone. There was no one to open the eyes, it was a natural phenomenon – just as a bud opens in the morning because it is ready to open, the energy is ready to open. The tree does not try to open it. Buddha found his eyes opening and he looked at the sky and the last star was disappearing. And with that last star disappearing he disappeared utterly, forever.And he laughed. It was so simple. He was making it difficult by his doing, by his effort.If you really leave your efforts, nobody is barring the path – you can become enlightened this very moment. As far as I am concerned you are already enlightened, it is only your delusion that you are not enlightened. The day I became enlightened all of existence became enlightened for me. From that day, I have never come across a person who is not enlightened. You may think you are not but that is your thinking, it is not true, it is not the truth. I know you are enlightened, that’s why I give you such a beautiful name – Sambuddha. It means one who is enlightened. For me, you are enlightened, Sambuddha; for you, you are not enlightened. So drop the idea of your being and your ego; it is already the case.You say: “I feel as empty and lost as the day I came.” No, you are more aware of your hopelessness. The day you came you were full of desire; the day you came you were full of hope. I remember very well, you may have forgotten. You came to me only because of hope, otherwise why should you come? What for? You came to me in the hope that you would attain. You were full of hope. You were doing many things – meditations, groups – and you were enjoying the trip. And then I said, “Don’t do anything.” And you were very happy thinking that now you must have attained a very high state; that’s why I was saying, “Don’t do anything.” And then you became depressed, then you became desperate; I have been watching this for two years. Now you are feeling very, very hopeless.But things have changed. This hopelessness is good. That hope was illusory; this hopelessness is on the right track. If you really understand that nothing ever happens, that nothing can ever happen in the nature of things, that all is already there, there is no improvement possible… How can you improve upon God? How can you improve upon the whole? The perfect is perfect, how can you make it more perfect? There is no way.When this understanding goes a little deeper… The moment is coming. If you don’t escape, the moment is coming. But remember, don’t start hoping because I say that the moment is coming. Otherwise again you will settle and you will start looking out of the corner of your eye to see if the moment is coming. The moment can come only when you stop all this nonsense that you have to become something, to do something, to be something.The situation is different. You are less hopeful. That’s why you are saying: “Is there any point in staying longer?” There was never any point. In the very beginning there was no point in staying here. But there is no point in going anywhere else either; in fact, there is no point! So if you want to go, you can go but there is no point, remember. If you want to stay, stay, but remember, there is no point. And you will have to be somewhere, so why not here?!Just relax because there is no point. You can relax.Mind is very cunning, very clever, and because of its cunningness it misses much.In a discussion between Mulla Nasruddin and his friend Sheik Abdulla, the Sheik maintained that no one could pray without having his mind wander. However, the Mulla positively stated that his mind never wandered while he was praying.“If you come to me next Saturday and tell me honestly that your mind did not wander once from your prayers on Friday,” said the Sheik, “I will give you one of the best horses from my stables.”On the following Saturday the Mulla presented himself to get the horse.“Are you sure, Nasruddin, that your mind didn’t wander once during the prayers?” asked the Sheik.“Well, maybe it did, once, at the end of the last prayer,” was Mulla Nasruddin’s reply, “when I wondered whether you would give me a saddle too!”Now, when you are hoping for the horse the idea may come into the mind, “I wondered whether you would give me a saddle too.”When you are waiting for something, ideas cannot stop. If you are not waiting for anything, ideas can stop. I repeat it again: there is no point, life is pointless, purposeless. Existence is not going anywhere; it has no destiny, no purpose. It just is. Simply, purely, it is. There is no why. It is because it cannot be, it cannot not be.Relax, and start enjoying. Rather than planning and thinking, start enjoying. Read, enjoy: eat, enjoy; listen enjoy; love, enjoy. These are small things but out of these small things arises the great understanding. The ego always says these are small things, seek the big, seek the huge, seek the great, seek God, seek buddhahood. I say to you, there are no great things, only small things. Love well, love deeply; sing well, sing deeply; dance well, dance deeply. Sleep well, go for a morning walk, do small things – cleaning, taking a bath, working in the ashram. Enjoy small things. There is no other point and there is nowhere to go.Drop hopes, and drop desires, and just be. Suddenly you will find you have always been a buddha. It has never been otherwise. Buddhahood is our intrinsic nature.But listening to me, even listening to me, you listen with ideas, with a mind standing just around the corner. You have a fixed desire, you never leave it.A young suitor was being led through the voluminous pages of the old family album by his girl friend’s proud father. After seeing scores of members of the clan, the young man was finally shown the picture of a solid-looking old gentleman. “This,” said the father proudly, “is the founder of the family.”“What did he do?” asked the young man.“He founded the family,” the older man said again.“I mean, sir,” the suitor floundered, “what did he do to distinguish himself?”“He was the founder of the family,” the father rasped in exasperation.“I understand that, sir,” the suitor sighed. “I just wondered what the old gent did in the daytime.”If you have a certain fixed idea, it has to come sooner or later.Sambuddha has a fixed idea, a curiosity, a desire – a desire to become enlightened. So, I understand, it must have been hard for him to wait and wait and wait for two years with nothing happening. Nothing is going to happen ever.Drop waiting, start being. Waiting is a thought process, being is existential. Live, live as much as you can, as intensely as you can, as passionately as you can. And through that passionate love for life, through that flame of passion, of authentic living something burns down in you – the ego. And when the ego is burnt down, something happens. That happening has nothing to do with your effort. It comes. It is a happening.The sixth question:Osho,I am attached and addicted to sitting before you at discourse. Should anyone sit in what I call “my seat,” I have to use every ounce of restraint not to freak out. You are my everything, everything else can go but it seems this possessiveness remains. I am, it seems, without love or mercy when it comes to giving up “my seat.”The question is from Divya. I have been missing her for many days. She is not in her seat. And it has nothing to do with possessiveness. She should not be worried about it. In fact, she has found the right spot for her; hence it is difficult for her to leave that spot. It has nothing to do with “my seat,” it has nothing to do with “my.” When she sits in a particular place she is flowing. From that angle she receives me best.Everybody has to find his particular seat by and by. Those who are permanently here have to find their seats by and by. They will have a certain angle where they will be more capable of receiving me, a certain place where they will feel more relaxed.Divya has found her place, so she need not be worried about it. And nobody should disturb her, let Shiva note it. For a few days she has not been in her seat. Other people have been in her seat, and nobody has been flowing there. One day Sagar was sitting there and he was sitting like a thief. Guilty, ill at ease! When Divya sits there she sits like a queen. She creates a certain space around her.And I also enjoy her sitting there. So, Divya, no need to worry. Not seeing you there I have been missing you.And the last question:Osho,I have never heard religion talked about in such a delightful way. What are you doing?To me, religion is not religion but life; to me, religion is not religion but love; to me, religion is not a serious thing but is fun. To me, religion is more like laughter, more like dancing, more like singing. It is not a serious church thing.I am not interested in the afterlife, I am not interested in heaven and hell; I am not interested in virtue and vice – I am interested only in how to impart to you an understanding of living life intensely, delightfully, because God is delight.A talkative individual in a coffee house was demonstrating his ability to catalogue people as to their occupations. He had gone around the group with considerable success: a lawyer here, a salesman on the left, a banker in the corner, an editor by the window.Finally, the self-announced expert’s eyes fell upon the interesting face of Mulla Nasruddin, a little pale, slightly drawn, with a certain glassiness in the eyes. “Here,” he said, “is a religious man, a preacher.”A moment’s hush and then Mulla Nasruddin said softly, “You got me wrong, sir. I am no preacher. I just have stomach ulcers.”The preachers that you have known are really pathological people, ill people. They have lost their taste for life.I teach you the taste. I don’t teach you to be against life because, to me, life is the very shrine of God. I don’t teach you to go against the joys of life but to go into them as deeply as possible. I am affirmative; I am a yea-sayer. I am not negative. I don’t want to deny anything to anybody. Whatsoever God has given must be accepted in deep gratitude and lived. To me God and life are synonymous. That’s why whatsoever I am saying to you has a different quality to it – the taste of Tao, the taste of life and love, the taste of delight.“When I am sick,” one day Mulla Nasruddin was saying to me, expounding his views on the subject of illness, “I go to see the doctor. For, after all, doctors have to live. He writes me out a prescription, which I take to the pharmacists. I pay the druggist willingly, for, after all, a pharmacist, too, must live. Then I go home and pour the medicine down the drain. For, after all, I have to live.”So even if you go to a preacher, go to a church, remember that you have to live. Don’t forget it. Even if you accept their medicine out of politeness, pour it down the drain. They have to live so they have to preach. You have to live – so never listen to their preaching.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Tzu-hsia asked the Master:“What sort of man is Yen Hui?”“For kindness he is a better man than I am.”“What about Tzu-kung?”“For eloquence he is a better man than I am.”“Tzu-lu?”“For courage he is a better man than I am.”“Tzu-chang?”“For dignity he is a better man than I am.”Tzu-hsia rose from his mat and asked:“Then why do these four serve you?”“Sit down, I will tell you. Yen Hui can be kind but cannot check the impulse when it will do no good. Tzu-kung can be eloquent but cannot hold his tongue. Tzu-lu can be brave but cannot be cautious. Tzu-chang can be dignified but cannot unbend in company. Even if I could have the virtues of the four men all together I should be unwilling to exchange them for my own. This is why they serve me without misgivings.”The greatest enemy of religion is not materialism but morality. Why? Because morality tries to impose spirituality. It is a conditioning, and religion can flower only from within, it cannot be imposed from without. Hence morality creates an illusion of false religion.Morality is a pretender, morality is a pseudo-religion. It gives you respectability, but it does not give you understanding. It gives you a great ego trip, but it cannot give you humility. It makes you feel superior, but it doesn’t help inner growth. And the man who feels superior cannot grow. He is stuck with the ego.Morality is a sort of decoration of the ego. Yes, through morality you can cultivate great virtues, but you will never be virtuous. Through morality you can become very talented in certain areas, but those talents will remain unconscious. Morality cannot bring awareness because morality is not based on enlightenment.The essential has to come from the inner, the essential has to grow like a tree, the essential is alive. The non-essential is imposed from the outside.Before we enter this beautiful parable, four things have to be very clearly understood. First, there are two kinds of unity in life. One unity is mechanical – for example, a car. A car has a certain unity, a functional unity, but it is assembled, it comes off an assembly line. You cannot assemble a tree, you cannot assemble a baby. They also have a sort of unity – but it is totally different. Their unity is organic. A car is mechanical, a baby is organic. A machine is mechanical, a tree is organic. You cannot put a tree together; it grows. It grows out of its own inner center. At the most you can help – or hinder – but you cannot put a tree together.You can put a car together, you can assemble a car; hence a car has no soul, no self, no center. It is a superficial unity. And a car cannot grow; it cannot give birth to new baby cars.The tree grows and can give birth to millions of trees. And the tree has a center; it is run by its innermost center. When fall comes and the old leaves drop, who brings the new leaves? Where do they come from? They evolve from the innermost core of the tree.If a mechanical part of the car is missing you will have to replace it. The car cannot evolve itself. It depends on you; it has no soul, it has no inner discipline of its own. If you cut off a branch of a tree another branch is supplied by the center, but if you destroy a machine nothing will come from the center – there is none, there is no center.Morality is mechanical, religion is organic. This is the first basic thing to be understood. Morality is put together from the outside; religion grows from the innermost core of your being. Religion comes out of meditation; morality comes out of conditioning. Morality is enforced by others, religion you have to seek and search for yourself. Morality is a social device; religion is an adventure, an individual adventure. Morality is dominated by the politician and the priest, religion is a rebellion. Very rarely is a person religious – and whenever there is a religious person there is a great revolution around him.Moral people are ordinary people, as ordinary as the immoral – sometimes even more ordinary than the immoral. The immoral may sometimes have courage, but the moral have no courage. The immoral may sometimes have intelligence, but the moral have no intelligence. The immoral may sometimes be original but the moral is always repetitive.Morality is the greatest enemy of religion because it is a pseudo-coin. It pretends, and it can deceive people. It has deceived down through the ages; millions and millions of people are and have been deceived by morality. They think that when they have morality they have religion.The second thing: morality is always relative. You can have more intelligence than somebody else, or somebody else can have more virtue than you. Somebody can be more courageous than you or is more cowardly than you. Somebody can be more sharing, more loving, or you can be more loving than somebody else. Morality is comparative.Nobody can have more religion than you or less religion than you – religion is non-comparative, when religion is there, it is simply there. Can you say Buddha had more religion than Jesus? Can you say Mahavira had more religion than Mohammed? Can you say Lao Tzu had more religion than Krishna? It would be absurd; the very statement would be absurd because religion is not quantity, it is a quality of being. You cannot have more or less. There are no degrees. You can be more honest than somebody else; there are possibilities. You can be more of a thief than somebody else; there are possibilities. But how can you be more religious than somebody else or less religious? Religion means awakening. Religion means you have come home. How can you be less at home or more at home than somebody else?When a man has become aware, his awareness is always total and complete, utterly complete. It does not come in parts, it comes as a whole – hence it is holy. Religion comes as a whole; morality comes in all shapes and sizes. You can have a family size or a medium size morality, like toothpaste. Morality comes in all shapes and sizes, religion is just complete. Either it is or it is not.Sometimes people come to me and they ask, “Who was more enlightened – Buddha or Mahavira?” The question is absurd. Who was more enlightened? Enlightenment means that you have gone beyond relativity; so more and less cannot exist now. Who is more enlightened? Enlightenment means that you have disappeared, and all relative concepts have disappeared. You are simply there – a pure isness. Whenever anybody becomes a pure isness, a pure existence, a primordial innocence, there is no comparison. To go beyond comparison is to become enlightened, so you cannot ask the question, “Who is more enlightened?” The very question is meaningless.Religion either is or is not. This is the second thing to be remembered.The third thing: when religion comes, you are naturally moral but vice versa is not the case – you may be moral but you may not be religious. When you are religious you are naturally moral; morality comes like a shadow.A disciple came to Lieh Tzu and asked, “What should I do, master, to become enlightened?”And Lieh Tzu said, “Stand in the sun, walk, and watch your shadow.”The man went out, stood in the sun, walked and watched his shadow, came back, bowed down, thanked the master and said, “You have shown me the way.”The other disciples were very puzzled. What had transpired between the master and this new man? They asked Lieh Tzu and he laughed. He said, “It is so simple. I told him to go into the sun and walk and watch his shadow. And he understood the point. If the body walks, the shadow follows. The shadow cannot walk on its own. And even if you can manage for the shadow to walk on its own, the body will not follow, there is no necessity.”Morality is like the shadow, religion is the real figure. When religion is there, morality comes on its own – it has to come, there is no other possibility. But if morality is there, there is no necessity for religion to be there. You can become a moral person without becoming religious at all. You can have good qualities. You can be honest, sincere, true, nonviolent, but that doesn’t make you religious. If you are religious all moral qualities simply follow you.When you are moral you have to continuously arrange things because those qualities have to be maintained, otherwise they will disappear. A moral man has to manage his honesty continuously because every moment there is the fear that he may function dishonestly. Dishonesty has not disappeared; it has been repressed. It is there, it is waiting in the basement of his being for its opportunity, and once the opportunity is there it will assert itself with vengeance. It is there and the moral person knows it well. He may try to be loving, but he knows that hatred is there boiling within him. He may be smiling, but he knows that his eyes are full of tears. He may not be showing his anger but he knows that his heart is burning, and he wants to kill. He may be praying but he really wants to curse. He knows it. There is no way not to know it.You can deceive others, but how can you deceive yourself? Even if you try to deceive yourself, reality will assert itself again and again and you will have to encounter it again and again. You know that you can pretend that you are a very good man, but deep down you know how bad you are. That hangs like a stone around your neck, like a rock, and keeps you pulled down.The moral person is dual: he is something on the outside and just the contrary on the inside. There is a continuous struggle in his being. He is split. The moral person is schizophrenic. The whole earth has become schizophrenic because of moral teachings. Teach a person to be moral and sooner or later you will send him to the psychiatrist’s couch. You are creating madness in him. The person is feeling angry and you say, “Don’t be angry, anger is bad – because Moses said so, or Mohammed said so, or Mahavira said so. Anger is bad. Don’t be angry.” Anger is coming up naturally and you teach him – because the stakes are great – if he becomes angry he will lose respect. He can be respected only if he is not angry; he has to pretend in order to get respectability.Look at people. They have lost their original faces. They are carrying masks, hiding behind masks. You can never be certain who is hiding behind the masks. You love a person but by and by you find it is not the same person you fell in love with. Haven’t you noticed it again and again? When you fall in love with a person, after a few months – or even after a few days, if you are a good observer – you will find that the person is somebody else. This woman is not the same woman; this man is not the same man that you fell in love with. You fell in love with the mask and now, by and by, the reality becomes clear. When you live with a person he cannot wear the mask for twenty-four hours. It is heavy and he wants to rest. And sometimes he is on holiday: even saints have their holidays.I have heard…In a circus there was a man whom the circus manager used to claim was the tallest man in the world: somewhere near nine feet tall.A press reporter went to interview him because he was the tallest man in the world. He naturally chose Sunday because Sunday morning was free for the tall man. He went to the circus and found the man lying down in front of his tent, sunbathing. He was very surprised to find that although the face was the same the body wasn’t nine feet tall at all.He asked, “What is the matter? You don’t look to me more than five foot five inches. But your face seems to be exactly the right one.”The man laughed. He said, “Yes, you are right. I am the same person – I am the tallest man in the world.”“But,” replied the reporter, “what is the matter? You don’t look more than five foot five inches.”And the man said, “This is my Sunday. This is my day off. If you want to see me nine feet tall then you have to see me on duty.”It is an arranged thing.When you see the leader delivering a lecture to the masses it is a different face. When you see the priest in the temple worshipping it is a different face. When you fall in love with a woman it is a different face. She is trying to be as good as possible, but that is not the reality, that is a managed reality. She cannot manage it forever; that’s why wives are not very beautiful; that’s why husbands are ugly. You know them. You have seen them on their day off.Morality creates a division – the inner, the real, becomes hidden and the outer, the false, becomes the manifested. This is one of the greatest calamities that has happened to humanity. Religion makes you one whole. It spreads the inner to the outer.Religion makes you healthy – then you taste the same always and you are never on a day off because you are always on a day off. It is your natural quality.The fourth thing to remember: a tree is alive, a machine only exists, it is not alive. A man of morality only exists, he is not really alive. You will not find vitality, you will not find radiance, you will not find a surging energy, you will not find a flood of life in him. He has to curb his being and continuously cut his energies. He has to live at his minimum, he is never aflame. He is always afraid. If he becomes too alive, then that which is repressed will start asserting itself. So he is always afraid. He keeps himself pulled down. He goes on holding onto himself. He never allows himself a total let-go because a total let-go will naturally mean that that which is repressed will suddenly erupt to the surface. It will be like a volcano erupting. So he has to keep himself at the minimum, he has to allow only his minimal energy – only then can he control himself. With his maximum energy flowing he will be out of control, he will be thrown off balanced.A man of morality just appears to be living – it is an appearance. Only a man of religion is alive. A man of religion lives at the optimum and the man of morality lives at the minimum. Naturally, living at the minimum you live like an impotent person. You cannot be angry so you cannot love either; there is always the fear that if you love too much sometimes anger may come. When one energy is allowed total expression, other energies also gain freedom. When you open your door for one thing, other things will also escape. A moral man cannot open the door; he must be always on guard. Just think of the misery of a man who is always on guard, who cannot relax. A man who is always on guard is a tense man.A moral man is never happy. At the most he may not be sad, but he is never happy, he is never ecstatic. For millions of years man has existed on the earth, but a single exception has never been seen – never has a moral man been found who is ecstatic. He cannot dance, he cannot sing, he cannot rejoice. Joy is freedom, and he does not know what freedom is. Ecstasy is going beyond oneself and that is possible only when you come from your optimum being, when you are aflame with a great passion to live, when you love totally, when you are flooded with godliness. Only then is ecstasy possible.Ecstasy is not yours; ecstasy is godliness dancing in you. You cannot allow godliness to dance in you because you have not allowed nature to dance in you. You have not even been natural, how can you be spiritual? Remember, spirituality is a higher stage of being natural; spirituality is the ultimate flowering of being spontaneous.A moral person is never spontaneous. A moral person lives from the past. He has a character and he has to follow the character. He has a blueprint, he has a map, and he always looks at the map and functions through the map. He never functions in the present, he is a dead man; he carries his character around him. His response is never a real response, it is only a reaction. A man of religion is responsive, not reactive.A man of morality is predictable because he has a character. You can depend on him; you know that he will be honest tomorrow because he has always been honest. He will be honest even in circumstances where honesty is going to harm the other person. Where honesty is going to be destructive, even then he is going to be honest – you can depend on that. He has no freedom, he has no eyes to look into things, he does not respond to reality. He responds to principles. When you respond to principles you are simply reacting, you have a program in your mind, you are like a computer. You go according to the program – right or wrong is not the question.The circumstances of life change every moment but your principles are rigid, your principles remain the same. Naturally a man of morality never fits anywhere; he is a misfit. It is very difficult to live with a moral man because he is always a misfit. He does not look at reality, at what really is. He simply lives through his principles; principles are more important than reality.A religious man has no principles. Let it sink deep into your heart. A religious man has no principles whatsoever, he has only awareness. He looks at reality and whatsoever is required he responds accordingly. His response is spontaneous, not dominated by the past – hence a religious person is not predictable. You don’t know what he will do. Not even he can say what he will do because it will depend on the circumstances. If there is a slight difference in the circumstances, the response will be different.A religious man has no character – it is difficult for you to get that. A religious man has no character because character comes from the past. A religious man has consciousness instead. Or, to say the same thing in other words, a religious man has no conscience. He has consciousness and the moral man has a conscience, but no consciousness. He functions through dead codes. He carries commandments, and he always looks into his commandments to find how to behave. He is always a misfit, he is never true anywhere. A moral man cannot be true because he has a character. How can you be true when you have a character? If the circumstances are different, what will you do? You cannot change so easily.A moral man is very rigid; he has no dynamism, he is not flowing and fluid. He has a fixed identity: things should be done only this way. He cannot do things in any other way, whatsoever the situation. The situation may have completely changed but the things have to be done in only one way.Once Zen Master Bokuju asked a disciple, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”And the disciple remained silent. He closed his eyes and fell into deep silence. Bokuju was happy and said, “Good, good, I agree.”But another master was sitting there while this happened. When the disciple had gone the other master said, “You agreed too early. I don’t see it. Call the disciple back.”The disciple was called back and the other master asked, “Tell me, what is the sound of one hand clapping?” And he again closed his eyes and remained silent.And the master laughed and he said, “Wrong, absolutely wrong.”And Bokuju said, “Yes, I agree with this other master.”The disciple was puzzled. He said, “But why? Just a moment before, I answered the same way – through my silence – and you said, ‘Right.’”Bokuju said, “That was true in that moment but now you are repeating it. Now this cannot be true in this moment – everything has changed. That was a response, this is a reaction. Now you have become fixed. When you responded for the first time there was no idea in what you were doing. It came naturally. It came just simply, innocently. Your mind was not manipulating. Now it is not a response of a meditative consciousness, it is the response of a manipulating mind. Now the mind knows the answer. Now the mind says, ‘Good. The same question again, so again the same answer.’”The master says that although the question may be the same the answer cannot be the same the next moment. It will depend on a thousand and one things.It used to happen to Buddha every day. Somebody would ask, “Is there a God?” and he would say, “No.” Somebody else would ask, “Is there a God?” and he would say, “Yes.” And somebody else would ask, “Is there a God?” and he would keep silent. And again somebody else would ask, “Is there a God?” and he would say, “Don’t ask nonsense questions.” In one day he gave a thousand and one answers to one question.His chief disciple, Ananda, became very worried. He said, “Master, the question is the same but you answer so differently, you answer so contradictorily, that we have become puzzled, confused.”Buddha said, “I was not answering you, so you need not listen. Somebody asked a question and the answer was given to him, not to you. The questioners were different, the time was different, the situation was different – how can the question be the same? One man who had asked, ‘Is there a God?’ was an atheist. He didn’t believe in God. I had to say yes to him, I had to shake him, shock him. I had to bring him out of his ideology, so I had to say yes. But it is not that God exists – it was a response to that man’s reality.“Then somebody asked, ‘Is there a God?’ and because he was a believer and believed in God I had to say no. I had to shake him and shock him, too, and bring him out of his sleep. If I had said yes to him, he would have gone home thinking that Buddha agreed with him, that Buddha also believed the same way that he believed. Then his ideology would have been strengthened and any ideology which is strengthened is a danger. All ideologies have to be shattered, utterly shattered, so the mind becomes completely free from ideologies.“I had to remain silent to another person because he was neither a theist nor an atheist. His question was very simple and innocent. He had no ideology so I did not need to shock him. He was a really silent man so I kept silent. And he understood me. He understood the idea that about questions such as one about God, one should be silent. They are meaningless questions; there is nothing to be said.”Whether you believe in God or you don’t believe in God makes no difference, you don’t change. Go and look: look into the lives of the person who believes in God and the person who does not believe in God. Their lives are the same. There is no difference at all. Somebody goes to the church, somebody else goes to the temple, somebody else goes to the mosque, but look into their lives – there is no difference at all. So what is the point of believing?You will find a different quality of being in a person who believes in nothing, who has dropped all beliefs, whose consciousness is freed, freed from all ideology. Every ideology becomes a fixation.A moralist is a man with a fixation; a religious man is flowing and fluid. The moralist has some idea about how to live life; the religious person has no idea about how to live his life. He leaves it to Tao, to God, to the whole. He surrenders to the whole and the whole lives through him. He has no ideas about how to live his life.Remember, if you have some idea about how to live your life, you will live wrongly. When somebody asks me, “What is the right way to live my life?” I say, The right way to live your life is not to have any ideas about how to live your life. Live without ideas and you live rightly. Live without mind and you live rightly. Live moment to moment and you live rightly. Don’t live out of the past and don’t live out of the future – just live herenow and you will live rightly.Now this parable:Tzu-hsia asked the Master,“What sort of a man is Yen Hui?”“For kindness he is a better man than I am.”Tzu-hsia is asking the master about four persons who are the master’s disciples. They all serve him. But they must have been very famous people, sometimes outshining the master himself. And these problems must have been in many people’s minds.Tzu-hsia asked, “What sort of a man is Yen Hui?” Yen Hui was a disciple, a famous disciple. And the master said, “For kindness he is a better man than I am.”“What about Tzu-kung?”“For eloquence he is a better man than I am.”“Tzu-lu?”“For courage he is a better man than I am.”“Tzu-chang?”“For dignity he is a better man than I am.”The master is saying that if you take different qualities and you compare them, then these people are in some way or other better than him. If you take individual characteristics, these people are better than him. Somebody is better as far as courage is concerned, somebody is better as far as kindness is concerned, somebody is better as far as eloquence is concerned, somebody is better as far as dignity is concerned. Relatively, morally, these people are better than him.Tzu-hsia rose from his mat and asked…He must have become very puzzled.“Then why do these four serve you?”Why? If these four people are better in some way than you, you should be serving them. Why do they serve you?And the master said,“Sit down, I will tell you.”This statement from the master – “Sit down” – is very metaphorical. Tzu-hsia’s standing up means that he became excited, he became feverish, his mind was confused. A thousand and one thoughts started rumbling in him. He could not believe it.Yes, it was true. What the master was saying was true. Everybody felt that these four people had great qualities, that they outshone the master in some way or other. Tzu-hsia must have become very curious. He forgot that you are not supposed to stand in front of the master, and that you are not supposed to ask a question while standing in front of the master.These are just symbols – symbolic, metaphoric things. When you ask a question of a master you have to ask in a certain posture, bowing down, in deep receptivity. The question should come from a very humble attitude. And the question should come from deep silence, not from a perturbed mind, not out of disturbance, not out of excitement. It should come out of a quiet, silent mind, out of tranquillity.The master said, “Sit down.” The disciple must have forgotten. With the answer the master gave he must have become really excited. He forgot what he was doing. He must have acted in an unconscious way.The master said, “Sit down. First sit down.” And it is not only that the body should sit down, the deep indication is toward the mind. Let the mind settle down. Only then will you be able to understand what the master is going to say. That’s what he means when he says, “Sit down, I will tell you.”Remember, only when the mind is in a deeply settled state will you be receptive. Otherwise, if the mind is stirred and there are clouds and dust arising all over, you are in a sort of storm. Then how are you going to receive the master’s answer?These are not philosophical discussions; these are penetrations into reality, into your own nature. And the answers to the questions that are being asked are not meant to satisfy curious people.One day it happened that a great philosopher came to Buddha. Buddha was sitting under a tree.This man, Buddha, must have loved trees tremendously. He was always sitting under a tree. He became enlightened under a tree – although it is not such a big thing to become enlightened under a tree; many people have become enlightened under trees. You will be surprised to know that Buddha was also born under a tree. And he also died under a tree.Buddha was a king’s son but he was not born in a palace. His mother was traveling and they came to a garden and suddenly she felt the pain arising. She stood under a tree and there was no other place, so she got down and Buddha was born. Later he became enlightened under a tree and then, when he was dying, he again lay down under a tree and died under it.He must have loved trees very much. For five hundred years after him the tree remained his symbol. For five hundred years no statue of him was made – just trees were painted. Trees were placed in temples and people worshipped the trees. In a way it was very beautiful.Let me remind you again – the tree is symbolic of religion because it grows. And it grows out of the innermost core.Buddha was sitting and this great philosopher asked, “Have you said everything that you know?” Buddha had become very old – almost eighty years old – and within a few months he would be gone. The great philosopher had come from a long way to inquire if he had said all that he knew.Buddha took a few dry leaves in his hand and asked the philosopher, “What do you think, sir? How many leaves have I got in my hand? Are they more than the number of dry leaves in this forest?” The paths, the whole forest, was full of dry leaves; the wind was blowing here and there and the dry leaves were making much noise and much music.The philosopher looked and he said, “What type of question are you asking? How can you have more leaves in your hand? You have only a few, a dozen at the most, and there are millions of leaves in this forest.”And Buddha said, “So remember. That which I have said is only like the few leaves in my hand. And that which I have not said is like the dry leaves in this forest.”The philosopher said, “Then one question more. Why have you not said that?”Buddha said, “Because it will not help you to attain nirvana, it will not help you to meditate – that’s why I have not said it. And moreover, it cannot be said. Even if I wanted to say it, it cannot be said. You will have to experience and know it for yourself. It is experiential, it is existential.”The master will say something only when he feels it is going to help your enlightenment. The master will say something only when he feels you are ready to receive. The master will say something only when he sees that clarity is there and the mind is open; that transparency is there and you are ready, with great humbleness and gratitude, to receive it. You are not quarrelsome, you are not ready to discuss and debate. Only in great sympathy, in great love, when the disciple is en rapport with the master, can these things be transferred. These are delicate things.The master says, “Sit down.” Not only physically – settle down inside and don’t get excited.“I will tell you. Yen Hui can be kind but cannot check the impulse when it will do no good.”Now this is the difference between religion and morality. Listen well. Sit down and listen well. Many of you are standing up. Sit down and I will tell you. “Yen Hui can be kind but cannot check the impulse when it will do no good.” This kindness is not of awareness. One must be capable sometimes of not being kind. Great kindness is capable both of being kind and of not being kind. Great kindness is capable of being hard too. If your kindness is such that you cannot be otherwise, then it is not strength – it is weakness. If you cannot act otherwise, that simply means that you are fixed, you are not fluid. Sometimes it is necessary to be hard.I have heard…A Zen master was driving a carriage with a woman and her child in it. Much snow was falling and the morning was very cold and there was no sun in the sky, it was cloudy. The master started freezing and the woman in the carriage did too. By and by he saw that she was becoming blue and was losing consciousness. So he took away the child, pushed the woman out of the carriage and drove away.The woman was shocked. She was left standing there in the falling snow; her child had been taken away – what type of man was this? And he had taken the carriage. She started running and shouting and screaming and cursing – and within half a mile, because of all the running and cursing and shouting and screaming, she was perfectly okay!Then the master stopped the carriage, took her in and said, “Now it is okay. I had to do that otherwise you would have died.”Sometimes to be really kind implies that you can be unkind too. If you cannot be unkind then your kindness is not of much worth. It is cultivated. It is not out of awareness. Now think. If you had been that driver, you could not have done that. It looks immoral. But it is not.In the Zen tradition there are thousands of cases which look very immoral. Sometimes the master jumps on the disciple, beats the disciple, throws him out of a window. And the story says that the disciple becomes enlightened – when he falls out of the window he becomes enlightened. To people who are not acquainted with the Zen methods it looks absurd. How can a person become enlightened like this?But you must be made aware that the disciple may have been working for twenty years – meditating, working, meditating, working. And then one day the master finds that only a thin layer of unawareness is left, a very thin layer. He watches the disciple but he cannot get through that thin layer. Remember, when the unconsciousness is very thick you can fight with it but when it is very thin it is very difficult to fight with it. There comes a moment when it is so thin that you think it is not there.It is almost like transparent glass; it is so transparent you don’t see it. Then how can you fight it? Only the master can see that you are still behind a glass. You are seeing very clearly, almost as if there is no glass, but still you are behind glass. In those moments the master will be very hard. He will do something very shocking. In that shock that thin layer will be broken. Only when it is broken, not before, will you be able to know that something was there in front of your eyes. When it is gone you will understand that a thin layer had been there – a thin film which was so thin and so transparent that there was no way for you to know. Then you will feel thankful to the master.“Sit down. I will tell you. Yen Hui can be kind, but cannot check the impulse when it will do no good.” Now this kindness is impulsive. You are almost a victim of it – you are not the master of it. If you cannot help but be kind – it is an impotency.In Japan there exists a statue of Buddha, a very rare statue, of tremendous significance. One of my friends went to Japan where somebody gave him a replica, a plastic replica, of the statue. My friend is a Jaina, and he could not understand it because it looked a little illogical and unhistorical.In this statue Buddha has a sword in one hand. A sword? Buddha has never been known to carry a sword. He was not a Mohammed, neither was he a Krishna. A sword? But in this statue he has a sword in one hand.The side of his face is tremendously illuminated by the sword – and it does not look like the face of a buddha, it looks like that of an Arjuna, a great soldier, a great warrior. The expression of the face has a sharpness to it.In the other hand he is carrying a lamp, a small earthen lamp, and on that side of the face the expression is so quiet, so silent, so buddha-like.Now this is very absurd. When my friend came back from Japan and showed me the statue he said, “I cannot understand it. What does it mean?” I said, “It is very meaningful. It is a Zen expression. It shows that your silence should be capable of strength also.”The lamp of peace should be capable of becoming a sword any moment it is needed in that way. And the sword should be capable of becoming a lamp of peace any moment it is needed to be that way. One should be fluid and all the polarities should meet in one.A man is rich when all the polarities meet in him. When all the contradictions have lost their contradictions and have become friends, when you can befriend the contradictions, then you are really rich. This is the state of a religious man. The moral man chooses, the religious man lives in choicelessness.“Yen Hui can be kind but cannot check the impulse when it will do no good.” Even when it will not do any good; in fact, it may even be doing harm – then too he cannot check the impulse. He is incapable of checking it. He is incapable of being responsive to reality. He functions according to a principle. So the master says, “For kindness, he is a better man than I, but still there is something missing in his kindness. He has moved too far to the extreme of kindness. He has lost balance. Being a balanced man is the goal – neither the bad nor the good, but the one who is exactly in the middle; neither the good nor the bad, but the one who has transcended both.”And the master is capable of being both – whatsoever the situation demands. Listen to this point: the capacity to be all is the capacity of a religious person.“Tzu-kung can be eloquent but cannot hold his tongue.”If you can be eloquent but cannot be silent, your eloquence is meaningless. Unless words come out of silence they are dead. Unless words come out of your inner emptiness they are not full. When words come out of your inner emptiness they carry a fullness; when they come out of your silence, soaked with your silence, they have a music around them, they have a poetry and a life totally of their own.When you cannot be silent, when you have to speak and you cannot do otherwise, then your words are meaningless, gibberish. Then there is no poetry; then they are very ordinary. Haven’t you seen it? Jesus speaks the same words that you speak, Buddha uses the same words that you use – so what is the difference? When you speak certain words they carry no meaning, not at all. When Jesus speaks the same words they are tremendously significant – so burningly alive, so aflame with his vitality. Where do they come from? They come from his silence.Jesus used to go into silence again and again. Whenever he came to the masses, for a few days he would talk to people, meet people, convert them, and then one day suddenly he would say, “Now I will go to the mountains or to the desert. I would like to be silent.” He would leave even his disciples and go alone into the wilderness, just to be silent. He had exhausted his silence by speaking; his silence had been spent in words – now he had to go back to become full again, to be full of silence. Then he would be full of poetry, then he would be full of song, then his words would not be ordinary words, they would be full of luminosity. Then they would hit you and go directly into your heart.Remember, words go exactly to the same depth from which they come. If my words come from my heart, they will touch your heart. If they come only from my head, they will touch only your head. It depends.Have you seen an archer pulling his bow back? The farther back he pulls his bow, the farther ahead the arrow will go. If the bow is not pulled back far enough, the arrow will fall short.The deeper the words come out of the silence of your innermost core, the further they will go – like an arrow – into the hearts of the people.The master said: “Tzu-kung can be eloquent but cannot hold his tongue.” Eloquence is of no importance as far as religion is concerned. Eloquence is important in politics, but in religion it is secondary. The basic, the fundamental importance is silence. Words are secondary, stillness is primary. If words come out of stillness, then they have some significance. If they don’t come out of stillness, they are just rubbish.The master said: “For eloquence he is a better man than I am.” But he makes the difference. Tzu-kung may have practiced eloquence but he does not know what silence is. He cannot hold his tongue.“Tzu-lu can be brave but cannot be cautious.”When you are brave and cannot be cautious you turn into a fool – you become foolhardy, you become stupid. Bravery in itself is of no value. It can be suicidal, it can be murderous. Bravery in itself is of no value unless there is a light inside it of awareness, alertness. That’s what cautiousness is.“Tzu-lu can be brave but cannot be cautious.” His bravery is not of much use. Either he will create trouble for others or he will create trouble for himself. His bravery is not going to become a beneficial thing to anybody. Bravery is beneficial, not because of bravery but because of cautiousness.Look into these things. This is a simple parable but the master is showing what morality and religion are. If you practice eloquence, you will forget about silence. If you practice bravery, you will forget about cautiousness. If you practice kindness, you will forget that sometimes it is kindness not to be kind. You will become fixed. You will have one pole but the other pole will be missing. You will be half; you will not be whole.To be positive and negative together is what a religious man is. The immoral man has chosen one pole, the negative pole; the moral man has chosen another pole, the positive pole – the religious person lives in choicelessness. He has not chosen anything but he uses all, whatsoever the need. Sometimes he is as negative as the immoral and sometimes he is as positive as the moral. But nothing holds him. He is not confined either to positivity or to negativity. He is a free man. He has freedom. He uses all and he is not used by anything.“Tzu-chang can be dignified but cannot unbend in company.”You can be dignified but if your dignity becomes an ego trip then you cannot bend. With an ego how can you really be dignified? How can ego be a dignified thing? How can ego give you grace? It will be just a superficial posture, an empty, impotent posture, nothing inside, just a container without any content.“Tzu-chang can be dignified but cannot unbend in company.” A man should be able to be undignified sometimes too. If you are always dignified, you cannot laugh, if you are always dignified, you cannot joke, if you are always dignified, you will become inhuman, you will lose all humanity.Haven’t you noticed it? People who can sometimes become undignified have more grace. A man who can laugh, sometimes laughs like a fool, has more wisdom than a person who is obsessed with wisdom and cannot laugh. He has to protect his wisdom – to be continuously on guard. He cannot laugh; he cannot allow himself to laugh because people will think that he is a fool. He is a fool. A wise man is capable of being foolish sometimes too.You must have heard that in the old days great kings used to have a fool in the court – the court fool. You will be surprised to know that they were not ordinary fools; they were some of the wisest men in the country. The king used to have wise men and a fool too – to keep a balance. Otherwise the wise people would make things so sober, dry, dull, sad. All joy would be lost. Sometimes you can become too serious, and the very seriousness can become a barrier in looking into things. The fool was needed. When things would be getting too serious he would do something or say something and bring the atmosphere back to a human attitude.For example, a king was seriously thinking of turning the whole country moral. Nobody should be allowed to say anything untrue. Untruths should be banned. The wise men were all agreed; in fact, because these wise people were his servants they were even going further than him, exaggerating. One wise man suggested that of course this was the right thing to be done – untruths should be banned – and one who was found to be saying some untruth should be immediately sentenced to death. He should be hanged in the marketplace so that everybody would know what the cost of saying anything untrue would be.The fool was listening. He said, “Okay. Then tomorrow morning I will see you all at the gates.”They asked, “What do you mean?”He said, “At the gates.” And he said to the king, “Keep the gallows ready because I am going to say an untruth.”The king asked, “Have you gone mad?”And he replied, “I have always been mad: but I will see you all, the whole court, at the gates – and keep the gallows ready. I will be the first person to be hanged.”It was a challenge. The gallows were made ready and the next morning, when they opened the gates of the town, the fool entered on his donkey. The king asked, “Where are you going, you fool?” He was very angry because they had had to get up early in the morning to get there.And the fool said, “I am going to the gallows.”Now he had created a problem. If you killed him, he had said a truth; if you didn’t kill him, he had told a lie. He had said, “I am going to the gallows. Prepare them. I am going to die on the gallows.”All these wise men and the king were puzzled. What to do with this man? He was telling a lie. If you kill him, the lie becomes a truth. If you don’t kill him, the lie goes unpunished.And the fool laughed. He said, “You are all fools. Who can ban untruth and who can ban immorality? Everything is needed in proportion.”Each great king used to have a fool because wise people tend to go to the extreme. And to go to the extreme is a sort of foolishness. To keep a balance one should sometimes forget all about dignity, one should sometimes bend in company, sometimes laugh like a fool, sometimes be like a child – and sometimes be human.Look at your mahatmas – they are never human. They will not laugh, they will not joke, they will not do anything that would prove that they are human. They keep above humanity. Hence, if they look sad it is nothing unexpected; if their eyes look dull and sad, if they look dead, it is natural.“Tzu-chang can be dignified but cannot unbend in company. Even if I could have the virtues of the four men all together I should be unwilling to exchange them for my own.”Now listen to this tremendously important sentence: “Even if I could have the virtues of the four men all together I should be unwilling to exchange them for my own.” Because that which is yours is true and that which you take from others is untrue. The borrowed is never true. The borrowed, the imitated, is always false. Morality is imitation, religion is always your own. A roseflower flowers on a rosebush; somewhere in a pond are lotuses. The lotus comes out of the lotus seed, the rose comes out of the rosebush. The rose cannot borrow the lotus; the lotus cannot borrow the rose. When religion flowers it is yours; when you try to be moral you borrow, you imitate, you try to become a carbon copy of someone.A Christian is one who is trying to become a carbon copy of Christ; hence a Christian is ugly and Christ is beautiful. Christ is a roseflower, out of his own bush he flowered – that was his crime. The Jews did not like it, they wanted him to become a Moses; they wanted him to become a lotus. And he asserted his own self. He said, “I will be my own being. I will be myself.” That was his crime and the Jews could not forgive him. But Moses was a flower out of his own being, he was not imitating anybody. No religious person has been an imitator. All so-called religious people who are imitators are not religious at all.Never borrow. Even if your flower is small, it is good, it is yours. Even if somebody else’s flower is very big, has much fragrance, has much color, don’t borrow it. Yours is good. It is your destiny. God wants you to flower in your own being.A great Hasid mystic was dying. His name was Josia. Somebody around him asked, “Josia, have you made your peace with Moses?”Josia opened his eyes and said, “Forget everything about this Moses. He is not important. I am dying, and you are talking nonsense.”The man became afraid – what was he saying? A pious Jew at the time of death was saying, “Forget all about Moses.” And Josia said, “Listen, now I am going to die and I will be facing God. He will not ask me, ‘Josia, why were you not Moses?’ He will not ask me that. He will ask, ‘Josia, why were you not Josia?’ So forget all about Moses. In these last moments leave me alone. Let me gather together my being so that at least I can stand before him on my own feet. I have wasted my whole life and now in the end again you have come to ask, ‘Have you made your peace with Moses?’ What do I have to do with Moses? If Moses has nothing to do with me, what have I to do with Moses?”Sometimes people come to me and they say, “Do you agree with Buddha?” I say, “Nonsense! He never agreed with me, so why should I bother to agree with him? He did his thing; I am doing mine. Where does this question of agreeing come from?”Why should you agree with anybody? If you can agree with yourself you have agreed with God. That’s enough, more than enough. If you have agreed with yourself, if you have accepted your being – it is finished. Your journey has come to an end. Now you can flower.The master said: “Even if I could have the virtues of the four men all together I should be unwilling to exchange them for my own.” It would be a mechanical thing to borrow one thing from one, another thing from another. To borrow from so many people – it would be an assemblage, it would be a mechanical thing.A car is assembled, a tree grows. The tree is the symbol of religion and the car is the symbol of morality. You can assemble a car. You can go to the market and purchase different parts from different places and assemble it. You can make your own hodgepodge car. But you cannot assemble a tree. You cannot go into one garden, take a branch, into another garden, take another branch, take flowers from somewhere, leaves from somewhere, roots from somewhere else – a tree cannot be put together.You cannot assemble religion. Religion is not born out of an assembly line.“…I should be unwilling to exchange them for my own.This is why they serve me without misgivings.”“They know that I have an organic unity, and they know that they have only a mechanical unity. They know that they have talents but their talents are fixations, and they know that I have something coming from the inner to the outer, from the center flowing toward my periphery. They know it; hence they serve me without any misgivings. They are great in one way or another but their greatness is one-dimensional.”This is the last thing to be understood. A man of morality is dimensional, one-dimensional. He moves in one dimension. A man of religion is non-dimensional, he has no fixed dimension. All dimensions are available to him.A sportsman entered his horse in the Kentucky Derby. The horse won by twenty lengths. After the victory the horse was entered in more than a dozen races at different tracks and came in last in every one.Puzzled, the sportsman took the horse to see a vet psychiatrist. After a thorough examination, the vet turned to the sportsman and said, “This is a very simple case – the trouble with this horse is that he has a one-track mind!”Morality is a one-track thing, one-dimensional. And the moral man becomes lopsided because when he moves in one direction all other dimensions suffer. If you want to be very kind, where are you going to get the energy? From other dimensions? It is as if somebody’s head becomes too big and his whole body shrinks and becomes small. Or somebody’s legs become big and all of his body shrinks and becomes small. That is the shape of a moral man.A religious man is an organic unity, in balance. His head, his hands, his feet, his body, his mind, his soul, all are in deep harmony, in deep rhythm. He is an orchestra.This parable must be deeply meditated upon. Always remember never to borrow; always remember never to imitate; always remember that you have to grow, not to condition yourself. You have to become a tree; you have to bloom like a tree. You are not to become an efficient mechanism; you have to become a tree so that your fragrance can be released to the winds. That will be your offering to the feet of God.And remember, he will ask, “Josia, why are you not Josia?” He will ask you, “Why did you miss your being? Why have you not arrived here with your being? Why did you miss your life by following other people? I was always within your heart waiting for you but you never came there. You followed Moses, Mohammed, Mahavira, Krishna. You followed everybody. You looked in every nook and corner but you never came into your own being. And I was sitting there waiting for you.”When you come into your own being you have come home, you have come to God. God is nothing but a name of your innermost core.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,It is all jolly fine for everyone to do their thing, but what should be the attitude when our “things” conflict? I am always giving in for the sake of harmony and to do one's thing under constant threat takes the joy out of it. But harmony is not in itself my thing.First, if conflict is your thing, then let it be so. Don’t try to impose any false harmony on top of it because false harmony will never be true; it will never be satisfying. It is ugly. A true conflict is beautiful – more beautiful, far more beautiful than an imposed harmony because deep down the conflict continues. You are deceiving nobody; you only think you are deceiving them. Reality cannot be deceived, and you have to suffer the consequences.If conflict is your thing, then let it be so. That is the message of Tao. It has nothing to do with harmony; it has to do with being in a let-go. If conflict is your thing and you allow it, then that is harmony for you – because you will be in harmony with your nature.It is difficult because you immediately create ideals. You think Tao is harmony. Tao is, but not as an ideal. When you relax and you do your thing – whatsoever it is, mind you, whatsoever, I say – then you are in harmony.So the first thing is that you are not to impose anything upon yourself, otherwise you miss the path of Tao.“It is all jolly fine for everyone to do their thing but what should be the attitude when our ‘things’ conflict?” Let there be conflict. Whatsoever happens, happens. What can you do? Then the conflict must be accepted with great respect. You would like to have no conflict but this is your ego. If existence wills the conflict to be there, then it must be that way. Relax and let the conflict be there.To move on the path of Tao is to move relaxedly. Whatsoever happens, there should be a total acceptance of it – both of the act and of the consequence. If the conflict brings misery, then that must be accepted. You have to flow with the river wherever it leads. If it goes south, good; if it goes north, good; if it does not go anywhere, good; if it drowns you, good. This is total trust.“I am always giving in…” Then you are not in a let-go. If you give in, you are giving in against yourself. Never give in. There is no need. It is better to be defeated; it is better to be cursed than to give in. To give in means that you are reluctant but still doing something for harmony’s sake. Harmony is missing from the very beginning. If you give in to your wife, she will never forgive you; if you give in to your husband, he will never forgive you because your whole being will vibrate with antagonism. You will say something in words, it will be on your lips, but your being will deny it, contradict it. And that is what is being broadcast continuously – from your eyes, from your face, from your gestures, from everything. Your words cannot hide it.So nothing is attained by giving in. When you give in, you lose your inner harmony, and no outer harmony is created out of it. Outer harmony comes only when there is inner harmony. If you are angry, then be angry, be totally angry. Risk all. Then you will be in harmony. This will be difficult to understand but let me say it: if you are really angry with your wife she will be happy, happier than when you give in, because you are being authentic. Who does not love an authentic person? Now she can trust you – when you are angry you are angry, you are not false, you are not pseudo. When you are loving, you are loving; you are not false, you are not pseudo. Now you are reliable.Otherwise while you are making love you are not being reliable. You may be thinking of making love to some other women, or at least thinking of some other woman. Your wife may not be there at all in your mind. Making love to your wife you may think of other women and you will not be there. It will be felt and it will hurt because all the time your woman knows that you are false. When you are smiling you are not smiling; when you say, “I love you,” you do not really mean it. You are always giving in for harmony’s sake. You are not true. If you are not in harmony within yourself, how can you be in harmony with your wife, with your friend, with your husband, with anybody? First be in harmony with yourself – that means allowing whatsoever is to be the case.This is the new revolution that is happening all over the world, the new psychology of man. Gone are those days of repression, gone are those repressed people. They never lived, they only pretended. They were empty gestures. There was no substance in their life.This is your life, live it – and live it in all climates, don’t try to fix the climate. Year round you can see that sometimes it is raining, sometimes it is hot, sometimes it is winter, sometimes there is sun and sometimes it is very cloudy. That’s why the earth is so beautiful. It is not monotonous, it is rich. A man’s life should be one of many climates, of many colors. A man’s life should be a rainbow, an orchestra. It should not be a single note. A man who has only a single note in his life is a monotonous man; he is a poor man, a dull man. He will not enjoy his life; and he will not allow anybody else to enjoy their life either. Wherever he is he will be a dead weight, he will make people serious, somber, unloving, unliving. Don’t become that; that is being a sinner – at least, in my definition. That’s what I call sin.A virtuous man is a man of many climates. A virtuous man is a man of tremendous richness. He has a whole orchestra – all possible notes – in his being. You can only love a man who has all possible notes, all the potentialities flowering. He’s always new, never old.While angry, be angry. Don’t give in. While loving, love; while hating, hate. Just be true, in harmony with yourself – that’s what Tao is. And then a miracle happens: when you are in harmony with yourself you start being in harmony with other people and they start respecting you. You are authentic, you are a solid man. You are not hollow; you are substantial, you have a backbone.How can a wife respect a man who always gives in? Impossible. No wife can respect such a husband. How can you respect a man who has no backbone, is always ready to crawl on the floor, always saying yes? It is impossible. This is not a true man.Never give in, and then the miracle happens: you don’t give in and you live your life, whatsoever it brings. If sometimes it brings conflict, then that is needed. Then a storm is also needed. The storm is needed as much as silence. Anger is needed as much as compassion. Life needs all the polarities.When the other person starts feeling that you are true, then by and by, through that respect, through that love, conflict drops. When you love a person, when you respect a person, when you see the person is true and authentic, there is less and less conflict. Between two false people there is always conflict. Conflict is a consequence of two false people being together. When two true people live together, conflict by and by disappears because they start understanding each other and there is less confusion, there is less possibility of any confusion. Things are clear, transparent. Then conflict by and by disappears. Without risking anything of your inner harmony, the conflict disappears. And then you and the other are in harmony.The first step is to be in inner harmony with yourself. Only then can you be in harmony with others, otherwise not. If you have not attained an inner harmony how can you attain an outer harmony? The basic element is missing.This question is from Anando. He can become a very authentic person, hence the question. He knows what he is missing; his question is not just intellectual. I understand. I have looked deeply into his being. This is his problem. Anando, you have to drop it, you have to be true. And whatsoever the cost is you have to pay it. Life must be paid for. Each single moment of beauty, of joy, must be paid for enormously. It is not free, it must be earned.“To do one’s thing under constant threat takes the joy out of it.” Certainly, it creates misery. That’s why so many people are miserable in the world. It is very rare to come across a person who is happy because it is very rare to come across a person who has lived authentically, who has lived rebelliously, who has lived his own life and who has not bothered to make any compromise. To compromise is to poison your being. Never compromise. It is better to die than to compromise. Die if need be, but die uncompromised – then you are unpolluted, unpoisoned. Then you are a beauty. Then you have dignity.You will have the same dignity as Jesus had when he was crucified. What was he doing, this man? Why were people so angry about him? He was trying to live his life; that was his crime. That has always been the crime. What was Socrates doing? Why were people so angry at him? He was trying to live his life.These miserable people cannot tolerate any happy person. These miserable people are so deep in misery that any happy person creates great jealousy, creates great restlessness in their being – they cannot tolerate it. The very presence of a happy and a rebellious person shows them how unreal they are. The happy, the true person becomes a comparison.I am not saying that by relaxing, by accepting your being, by being in a Taoist attitude, you will not have any misery – I am not saying that. You will be happy. You may have much pain; you may have to suffer many sufferings, but still you will be happy. All those sufferings will add to your taste, they will give salt to your life.I am not saying that the path is full of roses – there are thorns, they always come with the roses. Wherever you find one rose you will find a hundred thorns. But still I say, go for the roses. Those thorns have to be suffered but it is worth it. Those roses are so valuable that the suffering is nothing. If you want to avoid the thorns you will never have roses – that’s what you have been doing, Anando, up to now. You have been avoiding thorns so you are missing the roses. They always come together. You will be miserable, simply miserable. Your misery will be empty misery.Jesus also goes through pain but his pain is full of joy – that is the difference. There were three persons crucified on that same day – two thieves were also crucified. On either side of Jesus was a thief. They were both crying and weeping but Jesus was silent. People were throwing stones and saying ugly things and insulting Jesus as much as they could, but he was silent, as silent as if nothing were happening.One of the thieves became interested. This was rare. He was crying and weeping, and he was not even being insulted. Nobody cared about him. All the insults were directed toward Jesus. And then he heard Jesus saying to God, “Father, forgive these people because they don’t know what they are doing.” When the thief heard this he could not believe his ears. He said, “So it seems you really are a son of God. Bless me before you go.”Jesus said, “Don’t be worried. You will be with me in the company of God, in the kingdom of God, today.” In that moment of illumination, in that moment of understanding, the thief became transformed. He died silently, and a peace surrounded him. He was happy to die with Jesus. He became part of him. Then he stopped crying, then death didn’t matter; then he was moving into a deeper and higher life.The other thief was crying and weeping – and dying. Both the thieves were dying but in different ways. One was simply dying; another had a vision of a higher life. One’s misery was empty; another’s misery became full of joy.This is the difference between people. There are miserable people, painful people, whose misery is empty, for nothing. And there are tremendously happy people who are very rare, they also suffer. Sometimes they suffer more than other people because they never avoid anything, they go headlong into things.Anando, do your thing and do it truly. Never compromise. Never compromise with anybody, not even with God. No compromise. Be yourself. That is the only prayer there is.The second question:Osho,When will I be ready to cut off my hand and give it to you as a sign?The question comes from the parable I told you – the parable about Bodhidharma and Hui Koju.Bodhidharma sat facing a wall for nine years. People would go Bodhidharma and ask questions but he would not answer. People would ask him, “Why do you go on looking at the wall?”And he would say, “I am waiting for the right man to come. When he comes I will turn and look at him.” Then Hui Koju came.It was a very cold morning and snow was falling. He stood there in the falling snow, and it is said that the snow gathered all around his body, and he was freezing. One day passed and then he said to Bodhidharma, “Now I will make my offering.” He cut off one of his hands with his sword, gave it to Bodhidharma and said, “Now turn toward me, otherwise I will cut off my head.”Bodhidharma turned immediately and said, “Wait! There is no need to go that far. So you have come. I was waiting for you for nine years. I have a message to deliver to you. Once the message is delivered I will disappear.”Hui Koju became the second Zen master in China. The message was delivered.After four years, when Bodhidharma was departing from his disciples, he asked his four disciples the question, “What is truth?” The first disciple answered that truth is not in the scriptures, not in the tradition, not in the words. And Bodhidharma said, “You have my skin.”He asked the second disciple and the second said, “Truth must be experienced, it is not a concept, it cannot be thought about. It is not philosophy. It is existential.” And Bodhidharma said, “You have my flesh.”He asked the third and the third said, “Truth is when you are not, when the ego disappears. Truth is when the mind is no more. Truth is a state of no-mind.”Bodhidharma said, “You have my bones.”Then he asked the fourth disciple – this disciple was the same Hui Koju who had given his hand. When he asked Hui Koju, he looked at the master, fell down at his feet and remained silent. Bodhidharma took him up, hugged him and said, “You have my marrow. And now I am ready to depart. You have all that I have. To a question about truth, only silence can be the answer.”The others were sad but still they were saying something. Without saying anything the fourth disciple had said it. This was Hui Koju.The question comes from this same parable. “When will I be ready to cut off my hand and give it to you as a sign?”The first thing: I am not as gross as Bodhidharma; he was a barbarian. In fact, in China he was known as the Hindu barbarian from the south. I am not a barbarian. This is the twentieth century, sir, these things are not needed. You will have to bring more subtle gifts. A hand? What would I do with your hand? I would get in trouble with the police! So please never do that.A thing that has been done once is meaningless now. You would be repeating it – it would not be original. It would not be original at all, it would be imitative. You would be doing it because you know the parable. It would not be coming out of your being; it is not your response.You are also asking me: “When will I be ready to cut off my hand?” Hui Koju never asked. He just did it. You ask me, “When?” You are certainly after me. You will get me into trouble. First you ask me, “When?” Even if I say that the time has come, you would not be ready because this question is a question out of greed, not out of understanding.A parable is always a symbolic thing. Always remember that when I tell you parables don’t be too literal. They are metaphoric. Cutting off the hand is symbolic. What is the symbol? The hand is the symbol of action. When Hui Koju cuts off his hand he says, “Sir, I am ready to drop all my activity, all my action. I am ready to drop my ‘doer-hood.’” That’s what he is saying. The hand is symbolic.So if you can drop your “doer-hood,” that will be the real thing. The moment you are no longer a doer, immediately you become a being, you become a god. Now you are lost in your actions – doing this, doing that; you are thinking about having done this and not done that; you sometimes feel successful and very egoistic, sometimes a failure and very inferior. There is misery and happiness – you just go on. You move in a wheel.To become a meditator means to drop out of the wheel of activities. I am not saying don’t do anything, I am saying let existence do it, you just be a vehicle. That is the meaning of cutting off your hand.One thing more that I have never told you about this parable is that Bodhidharma gave the hand back, and Hui Koju was whole again. Now, if you cut your hand off, it cannot be given back and you cannot be whole again. Hands don’t grow like trees. You cut a branch and it grows back. No, even for a person like Bodhidharma, nature will not change its laws; it never changes its laws. Nature is very neutral, that’s why miracles never happen. Nature never gives way to exceptions. It is absolute.This action simply means that Hui Koju gave up his activity, surrendered his activity, and Bodhidharma gave it back again because Hui Koju was no longer a doer – so he could be allowed to do. Now God, or the total, or the whole, or Tao, would be the doer through him.These parables have to be meditated upon. They are not just to be understood literally; otherwise you will miss the meaning. They are great metaphors, they are poetic. They are not logical things, they are symbolic. They indicate something. In Zen they have a saying coined by a very great Zen master. Lin Chi said, “Don’t bite my finger. Look where I am pointing.”Now this is biting my finger.The third question:Osho,Have you yet been able to say to one of your disciples, “So, it has happened!”?If it has not happened, it would not be true to say so, and if it has happened, it would be futile. What is the point of saying it when it has happened? Either way it is meaningless.If it has not happened, I would not say so, and if it has happened, why should I say it? You know, I know – it would be a tacit understanding. I am not going to say to anybody that it has happened, remember. I will never say to anybody that it has happened. It is happening to many, it will happen to many; in fact, it has never happened to so many people as it is going to happen this time.But I am not going to say anything to anybody. You would like me to say something because then you can create great politics around it. If I say to Maneesha, “Maneesha, it has happened to you,” then everybody else will be jealous. Then you will start finding fault with Maneesha. Then you will start trying to prove that it has not happened to her. How can it happen to Maneesha before you? Impossible!Do you know that when Bodhidharma gave his robe to Hui Koju he told him a second thing? “Escape now. Take this robe and escape as far away as possible, otherwise the other disciples will kill you.” There were five hundred disciples. So four hundred and ninety-nine would be against this Hui Koju, just a simple poor man. They would kill him; certainly they would kill him. They followed him. The moment they became aware that it had happened to Hui Koju, that the robe had been given to him, they followed him. Where had he gone? He had gone into a mountain retreat, running as far away as possible because the master had told him, “Run far away.”They got hold of Hui Koju. The greatest scholar, who had been expecting that it would happen to him, got hold of him first. He was a very dangerous man. He said, “Give me the robe.”Hui Koju said, “You can take the robe because the robe is not the thing. You can take it.” He dropped the robe on the ground and said, “You can take it. But remember, if you are not yet capable of taking it, it will be a crime against the master.”The scholar started trembling and shaking and perspiring because he certainly was not ready. It was his ego. He tried to pick up the robe but he could not take it, it was so heavy. It was not that the robe became heavy; he must have become too shaky, too nervous.Remember, I say again: miracles never happen. If you ask the Buddhists they will say that this was a miracle. The robe became so heavy that the man could not take it. That’s not right. The man became very shaky, naturally. Hui Koju was standing there as a witness – a pure silence, a great meditation, a great ecstasy, watching. And he said, “Remember one thing: you will be committing a crime against the master if you are not ready for it. You can take it if you are ready.”How can you deceive a man like Hui Koju who has become a mirror? He must have seen all this scholar’s ignorance hidden behind the so-called knowledge. The scholar must have trembled. He must have tried to take the robe but could not pick it up. He fell down at the feet of Hui Koju and he said, “I am sorry. I am not after the robe. Tell me what he has transferred to you.”For years Hui Koju was pursued; efforts were made to kill him.This has always been so. I am not going to say to anybody that it has happened to them because I am not interested in creating any politics. When it has happened, it has happened. You will know, I will know, and there is no need for anybody else to know about it. You will know that I have said it to you in deep silence. Not a single word will be uttered, but the message will reach you. You will know my recognition – that I have recognized you, that I have blessed you, that I have patted you on your back and I have said, “Yes, it has happened.” But it will not be in so many words; not a word will be uttered. It will be a gesture and you will understand and nobody else will understand.This is going to be the way.The fourth question:Osho,Should I throw away all my self-confidence?Don’t think you can do it because you don’t have any.What you call self-confidence is just a lack of it, hence you need it. A man of real self-confidence never carries much luggage. Why should he carry it? Why should he be concerned about self-confidence? He has it. Nobody can rob him of it, nobody can steal it. There is no way of losing it; you will not need to carry it. When you carry it you show only one thing – you don’t have it.People who don’t have any self-confidence create a false self-confidence as a substitute. They are trembling inside, they are afraid inside. On the surface they pretend. Deep down there is cowardice; they pretend that they are brave people, very courageous. Deep down there is ignorance, but on the surface they are very knowledgeable. Deep down they don’t know anything; on the surface they are ready with all the possible answers to every possible question.What do you need self-confidence for? If you are confident, self-confidence will be like a shadow to you. It will follow you. You don’t carry your shadow, you don’t look back again and again to see whether it is coming or not, you can’t get any insurance for it. You don’t care. It follows. Self-confidence is always there when you have become a self.You are not yet a self, you are just an ego. Remember this difference between the ego and the self. The self is divine, the ego is human. The ego is manufactured by education, society, ambition, politics, morality, and all that; the self is not manufactured, it is discovered. The ego is an invention. The self is a discovery.You have to manage the ego because if you don’t manage it, within hours it will be gone. If you don’t manage it continuously, if you are not on guard continuously, it will be lost. So you have to be on guard. Of course, it creates great tension, great heaviness in the head. You become a heavy person and you become very uptight. Your flow stops. You become frozen.It is very foolish but it is what you have. That is why you are afraid, that’s why you ask: “Should I throw away all my self-confidence?” That which can be thrown away is not self-confidence. How can you throw away your shadow? Or can you? What are the ways to throw away a shadow? There are no ways. Nobody has ever been able to throw away a shadow. When your self has been discovered, when you have become an integrated soul and you have come to know your center, self-confidence follows like a shadow. You cannot throw it away.A Buddha has it, a Mahavira has it, a Lao Tzu has it – you don’t have it. Hence you are always afraid it may be taken away. And sometimes you even start thinking about dropping it. It cannot be taken away if it is there; it cannot be dropped if it is there. It can be taken away only if it is not there; it can be dropped only if it is not there. This will look paradoxical but this is one of the fundamental laws of life. You think only of that which is not; that which is needs no thought to hold it – that which is simply is, on its own accord.So, if you want to drop it, you don’t have it. So please drop it. Please drop it because it is meaningless, it is useless; it is not, it is bogus, it is a false coin.Now I would like to make the paradox even deeper. First I say you don’t have it, so how can you drop it? Then I say you don’t have it, so please drop it. It is a waste of energy to carry it. You are just carrying an idea; it is not there. The moment you drop your so-called self-confidence, you will be able to discover your self. The false must be understood as false, only then does the real reveal itself. The false, when understood as false, is the first step toward reality. Let the false cease to be and the real will enter. Carry the false and you will not allow the real to penetrate your being.The fifth question:Osho,This master-disciple game is Osho-roulette but I know the bullet is a blank, isn't it?Yes, it is, but it kills all the same.Just the other day I was reading somebody’s memoirs. And he wrote that once, in Sannen, J. Krishnamurti was conducting a small discussion. A few people had gathered and they were asking questions, which he was answering. Suddenly a man arose and he said, “Stop all this. It is almost as if we are blind, in a dark night, searching for a black cat which is not there.” And Krishnamurti stood up and said, “Sir, but it is there.”Let me repeat it. Krishnamurti said, “Sir, but it is there.”I would like to tell you, yes, the bullet is a blank but it kills. It cures, it kills, it destroys, it recreates. In fact, it kills because it is a blank; it kills because it is empty. It comes out of my emptiness; it is part of my emptiness. If you allow my emptiness to enter you, it will kill you and will revive you on a totally different plane, in a new dimension. Yes, it will be a cross, a crucifixion – and a resurrection too.It kills only because it is a blank. It is like a blank check – the value depends on you. If you accept it totally, it has tremendous value; if you reject it, it is just a piece of paper.You will have to write the amount on it. I simply give you a blank check. It will depend on your courage as to how much you can write on it.And don’t be a miser when you are filling out a blank check.The sixth question:Osho,Sometimes I feel really that the other is hell. What about love then and being with somebody?The other is hell only to the extent that you feel the other as the other. There is a way to feel the other not as the other but as your extension – and that is true too, that’s what reality really is.The other is not the other. When you love, what do you mean by love? Love means only this experience: that the other is no longer the other. What else is love? What is love all about? Love is an experience in which you feel that the other is no longer the other, the other is me; the other is my being. Maybe on the bodily plane you remain separate, on the mental plane you remain separate, but further down the centers start overlapping, merging, losing definition. That’s what love is.The other is hell if you are only pretending love – then the other is really hell. If you are only playing a game and just trying to exploit the other as a means, then he will also try to exploit you as a means. Nobody wants to be reduced to a means; everybody is an end unto himself. Hence in the name of love so much misery arises. It is not out of love; it is out of false love, pretended love.Love. And then you will know the other is not other. If you can love deeply, infinitely, you will by and by become aware that even the trees are not other; even the stars are not other.This is what I call becoming a sannyasin: to fall in love with the total. That’s what Lao Tzu calls Tao: to fall in love with the total, to make love to God. That is the ultimate Tantra: to make love to God, to be in love with the whole.Naturally, when you make love to a woman or a man it is bound to be momentary because when two small, tiny individuals make love you cannot expect more than that. Even that much happening is a miracle. If you really want eternal orgasm, a continuous orgasm, then you have to love the whole and you have to fall in love with the whole. Make love to God, then God is not the other. Wherever love comes in, the other disappears. That is the sign of love; that the other is no longer there. And when the other is not there as the other, there is heaven – paradise regained. When the other is as the other, there is hell – paradise lost.The seventh question:Osho,You said that the real morality is the shadow of enlightenment. But then how is one to live before becoming enlightened?The moment you ask how, you are asking again for a discipline. The moment you ask how, you are asking for methods, techniques. Why can’t you simply live? Are not animals living? Are not trees living and birds living without asking how? Why do you carry on continuously about everything with this how? How to love? How to pray? How to be friendly? How to be compassionate? How to be silent? How to live?Drop the how and let life take its own course. It will. It is not waiting for any how. That’s what Tao calls spontaneity, tathata, suchness. Let life take its own course. Who are you to interfere continuously? Can’t you simply eat? Why do you ask how to eat and how to taste? Can’t you simply taste? Just eat, chew well, and enjoy.Let life move, don’t try to manage it. You have mismanaged enough. By trying to improve you have destroyed all its beauty. With all your goals and ideologies you have poisoned your being. Be natural.But that is very difficult for the ego. The difficulty comes from the ego, not from life. Life can be lived without any how, but the difficulty comes from the ego. The ego says that then you will be like an animal. So what? Be an animal! What is wrong in being that? Man is an animal. There’s nothing wrong in being an animal. No animal is as ugly as man. No animal has done so much violence on earth as man. No animal has destroyed nature as man has. What is wrong with animals? Have you ever heard of any animal becoming Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong? They have not murdered and butchered. They have not created wars. It is man who brings ugliness into the world.The ego says you have to be higher than the animals. In trying to be higher than the animals you fall lower than the animals. Be natural, don’t try to improve, and you will find a great transformation happening. Godliness comes through nature – not through improvement, not through any effort of the ego, but through effortlessness, through deep trust and surrender.Can’t you trust existence, which has given you birth? You did not ask that question when you were in the womb: “How to live for nine months?” You lived well, you did well, perfectly well – otherwise you would not be here. There was no yoga teacher to teach you to be in what posture, to teach you how to breathe, how to do pranayama and pratyahar, and which asana would be the best. You didn’t ask anybody. There was nobody to ask. You lived in the womb naturally and you grew. Existence was taking care, the whole was taking care, everything was provided.Then you were born and became a child – you did not ask how to breathe, how to walk, how to talk. Everything came by and by. Can’t you trust life? One day you became a young man, youth came, and love started arising in your being. One day you will become old, life will start disappearing; one day death will come and the circle will be complete.Why are you always trying to interfere? Tao says you should be in a wu-wei, noninterference. Let the whole do things. This is a very radical attitude; this is the greatest revolutionary attitude ever. “How?” is very childish. Yoga is for children, Tao is for grown-ups.So don’t ask: “But then how is one to live before becoming enlightened?” Just live. And just living, I tell you, is fantastic. It’s far out!The eighth question:Osho,How to be a Taoist psychotherapist within a very Confucius-oriented mental institution? In other words, how to be a nut healer instead of a nutcracker?You can be a Taoist anywhere; nobody can hinder you, no obstacles can prevent you, because to be a Taoist means taking the ultimate risk. I am not saying that you will not be in trouble; I have never said that. You will be in trouble, certainly you will be in trouble, but that trouble is good, beneficial. It is a birth pain.Yes, when you become natural you will be continuously in trouble –from everywhere. Nobody is natural, so everywhere you will be an odd person. Nobody will feel at ease with you in the beginning. Because you are at ease with yourself, nobody will feel at ease with you – because they are not at ease with themselves. They are very tense people. They fit with a tense person, but they are simply at a loss with a non-tense person. What to do?Once I was traveling in a train and there was only one other passenger in the compartment. He wanted to talk to me, to somehow get into conversation with me. Seeing his restlessness I remained very cool. When he tried to ask something I simply answered with yes or no. I didn’t take any interest in him or the topic. When he offered me some pan I said, “I don’t take it.” When he offered me a cigarette I said, “I don’t smoke.” When he prepared a drink – he was a doctor – I said, “I don’t drink.”He went crazy. He said, “Then how can I be friendly with you? How? We are going to be here together in this compartment for forty-eight hours and there seems to be no bridge.”I said, “There is none.”And I watched him. He started becoming crazier and crazier. He would open his suitcase and close it again and arrange his clothes and then arrange them again, and then open the window, close the window, read the same newspaper again, and in between he would look at me as if to say, “What is the matter?” I sat there cool and silent, and I enjoyed it.After two hours he called the conductor and said, “I want to go into another compartment.” The conductor asked if there was something wrong. He said, “Nothing is wrong but this man is too silent. It hurts. It drives me crazy. He is just sitting there and I have to see him because I am here alone. And there seems to be no possibility of communicating with him.”Now, I was not doing any harm. I had not said even a single word to him, but he had become very disturbed.When you are silent you will find that people become very uneasy with you. Your silence brings a totally different world, a world that they are not attuned with. You bring a totally new music, a music they don’t know at all. You introduce them to a new way of being for which they are not ready.You ask me: “How to be a Taoist psychotherapist within a very Confucius-oriented mental institution?” The whole world is a Confucius-oriented mental institution. Confucius is the master of millions, of the whole world really. And the whole world has become a mental institution. It is very difficult to find a man who is sane. Insanity is normal.So if you are in a mental institution don’t be worried very much, because whether you are in the institution or in the world it is the same. There is not much difference – maybe a little difference of degree.You can be Taoist anywhere because Taoism has no conditions to be fulfilled. The first thing you have to understand is: don’t think of mad people as nuts, don’t even think of them as mad. That is disrespectful. Their family thought them mad, hence they were hospitalized or institutionalized. The politicians thought them mad, the priest thought them mad, everybody thought them mad. I tell you they are only different, not necessarily mad. Certainly they are different, but who knows who is mad? Jesus was thought to be a madman, Mansoor was thought to be a madman, St. Francis was thought to be a madman, Ramakrishna was thought to be a madman. But who is mad?They are different, that much is certain. Be respectful. Maybe by being respectful you will help them to come back, to become more alert.This must be understood: when a person goes mad it simply shows that he is the weakest link in the group in which he lives – for example, in a family. If the family is neurotic – as families are neurotic – then the person who is the weakest in the family will become neurotic. Then through that person the whole neurosis of the family will start flowing. He will become the scapegoat. He may be weak, he may be fragile; he may be more sensitive than the others. He may be of a softer heart and softer build. But the whole neurosis of the family will start flowing through him and the whole family will start calling him mad. And they will start thinking to take him to the psychiatrist, to the institution.He had been helpful; he had been a safety valve for the neurotic family. In fact the family was neurotic. The family’s neurosis created the neurosis of the person; he was the most vulnerable in the family. Maybe he was the most intelligent, the most sensitive, the softest of them, so certainly he became affected first. Others were harder, more insensitive, more stone-like – he was more like a rose, so he was crushed.Then he goes to the psychiatrist and the psychiatrist is ready to label him: he is a schizophrenic, or a manic-depressive, or this or that. He is labeled. The family is happy – they were right. The man cannot say anything because the family says he is mad, and the people where he works say he is mad, and now, finally, the psychiatrist confirms that he is mad.The psychiatrist is in the service of the society. The psychiatrist is part of the politics. Just as in the old days the priest was in the service of society, now the psychiatrist is in the service of society. Now the psychiatrist is doing the same function as the priest. The old conspiracy continues. The priests and the politicians were together – they conspired against man. Now the priest has lost his prestige, so he is being replaced by the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Now he is doing service and the politician is using him.You force the person into a mental hospital. The moment you force a man into a mental hospital you absolutely fix in his mind the idea that he is mad. The idea that he is mad, which you have given him, is irreversible. Now everything will prove that he is mad – the treatment, the medicine, the doctors, the nurses, the whole atmosphere. You are hypnotizing him into madness.If you really want to be a Taoist in a mental institute, the first thing to do is to help the person to feel that he is not mad, only different. Do you see the difference it will bring? Just the word different. Nothing is basically wrong with him; he is just not like others. Then you are not destroying his self-respect, then you are not destroying his dignity, you are helping his dignity. Then you are not giving him a hypnotic idea that he is mad, you are helping him to be dehypnotized. Help him as a person but not as a patient. Nobody is a patient. Help him respectfully, not with any derogation on your part.Don’t label him because people cannot be labeled. People are so infinite; people are so glorious – how can you label them manic-depressive or schizophrenic? These labels are dangerous, very dangerous. Nobody knows exactly what schizophrenia is, nobody knows exactly. There is no exact definition of who is abnormal, who is mad. So don’t play with words.Help the person to understand that he is different. Help the person to understand that he exists in a crowd that is totally different from him so he must be a little careful – that’s all. If you can bring a little more awareness into him, you will be a great blessing to him. That’s all that is needed.In the East, we did it for centuries. In the East, in the old days, if a person was going mad they would not take him to a doctor, to a physician, they would take him to a certain sacred place, to a temple. Why? Because madness was thought to be something divine. It is beautiful to think of madness as divine. It has something in it of the divine, of divine spontaneity, of divine chaos. It has something that transcends ordinary intellect. They would take him to the temple, and in the temple he was not thought to be mad, he was thought only to be in a higher stage than most people.People would pray for him and he would be left surrendered to God. In almost all cases people were helped. They would again become normal – whatever that means. They would come back home, they would be able to fit with people more easily.In Japan, in Zen temples, they still do that. They don’t consider a person to be mad; they simply accept him as a person in trouble, a person who is different. They help him to be in the monastery but nobody does anything else to him. He is left alone. His needs are fulfilled. And by and by, within three or four weeks, he settles. The stirring that was inside him settles. In fact, to take a person out of his family reference and context is to help him.Mad institutions should not be called mad institutions. They should be houses to help different kinds of people, with respect.Don’t think of yourself as a doctor; think of yourself as a friend. Don’t think of yourself as higher than the patient. You are nobody to prescribe; you just have to understand the person and help him come to more awareness.Many things can be helpful. Music will be more helpful than medicine. Meditation will be tremendously more helpful than anything else and in particular, dynamic meditation will be helpful. Just help him to cathart. He has gathered much rubbish in his heart which he has not been allowed to throw out anywhere. Help him to throw it out. Don’t repress him any more. His family was repressive; his society was repressive, now at least you can help.What I call the dynamic methods of meditation can be of tremendous value to future psychiatry. Help him to bring his madness out, whatsoever he feels. If he wants to scream, let him. Don’t let him feel guilty that he is doing something wrong. It is perfectly okay. Nothing is wrong in screaming. He may have needed it from his childhood. He wanted to scream and scream and scream, and nobody allowed it. Now the scream has become too big a burden. It needs release. Let him scream. Let him cry and weep. Let him roll on the ground. By and by you will see all violence disappearing. By and by he will cool down, he will settle down. Then give him silent methods of meditation – zazen, vipassana, and other methods. First give cathartic methods, then silent methods. These two things.Be respectful. Serve him; don’t treat him – and you will be able to treat him.The ninth question:Osho,In your discourses on Patanjali, you spoke of the need to develop a third psychology – a psychology of the awakened mind which would supplement already existing psychologies of the abnormal and the normal mind. You also said that Gurdjieff had tried to develop such a psychology, but had failed to do so after Ouspensky left him.Could you say a little more about the general form and content of your third psychology? For example, could it be taught in the way that the first and second psychologies are taught? And what benefits might be expected from teaching such a subject?The first thing: it has content but it has no form; it is not formal. That is the first basic difference.The second thing: it, therefore, cannot be taught as a subject. It is not a subject. You cannot make a curriculum out of it. It cannot become a textbook.Then what can be done? In universities, colleges, schools, facilities can be made available where people can meditate. It has no form, so you cannot teach it, but it has content; it can be learned. And you cannot impose it. Meditation cannot be imposed. You can only make facilities available: a temple on the university campus, a meditation hall, underground cells where people can go and sit silently and be with themselves. You can provide dynamic meditation to allow people to cathart and then you can give them facilities where they can sit silently and be alone, centered, grounded in their being.This cannot be a subject to be taught, it cannot be made compulsory. Only those who are interested, who have a desire, a longing, will be able to go there. You can have a guide who can give instructions on how to cathart and how to be silent and sit silently – general guidance. That too must be very vague. If you try to be very concrete it becomes a pattern, and no meditation is possible in a pattern. Meditation is a fluid phenomenon; you cannot give it a pattern. So fluid patterns can be given.Each one has to develop his own pattern because each individual’s is different from everybody else’s. My meditation cannot be your meditation. Buddha’s meditation cannot be Jesus’ meditation. Of course, the meditation is the same, but each one will have his own way.It is almost like when you go to a tailor. He may cut from the same material, but he will have to make different clothes for different people. The material is the same but the clothing will be different.Meditation, the quality of meditative consciousness, is the same.Two things are to be remembered. First, people have to be helped so that they can unconditionally throw off their repressions. Nobody may condemn them. If they want to shriek and shout and scream, they have to be allowed. If they want to jump and run, they have to be allowed. If they want to dance, they have to be allowed. If they want to go almost crazy, they have to be allowed. This is the beauty of it: when a person goes crazy on his own, he is not crazy – deep down, he always remains in control. A tremendous ability to control arises and he becomes unburdened.When a person has become unburdened then he can start the second step – vipassana, zazen-type silent methods. Tell them to just sit silently. If thoughts come, watch them. Don’t fight with thoughts. They will come less if you have really been cathartic. Not so many thoughts will come; the traffic will be very, very slow. Ordinarily your mind is always in a rush hour but now a thought will pass sometimes and then there will be a gap. You will be more silent. Thoughts will come and go but you need not be worried. Just watch them. You have nothing to be worried about – good or bad, no judgment is needed. Just be an observer.These small instructions and a guide who will give the instructions is all that is needed. If people bring problems, the guide can solve them. This guide must, of course, be a meditator himself, otherwise he will not be able to help. It is not that he knows about meditation and can be helpful, no. It is not that he has read about meditation and can be of help, no. But the guide will have to be a meditator.That’s what I am trying to do here. I am not interested in the universities, in the education system, because I know that unless I have thousands of meditators it is futile, it is not possible, it cannot be done. So the first thing is to create thousands of meditators. Once I have those thousands of meditators then my interest will be in the universities. Then those meditators can go to the universities, to the colleges, to the schools, and they can create facilities there. Their presence will help and their own experience on the path will be a help to others.The basic thing about meditation is freedom. It cannot be imposed. You cannot force everybody in the school to come and meditate at a particular time. That would destroy meditation forever.That is what happened with poetry. Poetry is being destroyed by the universities and colleges and schools because people are forced to read it. Once they are forced they lose all interest in it. Then never in their lives will they read poetry again. Poetry is so beautiful; it cannot be forced. You should make possibilities available. Poets should be there. Poets can be called to come to read their poetry. People can ask questions and they can explain. Or you can ask poets to be there and create poetry before school children or before college and university students so they can see how poetry arises in a being, how poetry descends, how a person pours out poetry.They can sing with the poet, they can dance with the poet, they can enjoy the poetry, but there can be no examinations. Poetry is such a big thing that examinations cannot be given on it. You can examine mathematics. It is such an ugly thing that if you destroy it, nothing is destroyed. But poetry, no, please, no. Never touch poetry. Examinations are destructive.Just make possibilities available. Poets should travel from one university to another university. Poets should be called from one university to another university. They could just be there, and people who are interested in poetry could sit by their side and wait, sip tea with the poet and wait. If the poetry arises the students should be able to see the birth of it. Then they can sing with the poet and they can ask questions of the poet. And then the poet moves on.Meditation will also be like that because meditation is still higher than poetry. Poetry at least has words, meditation has no words. Meditation is wordless poetry; poetry is meditation in words. Music is meditation with instruments, poetry is meditation with words, but meditation has no words, no instruments – only sound, only silence. It is the highest peak of human consciousness. You cannot teach it, but people can learn it.So what can be done? The question is from Brian Lewis. He is a professor in England – a beautiful person. He can be of much help in creating a possibility in his own university.But remember, textbooks are not possible and this is not subject matter, you cannot make a curriculum out of it – it has no form. It has content. Its content is godliness. That’s what godliness is all about – the content of meditation.And the last question.Because of Divya’s question, at least half a dozen questions have come. Now everybody wants to have a special spot for himself. I am not going to allow anything to anybody because these are imitative questions; they have not come out of your own experience. You are simply jealous of Divya. Jealousy must be dropped. Listen to the questions and you will understand.Osho,You are the most blatantly outrageous son of a bitch I have ever met. First you say no one is special, then you give Divya a permanent spot in the front of fronts, and bestow on her a queenship. I want a front row seat too – and I'll settle for empress!It is from Amida.Divya’s question was totally different. She was not interested in any row – neither first nor second. And she was not demanding. Her question was really that she felt guilty about clinging to her seat. She wanted to be freed from that possessiveness. Her question was totally different.You have completely forgotten her question. Her question was: “Osho, why do I cling to this spot? Why can I not drop it? I have dropped everything, why not this spot? Why am I so possessive about it? Why can I not let it go?” That was really a totally different question. She was not asking for this spot, remember. She was not asking for permission to sit here forever and always, she was asking for help to drop it. Hence I have given her the spot.To Amida, no. Your whole idea is of jealousy. Your whole idea is of competitiveness. This is ugly.The second question:How the hell am I supposed to find my right seat when by the time I reach the auditorium there are already three hundred and twenty-five people sitting there?This is from Vidya. So your seat is three hundred and twenty-sixth. That is your spot.And the third question:Could I have the seat next to Divya?It is from Devesh. No, never. You will have to surrender to Shiva and wherever he gives you a seat that is your seat. And I would like him to change your seat every day.Never be imitative. Then you miss the whole beauty of it. Never ask a question because others have asked it. Can’t you even create a question which is originally yours? Even the question must be borrowed. At least be that creative. At least ask your own questions.And never refer to anybody else because whatsoever I have said to one I am not going to say to anybody else. Whatsoever is right for one may be wrong for the other. The thing that is medicine to you may be poison to somebody else. My answer is always going to be different.Keep it always in mind to let your own question come. Be authentic. And never become a victim. These are all victims. The spot is not important to these questions, something else is – the ego. Hence the very formulation of the question.Devesh asked for seat the next to Divya. Do you know that Divya is going to hell? Are you ready to have the next seat there too? How long will you follow Divya and how are you concerned with Divya? The next seat? Do you want to be a carbon copy? Be an original. Existence loves originals. Carbon copies are never loved; carbon copies are ugly. Find your spot. Why next to Divya? How does Divya come into it? Never think in terms of anybody else. Here you are directly related to me, not through Divya or somebody else.My sannyasins are not an organization. Each sannyasin is related to me. You are related to other sannyasins only because you are related to me and they are related to me. When you are not directly related to me, naturally you are related to one another – but that is secondary. Your eyes should be directly on me, nobody should come in between. You have to face me, you have to encounter me, and the encounter must be absolutely immediate and direct.Enough for today.

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Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 01-14Category: TAO

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Lung Shu said to the physician Wen Chih:“Your craft is subtle. I have an illness, can you cure it?”“You have only to command. Tell me the symptoms of your illness.”“I do not think it an honor if the whole district praises me nor a disgrace if the whole state reviles me; I have no joy when I win, no anxiety when I lose; I look in the same way at life and death, riches and poverty, other men and pigs, myself and other men; I dwell in my own house as though lodging in an inn, and look at my own neighborhood as though it were a foreign and barbarous country.“Having all these ailments, titles and rewards cannot induce me, punishments and fines cannot awe me, prosperity and decline, benefit and harm cannot change me, joy and sorrow cannot influence me. Consequently it is impossible for me to serve my prince, have dealings with my kindred and friends, manage my wife and children, control my servants. What illness is this? What art can cure it?”Wen Chih ordered Lung Shu to stand with his back to the light. He himself stepped back and examined Lung Shu from a distance facing the light. Then he said:“Hmm. I see your heart. The place an inch square is empty – you are almost a sage. Six of the holes in your heart run into each other but one is stopped up. Can this be the reason why you now think the wisdom of a sage is an illness? My shallow craft can do nothing to cure it.”A parable…Once in the garden of a master there lived a monkey. And, as monkeys are curious people, he became very curious about the master. He saw the master sitting silently, doing nothing, and by and by he started coming close to him – what is this man doing? It was a mystery. Certainly, to a monkey, the most mysterious thing is somebody sitting silently, doing nothing.Restlessness is just natural to a monkey, but resting in silence? Has this man gone mad? By and by he started coming closer to watch him. The closer he came, the more he was surprised. Not only was the man silent but the space around him was tremendously quiet. Even the monkey could feel the vibe as he came closer.Then he started loving the man, and just to be close to him became one of his hobbies. Whenever he could find the time and whenever the master was sitting in the garden, he would come close and sit by his side.One day he said to the master, “What do you do? Please tell me. I surrender to you. Accept me as a disciple.”The master looked at the monkey, felt great compassion for him, and said, “I don’t do anything. You can also do it. It is non-doing. Sitting silently, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. You simply sit silently. When the right moment comes, suddenly you are full of tremendous joy and peace and God. You are not supposed to do anything. Anything done by you is a disturbance, creates ripples, creates waves. And when your mind is wavy God cannot enter. When the mind is a quiet surface, when everything is silent and calm, God enters. He enters through the door of silence – but that is possible only when you are not a doer. So you can do it, you can try it.”The monkey shook his head. He said, “It is impossible. I thought that if there was something I could do I would do it, but this is impossible. If you told me to fetch the moon, I could bring it; if you told me to remove the Himalayas, I could do it; if you told me to force the Ganges to run uphill, I could do it – because in the old ancient days, other monkeys like Hanuman have been known to do things like that. I am a monkey, I have the potential, I can also do it. But sitting silently, doing nothing? Sir, that is impossible. It is against my nature, it would drive me crazy. If God comes through silence then God is not for me and I am not for God.”Human mind is nothing but a monkey. Man has not changed much. Charles Darwin says that man has evolved only on the surface – deep down man is as restless as other monkeys. Man has not evolved much. The real man is born only when your inner monkey completely disappears, utterly disappears.To be a man means to be a no-mind. The constant chattering of the mind inside, the inner talk, the monologue, continues day and night, year in, year out, from birth to death. Whatsoever you are doing is irrelevant; it continues deep inside you. That chattering is the only thing that is irreligious, the only sin, the original sin. Once that chattering stops, miracles start happening to you. Such great mysteries become revealed that you cannot contain them. Such a vast sky starts pouring into you that you cannot believe it. It is incredible. You start expanding. Then the whole universe is something within you. Then you are not within the universe but the universe is within you. Then stars and moons and suns circle within your heart.But if this happens without a master you will go mad. It is mind that is holding you together. Whatsoever you are – even if you are a monkey – it is mind that is holding you together. The mind is your illness and also your normality. Because of the mind you are tethered to the earth. Without the mind you would not be tied anywhere. You would be so loose and so free you might disperse. Who would hold you? What would your definition be then? Mind gone, ego goes. The ego is the center of the mind, the very heart of the monkey. Mind gone, greed is gone. Mind gone, ambition is gone. Mind gone, competition is gone. Mind gone, future and past are gone. Mind gone, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, are gone. Mind gone – Indian, German, Chinese – nationalities are gone. Mind gone, the body is no longer you. Your own mother is not your mother, your own father is not your father, your own son is no longer your son. All relationships disappear because relationships exist in the mind.Just think of a moment: if the mind suddenly disappears – where will you be? What will you be? You will lose all identity. You will simply melt and disappear, evaporate. It would be maddening; hence without the master the path is very risky. When the glimpse of the beyond comes to you for the first time it will shatter you, and you will not be able to see the positivity of it. You will see only the negativity of it. You will see what it has taken away from you; you will not be able to see what it has given you. Naturally you are acquainted with your past and the past is going away fast. You will simply see yourself as disappearing.You don’t as yet have any language for the new that is being born; you don’t as yet have any concept for the new that is being born. The new that is being born is invisible, cannot be touched, cannot be heard, cannot be smelled, cannot be tasted. It is beyond the senses. You have never before known the new that is happening, so how will you recognize it? The new will not be recognized and the old will be disappearing. You will feel yourself going mad, falling apart, dying. Death will be your experience, or madness will be your experience. You will think that it is a curse that has happened to you. The blessing will look like a curse because you cannot yet see it as a blessing; your eyes are not trained for it. You can only see the curse; you can only see the negative part of it. This is what Christian mystics call the dark night of the soul – the light is so blinding it almost looks like darkness.Have you ever looked directly into the sun? Within seconds you will go blind; you will not be able to see. It will be so dazzling. It is not dark, but the light is too much for you and your eyes are not able to take it in; they cannot absorb it. After looking at the sun for a few seconds, if you look around everywhere, you will find a tremendous darkness. If you look long enough at the sun, you will go blind.Why is light blinding? Why? Because we have certain capacities. Only in tiny amounts can we allow the light to enter – and we can recognize only that much. Beyond that we lose recognition. That’s how it happens: when you first enter into the world of no-mind it looks like madness – the dark night of the soul, the mad night of the soul.All religions have noted this fact, hence all religions insist on finding a master before you start entering into the world of no-mind. He will be there to help you, to support you. You will be falling apart but he will be there to encourage you, to give you hope. He will be there to interpret the new to you. That is the meaning of a master: to interpret for you that which cannot be interpreted, to indicate that which cannot be said, to show that which is inexpressible. He will be there; he will devise methods and ways for you to continue on the path, so that you don’t start escaping from it.And remember, there is no escape. If you try escaping, you will simply go berserk. Sufis call such people the mastas. In India they are known as mad paramahansas. You cannot go back because it is no longer there, and you cannot go ahead because it is all dark. You are stuck. That’s why Buddha says, “Fortunate is the man who has found a master.”I myself was not as fortunate as you are; I was working without a master. I searched and I could not find one. It was not that I had not searched, I had searched long enough, but I could not find one. It is very rare to find a master, rare to find a being that has become a nonbeing, rare to find a presence that is almost an absence, rare to find a man who is simply a door to the divine, an open door to the divine which will not hinder you, through which you can pass. It is very difficult.The Sikhs call their temple the gurdwara, the door of the master. That is exactly what the master is – the door. Jesus says again and again, “I am the gate, I am the way, I am the truth. Come follow me, pass through me. And unless you pass through me you will not be able to reach the kingdom of heaven.”Yes, sometimes it happens that a person has to work without a master. If a master is not available, then one has to work without one, but then the journey is very hazardous.For one year I was in the state that this parable talks about. For one year it was almost impossible to know what was happening. For one year continuously it was even difficult to keep myself alive. Just to keep myself alive was a very difficult thing because all appetite disappeared. Days would pass and I would not feel any hunger; days would pass and I would not feel any thirst. I had to force myself to eat, force myself to drink. The body was so nonexistent that I had to hurt myself to feel that I was still in the body. I had to knock my head against the wall to feel whether my head was still there or not. I would be a little in the body, but even then, only when it hurt.Every morning I would run for five to eight miles, and every evening I would run for five to eight miles. People used to think that I was mad. Why was I running so much? Sixteen miles a day! It was just to feel myself, to feel that I still was, not to lose contact with myself – just to wait until my eyes became attuned to the new that was happening.I had to keep myself close to myself. I would not talk to anybody because everything had become so inconsistent that even to formulate one sentence was difficult. In the middle of the sentence I would forget what I was saying; in the middle of the road I would forget where I was going. Then I would have to come back. I would read a book; I would read fifty pages, and then suddenly I would remember, “What am I reading? I don’t remember at all.” This was my situation.The door of the psychiatrist’s office burst open and a man rushed in.“Doctor!” he cried. “You’ve got to help me. I’m sure I’m losing my mind. I can’t remember anything – what happened a year ago, or even what happened yesterday. I must be going crazy!”“Hmm,” pondered the shrink. “Just when did you first become aware of this problem?”The man looked puzzled, “What problem?”This was my situation. It was difficult to complete even a full sentence. I had to keep myself shut up in my room. I made it a point not to talk, not to say anything, because to say anything was to say that I was mad.For one year it persisted. I would simply lie on the floor and look at the ceiling and count from one to a hundred then back from a hundred to one. Just to remain capable of counting was at least something. Again and again I would forget. It took one year for me to gain a focus again, to have a perspective.It happened; it was a miracle. There was nobody to support me; there was nobody to tell me where I was going and what was happening. In fact, everybody was against me, my teachers, my friends, my well-wishers. All were against me. But they could not do anything, they could only condemn, they could only ask what I was doing.I was not doing anything! Now it was beyond me; it was happening. I had done something: unknowingly I had knocked on the door – now the door had opened. I had been meditating for many years, just sitting silently doing nothing, and by and by I started getting into that space, that heartspace, where you are and you are not doing anything, you are simply there, a presence, a watcher.You are not even a watcher because you are not watching – you are just a presence. Words are not adequate because whatsoever word is used it seems as if it was being done. No, I was not doing it. I was simply lying, sitting, walking – deep down there was no doer. I had lost all ambition; there was no desire to be anybody, no desire to reach anywhere – not even God, not even nirvana. The buddha disease had completely disappeared. I was simply thrown into myself.It was an emptiness, and emptiness drives one crazy. But emptiness is the only door to godliness. That means that only those who are ready to go mad ever attain, nobody else.But if you have a master things are simple. He can hold your hand when you are losing all track of your being. He can become your support. If you love your master, that love will be the last link. Every link disappears, but that link remains. It disappears only when you have attained your own perspective, your own clarity. It is just like an umbilical cord. The child lives through the mother in the womb for nine months, and if you cut the umbilical cord, he will die. He lives through it. That is the only link.In exactly the same way, if you love the master a subtle silver cord arises between you and the master – a very invisible phenomenon to others but very visible to the disciple. He can almost touch it. You become joined together with your master from your navel. The master is your mother; the master is your womb. And this umbilical cord, this invisible silver cord, remains nursing you till you are ready and the pregnancy is ripe, until you are ready to be reborn and you can breathe on your own.The master is a must. If you can find one, you are fortunate. Then he will interpret for you and the darkness will look like light; the illness will look like a new wellness; he will transform the curse into a blessing. In fact, it is a blessing but you interpret it as a curse. He is not doing anything; he is simply showing you what the case is.With this background, listen to this story.Lung Shu said to the physician Wen Chih:“Your craft is subtle. I have an illness, can you cure it?”This man must have been like me – unfortunate. He must have been working without a master. He thought that he had an illness. It is natural, that’s how it appears – it looks like an illness. The old hold on reality is gone; your old intelligence no longer functions, your old memory no longer functions, your old identity is no longer there. You cannot say, “Who am I?” Your name, your address, has all become irrelevant. You don’t belong to anybody, you also don’t belong anywhere. For the first time you are an outsider in this world; you are a stranger. You are unrelated, uprooted – like a tree which is uprooted from the ground and has started dying.When you enter this inner emptiness, this state of no-mind, for the first time, you are uprooted from the earth. Before you can grow your roots into the sky, if there is nobody to make you alert to the blessing that is going to happen to you, there is going to be a time gap, an interval, in which there will be much suffering,. If there is nobody to give you hope, then the dark night of the soul can become your grave.Lung Shu said to the physician Wen Chih:“Your craft is subtle. I have an illness. Can you cure it?”“You have only to command. Tell me the symptoms of your illness.”“I do not think it an honor if the whole district praises me nor a disgrace if the whole state reviles me; I have no joy when I win, no anxiety when I lose; I look in the same way at life and death, riches and poverty, other men and pigs, myself and other men; I dwell in my own house as though lodging in an inn, and look at my own neighborhood as though it were a foreign and barbarous country.”The man must certainly have been in terrific trouble, in great anxiety. He could not relate to people any more. He had lost the language to relate.What was happening? First he said, “I do not think it an honor if the whole district praises me nor a disgrace if the whole state reviles me.” He was losing his ego. It is the ego that feels good when somebody praises you and feels bad when somebody disgraces you, insults you. You live through it, you judge your life through it – it is the way you relate to people. You say that you love somebody because somehow he buttresses your ego. You say that you hate somebody because somehow he displeases you, he disgraces you, his presence is humiliating. The way he talks, the things he says, are hurting your ego. They don’t nourish you; they starve you. You hate the person.Sometimes it happens that you do not even know the person, you have just met him for the first time, but immediately you hate the person because somehow his vibe is against your ego. The way he walks, the way he looks at you, the way he talks – he is trying to have the upper hand. Maybe it is not conscious, but you feel that he is trying to prove that he is superior to you. Somehow he makes you feel inferior. You hate him. Whenever a person makes you feel superior, you like him, you love him; you say that he is beautiful.Your ego is your criterion. Once you drop the ego, who is your friend and who is your enemy? Once you drop the ego, what is right and what is wrong? Once you drop the ego, how can you know what to do and what not to do? How will you be a sinner or a saint? Once you drop the ego you drop all duality – you become one. That oneness drives you crazy.There is a beautiful parable in the life of a saint in Maharashtra, Tukaram:One day he came home – he was a poor man, a very poor man – he was coming home. Somebody had given him ten sugarcane sticks. While coming home he met many beggars and children on the road, and he distributed the sugarcane sticks. He kept only one for himself; nine he gave away. He was very happy, happy because he could give something, happy because he had something to give, happy because when he gave those sugarcane sticks to the beggars they thanked him, happy because the children were very happy – they laughed and enjoyed them and they ran to their homes with their sugarcane sticks.He came home very happy – very, very happy. He told his wife the whole thing, “Somebody presented me with ten sugarcane sticks. I distributed nine and one I brought for me and you.”Of course, as wives do, she became very angry. They were poor and these ten sugarcane sticks would have been nourishment for them. For days they had been hungry, and here was this fool – he had distributed them. She became so angry that she took the last sugarcane stick and started beating Tukaram. She hit him hard on his head. The stick broke in two and Tukaram laughed. He said, “So you are a dualist. I believe in the one, you believe in two. Good. So now there are two sticks; you can have one and I can have one. But I thought that we were one so I thought one stick would be enough.”Your understanding is different. The mind of man converts everything into two. The energy that you call light and darkness is one, but you call it by two names: darkness and light. The energy that you call life and death is one, but you call it by two names: life and death. The energy that you call hate and love is one, but you call it by two names: hate and love. You are Tukaram’s wife.This whole human world exists in duality. Language depends on duality, expression depends on duality. When a person starts feeling that he is one – when the ego disappears and the very phenomenon of duality disappears – then he feels at one with the trees, at one with the birds, at one with the rocks, at one with the river, at one with the moon, at one with the sun. Certainly the person will start feeling that something has gone wrong. Now who am I?In this state if a lion jumped on you, you would not be worried at all. It is possible that you might even enjoy the whole thing – the lion eating you – because you are not separate from the lion. You will adjust perfectly well. You will enjoy the fact that the lion is hungry and he is eating you. You will become the lion. There is no duality.But in this state, in the beginning, one naturally thinks, “Have I gone mad?” No enemy, no friend, praise means nothing, disgrace means nothing.Just the other night a young man asked me, “Osho, can I displease you?” I said, “If you like, you can do it. But you will not be able to displease me because you are not able to please me either. To please me or to displease me is impossible. What can you do to displease me and what can you do to please me? To me both are the same.”“I do not think it an honor if the whole district praises me nor a disgrace if the whole state reviles me.” The man was disturbed, very disturbed, uprooted. What was happening? People used to insult him before and he used to get in a rage. Now nothing happened. Had he become impotent? Had he lost all energy? People used to praise him and he used to feel happy, but now nothing was happening. Now, even if people brought him garlands, nothing happened.Or, if sometimes they insulted him and threw shoes at him, still nothing happened. Once it happened in a public meeting in Baroda that somebody threw a shoe at me. He may have thought to displease me. I asked him to give me the other shoe too because what was I going to do with only one? He became very embarrassed. He was very puzzled. Later on he wrote a letter to me: “What manner of man you are? I insulted you and you asked me for another shoe!” He was not expecting that. But when it happens for the first time you become disoriented. You don’t know now what is what.The second thing: “I have no joy when I win, no anxiety when I lose.” Comparison was disappearing, competition was disappearing, jealousy was going – they are all shadows of the ego. When the ego goes, the shadows cannot linger long; they have to follow suit. They go with the ego, they come with the ego. They are companions of the ego.“I have no joy when I win, no anxiety when I lose.” What is there to lose in life? And what is there to win? All that you need cannot be lost. Your essential-most core can never be lost. And the essential-most core cannot be achieved; once you start looking into your being it is already there. You are already that which you were always thinking to gain and attain; and it is something that cannot be lost, cannot be robbed. Nobody can take it away. It cannot be destroyed because it is your very nature. When you start moving into the dimension of ultimate reality, there is nothing to win and nothing to lose. Comparison, jealousy and competition go with the ego, as shadows of the ego.The third symptom: “I look in the same way at life and death, riches and poverty.” Equanimity is born. When ego is gone and ego shadows are gone, samyaktva, equanimity, is left. You start looking at things but you don’t think “This is bad and this is good, this should be and this should not be, all is good or all is bad.” All is alike. That is the equal eye, equanimity, what in India we call samyak drishti – the eye which sees everything as equal, the eye which sees the small as the big and the big as the small, the worthless as valuable and the valuable as worthless, the eye which sees gold and mud as the same.Life and death, riches and poverty, all looked the same to this man – and he was very disturbed. What was happening to him? Had he lost interest in life, or had he died somewhere in his being?The fourth symptom: “I dwell in my own house as though lodging in an inn and look at my own neighborhood as though it were a foreign and barbarous country.” When you lose your mind, certainly you become a stranger. Now you don’t have any common language with anybody else. Now your language is silence, and people cannot understand silence. And you cannot understand their words. It takes time to get attuned to your inner silence and then to come back to your mind and start using it again. It takes time – sometimes years, sometimes a whole life. One has to learn from ABC.Once your mind is gone you have to start using it again if you want to relate. That’s why Buddha says there are many people who become realized but there are only very rare people who become masters. A master is one who has become realized and has again entered the world of the mind, has again become proficient with language, has again become capable of using the mind.The realized person is one who has gone beyond the mind but who cannot relate again to the people who are lagging behind. The master is one who has gone beyond the mind and has become capable of using the mind again. Now the mind is not using him, he is using the mind, he is the master.Great effort is needed to come back, great compassion is needed. Unless you love people tremendously, when you attain your buddhahood, who cares? Why bother? Why not remain silent? Why not enjoy the beautitude that has happened to you, the blessing that has come to you? Why bother with foolish people? They are not going to understand anyway; they are only going to misunderstand. At the most they will not understand, at the worst they will misunderstand. And they are going to create unnecessary problems for you – they crucified Jesus, they poisoned Socrates, they killed Mansoor.Mansoor could have remained silent; he could have avoided it all. That’s what others told him. In those days, in that part of the world where Mansoor lived, there were many enlightened people. Enlightenment comes like a wave – when it comes, then many people ride the wave. There were many enlightened people, Junnaid was one. Junnaid told Mansoor al-Hillaj, “Stop talking, keep quiet, otherwise they will kill you.” There were other enlightened people; they all came to Mansoor and told him, “Keep quiet! These Mohammedans around are dangerous!”But al-Hillaj wouldn’t listen. He started shouting from the house-tops, “I am God! Ana’l haq, I am the truth. I have attained. Come and have a taste.” He started offering his cup of tea to everybody. People were enraged. Who is this, saying that he is a God? To people it looked like the ultimate in egoism. Somebody calling himself a god? This seemed to be the last straw – this man had become a megalomaniac; he thinks he is a god. They were very offended. They killed him; but even while they were killing him, Mansoor was laughing, and the last thing that he said again was, “Ana’l haq! I am God!”He was a master. He was trying to help people. A master is one who has gone beyond mind and come back. A master is one who has gone to the peak and traveled back to the valley to take others to the peak. Not every enlightened person is a master. In one thousand enlightened persons only one becomes a master. To go to the peak is very arduous but to come back from the peak, back to the valley, is far more arduous. And it is a thankless job! You go to so much trouble and nobody is even going to thank you. They will curse you. They will say, “Why did you come back? Why won’t you allow us to rest? Why do you bring such great challenges to us? Why don’t you keep your peak to yourself? Why are you shouting and disturbing our sleep? We are happy wherever we are. Don’t bring these dreams about the peak to us.” They become angry.One can understand their anger. You disturb their life. They are settled in the valley, enjoying a thousand and one trips. Of course, all are dreams, meaningless, but at the moment they look meaningful; at the moment even the dream looks real and they are absorbed in it. Then comes a man from the peak back to the valley, and he starts shaking everybody up and he becomes an alarm and it disturbs everybody’s sleep. Somebody was having a beautiful, sweet dream – he becomes angry because you disturbed his dream. He has to take revenge. “Why don’t you go to your peak? If you have attained, go. Forget us. We don’t bother you, so why should you bother us?”Those few people who have come back to the valley are the rarest. Their compassion is infinite. To attain to God is just selfish; to bring it to others is service. Buddha has insisted again and again that while you are meditating, always remember compassion. Don’t forget compassion. It is very easy to forget compassion while you are meditating, so you must continuously remember it. When you have come to the fulfillment of your meditation, don’t forget compassion. Bring it back to people. Grow in compassion and meditation so simultaneously that when meditation brings you home, compassion takes you back to the valley. Takes you back to the foreign lands where barbarous people dwell, where they will not understand your language, where there is more possibility that you will be crucified. But that is nothing – for an enlightened person to be crucified is nothing. It makes no difference. If crucifixion can help people, he will love to be crucified. Whatsoever can help people he would love to do.There is every possibility that Jesus helped those people who were going to crucify him. There is every possibility that Judas was not against Jesus but was an agent from Jesus. There is every possibility that Jesus planned the whole thing – because those people were so fast asleep that unless something very sensational happened they would not wake up.The crucifixion was something really sensational. For two thousand years it has not allowed many people to go back to sleep again. It has been the most sensational thing in the whole history of humanity. Jesus left the deepest mark. Buddha did not leave such a deep mark; neither did Mahavira, nor Patanjali, nor Lao Tzu. Jesus left the deepest mark. It is as if, with the crucifixion, history split in two: before and after. All that was before Jesus became irrelevant and all that came after Jesus took on a new significance.The Christian calendar is the most important calendar. There are other calendars, but no calendar is as important. Jainas have their calendar – their calendar starts with Mahavira – but it is not important. Hindus have their calendar – their calendar starts with a great emperor, Vikramaditya – but a king is just a king, nothing compared with the Christian calendar.With Jesus, history simply split into two parts. With Jesus, something of tremendous value entered into human consciousness. And that happened because of the crucifixion. His blood is still alive, his blood still shouts, his blood still calls people. If he had not been crucified, he might have been forgotten. Many people have been forgotten, completely forgotten. There is every possibility that he conspired with the conspirators, that he helped them.But when for the first time the glimpse enters your being you will feel: “I dwell in my own house as though lodging in an inn and look at my own neighborhood as though it were a foreign and barbarous country.”That is because you lose your old language and the new one must be learned. It is arduous to learn the new language; it needs real effort to learn the new language – because when you have attained to the inner silence, if you make a word the word melts and disappears. You try hard to create a word, but you cannot create it – it disappears. For a man who has attained to the innermost silence all language is as if one is writing on water, you have not even written it, and it has gone.The fifth symptom:“Having all these ailments…”Naturally the man thinks he has become very ill, these are ailments…“…titles and rewards cannot induce me, punishments and fines cannot awe me; prosperity and decline, benefit and harm cannot change me…”When equanimity happens, when you have become samyak drishti when you have attained to the equal eye… Jesus says, “Attain to one eye, and if you can attain to one eye your whole body will become full of light.” When you start looking at things as if they are the same – nothing is inferior, nothing is superior, the dunghill and the diamond have the same value, or same nonvalue, no actual difference exists – then this fifth state, transcendence, comes.“…titles and rewards cannot induce me, punishments and fines cannot awe me, prosperity and decline, benefit and harm cannot change me… Things happen but I remain transcendent, I remain aloof, nothing touches me.” One has become a lotus. The lotus is in the water but the water does not touch it, the lotus comes out of the mud but is beyond mud, beyond all mud. Can you find anything like the lotus? It is difficult – that’s why in the East the lotus has become the symbol of enlightenment itself. Buddha is depicted sitting on a lotus. Vishnu is standing in a lotus. And the ultimate state of consciousness, sahasrar means a one-thousand-petaled lotus.The lotus is a symbol, a metaphor, for transcendence. You move but nothing touches you – that is what Zen people mean when they say, “When a master walks in a river the water does not touch his feet.” He is transcendental. He lives in the world and yet he lives not in the world. This is not an illness; it is a great siddhi a great achievement. But when it happens for the first time it looks like an ailment.The sixth symptom:“…joy and sorrow cannot influence me.”When joy and sorrow cannot influence you, you suddenly feel that you have become a desert. Your whole life consists of joy and sorrow – you don’t want sorrow, you hanker for joy. Your whole life exists on these two wings – joy and sorrow. When joy and sorrow both disappear, or both become meaningless, or you have attained the equal eye, equanimity, you have attained transcendence, joy and sorrow look alike. Whatsoever comes is okay – then you will feel that you have become a desert. This is the state which in India they call veetraga. This is one who has gone beyond attachment, detachment, like, dislike – one who does not know at all what is beneficial, what is harmful, one who has become a child again.“Consequently…”…the seventh symptom:“…it is impossible for me to serve my prince, have dealings with my kindred and friends, manage my wife and children, control my servants. What illness is this?”The seventh sign means freedom. When you are completely free of the ego and all the shadows that the ego brings in, when you are free of all duality, when you are free of all distinctions and you start living in a world which is one energy, nothing lower, nothing higher; when Devil and God lose their definition, embrace each other, fall in love, make love to each other; when life and death meet and become one; when the whole world is one – in that state you are free. But first the freedom will look as if you have gone utterly mad.“…it is impossible for me to serve my prince…” It is impossible to serve anybody now. “…have dealings with my kindred and friends…” It is impossible now. They will think you are a madman, and to you they look like phantoms, ghosts, not real.“…manage my wife and children, control my servants.…” In this state you cannot serve and you cannot control. You are not – so how can you serve and how can you control? Freedom means you are not; freedom means to be free from one’s self. Freedom does not mean that you have become free; freedom means that you are no more; freedom means that you have become free of you. Now there is nobody; just a deep emptiness exists.This emptiness will look empty to a person who has no master. It looked empty to me also. There is no way to go back, so one is simply helpless. One cannot go back; one does not know how to go ahead because there is no longer any ahead – all paths have disappeared. This is the moment when Tao arises. That’s why I say “the pathless path.” Tao is the pathless path. This is the moment when all paths disappear; you look back and there is nothing.There is a beautiful Buddhist story in China:In a certain town a very beautiful young lady suddenly arrived out of the blue. Nobody knew where she came from; her origins were completely unknown. But she was so beautiful, so enchantingly beautiful, that nobody even thought about where she had come from. People gathered together, the whole town gathered; and all the young men, almost three hundred young men, wanted to get married to the woman.The woman said, “Look, I am one and you are three hundred. I can only be married to one, so each of you do one thing. I will come again tomorrow; I give you twenty-four hours. If one of you can repeat Buddha’s Lotus Sutra, I will marry him.”All the young men rushed to their homes; they didn’t eat, they didn’t sleep, they recited the sutra the whole night, they tried to cram it in. Ten succeeded. The next morning the woman came and those ten men offered to recite it. The woman listened. They had all succeeded.She said, “Right, but I am one. How can I marry ten? I will give you twenty-four hours again. The one who can also explain the meaning of the Lotus Sutra, I will marry. So try to understand it because reciting is a simple thing. You are mechanically repeating something and you don’t understand its meaning.”There was no time at all – only one night – and the Lotus Sutra is a long sutra. But when you are infatuated you can do anything. They rushed back, they tried hard. The next day three young men appeared. They had understood the meaning.The woman said, “The trouble still remains. The number is reduced, but the trouble remains. From three hundred to three is a great improvement, but again I cannot marry three persons, I can marry only one. So, twenty-four hours more. The one who has not only understood it but tasted it too, I will marry that person. So in twenty-four hours, try to taste the meaning of it. You are explaining, but this explanation is intellectual. Good, better than yesterday, you have some comprehension, but the comprehension is intellectual. I would like some meditative taste, some fragrance. I would like to see in your presence that the lotus has entered you, that you have become something of the lotus. I would like to smell the fragrance of it. So tomorrow I will come again.”Only one person came, and certainly he had achieved. The woman took him to her house outside the town. The man had never seen the house; it was very beautiful, almost a dreamland. And the parents of the woman were standing at the gate. They received the young man and said, “We are very happy.”The woman went in and he chitchatted a little with the parents. Then the parents said, “Go. She must be waiting for you. This is her room.” They showed him. He went, he opened the door, but there was nobody there. It was an empty room. But there was a door entering into the garden. So he thought maybe she had gone into the garden. Yes, she must have gone there because on the path there were footprints. So he followed the footprints.He walked almost a mile. The garden ended and now he was standing on the bank of a beautiful river – but the woman was not there. The footprints also disappeared. There were only two shoes, golden shoes, belonging to the woman. Now he was really puzzled. What had happened? He looked back – there was no garden, no house, no parents, nothing. All had disappeared. He looked again. The shoes were gone, the river was gone. All that there was, was emptiness – and a great laughter.And he laughed too. He had gotten married.This is a beautiful Buddhist story. He got married to emptiness, got married to nothingness. This is the marriage which all the great saints have been searching for. This is the moment when you become a bride of Christ or a gopi of Krishna.Everything disappears – the path, the garden, the house, the woman, even the footprints. Everything disappears. There is just laughter, a laughter that arises from the very belly of the universe.But when it happens for the first time, if you have not been led slowly, slowly, you will go mad.This Buddhist story says that he was led slowly, slowly. The woman was the master. The woman is symbolic of the master. She led him slowly, slowly. First, recite the sutra; second, understand it intellectually; third, give a sign that you have lived it. These are the three stages. Then she led him into nothingness.The master leads you slowly, slowly; makes you by and by ready. Lung Shu was not fortunate enough to have a master. He had come to the emptiness, to the ultimate emptiness but he thought that it was an illness.“What art can cure it?”Wen Chih ordered Lung Shu to stand with his back to the light. He himself stepped back and examined Lung Shu from a distance facing the light. Then he said:“Hmm. I see your heart. The place an inch square is empty – you are almost a sage. Six of the holes in your heart run into each other but one is stopped up. Can this be the reason why you now think the wisdom of a sage is an illness? My shallow craft can do nothing to cure it.”This is the difference between modern and ancient medicine. Ancient Chinese medicine, including acupuncture, is not as gross as modern medicine. Neither is ancient Indian medicine, ayurveda, as gross as modern medicine. Modern medicine is concerned only with the physical; it knows nothing of the beyond. Ancient Eastern medicine is more concerned with the metaphysical, with the paraphysical. Now a few insights in the West are gaining strength slowly; radionics, Kirlian photography, acupuncture and ayurveda are entering Western consciousness.Ancient Eastern medicine was not just medicine, not just a cure for the body, but a cure for the soul. The East says that the body only shows the symptoms – the symptoms are not the real illness. And the symptoms should not be treated directly. The illness should be treated directly then the symptoms will disappear. The allopathic approach is to treat the symptom and to think that the illness will disappear. That is not possible; that is going from the outer to the inner, which is not possible. What happens? It becomes a sort of repression.Maybe the whole Christian tradition of repression is the cause. The whole Western mind is repressive. So wherever a symptom is found, suppress it. The symptom is suppressed and the illness is not treated at all. The illness remains within so it finds another way to come out. You treat one illness and another illness is born; you treat that, and a third one is born.In the East, we have never been much interested in the symptoms. The symptoms are not to be treated; the person is to be treated. One thing more, the East knows that illnesses are not always illnesses – there are a few illnesses which are blessings. When a person moves beyond the body, the body will never be healthy in the same way it was before, it cannot be because a distance has happened between the innermost being and the body. The bridges have been broken. That’s why an enlightened person will never be born again. He cannot enter the body again because the bridges are broken. So the enlightened person, once enlightened, can never come back. Then he is gone forever: gate gate para gate; gone, gone, gone forever – gone to the beyond whence there is no coming back, gone to the point of no return.The thing starts happening in this life. If you become enlightened, you become loosened from your connection with your body. The body can never be as healthy as it was before, cannot be healthy in the same way that it was before. Those illnesses are not really illnesses; they are simply symptoms that your inner being is being transformed. Something of tremendous revolution is happening within you; a radical change is happening within you. So the body will go through many changes.This physician, Wen Chih, must not have been only a physician; he must have been a man of great insight. What does he say? He says, “I see your heart. The place an inch square is empty.” This is the beginning of enlightenment. The man is just one step below. One step more and his whole heart will become an empty space; for the first time he will have what is called heart space. Ordinarily your heart is cluttered, cluttered with a thousand and one things: useless, useful; essential, nonessential; discarded rubbish. Your heart is cluttered – it has no space.Unless the heart has space, God cannot enter you. He comes only when the space is ready, when you have the room ready for him – your heart is the room.According to the Taoist mapping of inner consciousness there are seven holes. That is exactly the same as the seven chakras. Each Taoist hole is concerned with one chakra of Yoga. There are seven chakras: muladhar, svadhisthan, manipura, anahat, vishuddhi, agna, sahasrar. These seven chakras of Yoga are concerned with each hole in the heart. When you pass through one chakra, then one hole opens in the heart; when you pass through the second chakra, the second hole opens in the heart; when you pass through the third chakra, the third hole opens in the heart. In Yoga they have not talked about those seven holes because that will make it very confusing and complex. There is no need. One map is enough.The Taoists have not talked about the chakras because there is no need – their map is also enough. When one hole opens, you have passed through one chakra; when another hole opens, you have passed through another chakra.This man has six holes, only one is still blocked. That means in Yoga mapping he has reached the agna chakra, the third eye – that’s why he has become one-eyed. He has passed beyond duality, he has transcended. He is just below the seventh. If he passes to the seventh, his seventh hole will be opened. When all seven holes are open in the heart, you disappear because you are nothing but the furniture that is cluttering the heart. Once all blocks disappear, then those seven holes are not seven because there is nothing to divide them. They become one hole. The heart space is created.This is what Buddha called emptiness, anatta, nonbeing. This is what Buddha called shunya, zero experience. And when your heart has become a zero then nothing is missing. Your seventh chakra has opened; you have become a lotus. All one thousand petals have opened, your fragrance is released. You have become a buddha.The physician was really a rare man and had a rare insight into Tao. In fact, in the ancient days, a Hindu physician, an ayurvedic physician, had to go through Yoga. You will be surprised; you will not see what the relevance is. Not only did he have to go through Yoga, he had to study poetry. In the old days the Hindu physician was called kaviraj, the poet. This is nonsense! Why should a vaidya, a physician, be called kaviraj, a great poet? What has poetry got to do with illness? What has poetry got to do with treatment?It has a function. Man is not just physical, man is not just prose. He has poetry inside. Man is not just that which appears to the eyes, man has an invisible realm of poetry, song, dance, celebration. The Hindu ayurvedic doctor had to understand the subtle layers of the poetry of life, the song of life, the rhythmic flow of the inner being. And he had to be a great adept of Yoga too.The same was the case with Taoist physicians. They had to go through deep meditation because in the old days many people were searching. The world was not as poor spiritually as it is now. It is materially very rich today, it has never been so rich; but it is spiritually very poor, it has never been so poor. The world was spiritually very rich and millions of people were searching; millions of people were coming close to innermost reality. Naturally they had to go to the physician when things like this happened.It was an everyday thing, it was not rare. The physician often came across such people. They were not really ill but had moved within themselves so much that their body was suffering, their mind was suffering. Or at least it looked like suffering. So the physician had to tell them that this was not a physical illness.“I see your heart. The place an inch square is empty. You are almost a sage.” Notice, he says “…almost a sage” – just on the brink of it, almost a sage, not very far, the goal is just around the comer, very close by, within reach, one step more and the journey will become complete.“You are almost a sage. Six of the holes in your heart run into each other but one is stopped up.” Just one. He is still holding on to something of his individuality, still holding onto something of the ego – the last remnant, the last shadow, the last mark of the ego.“Maybe that’s why you think …the wisdom of a sage is an illness. You have come upon a treasure, the greatest there is, you are blessed, but you think that you have an illness. That may be the cause,” the physician said. “One hole is still closed and because of that you may be holding this wrong notion that you are ill.”This man needed a master. For this man a master would have been the only physician there could be. Buddha said again and again, “I am not a philosopher, I am a physician.” So said Nanak, “I am not a philosopher, I am a physician.” The great sages have been physicians – better to call them metaphysicians because they treat not the physic but the metaphysic, the beyond. Or call them paraphysicians – they don’t treat the body, they treat the soul. They don’t treat the form but the innermost emptiness that is covered by the form. Your body and mind are just forms. You are empty.But if you are close to a master you will never feel it as emptiness. The moment it happens the master will help you to understand it and it will start looking like fullness. It is fullness; it is not emptiness, but it is so new that you feel it as emptiness because all that you have known is no longer there. So you feel as if all that you have known has gone and everything is empty.Just think, in your room you have much furniture. Once I stayed in a very rich man’s house. As it always happens, rich people don’t have much taste. It is very difficult to have both taste and money; it is a rare combination to be cultured and to be rich, to have a higher flight of the soul and to hoard money. It is very difficult to manage both. It rarely happens, and then only by accident.This man was very rich. He was a bidi king, one of the biggest bidi manufacturers in India. And, naturally, when you manufacture bidis you cannot have much taste. I stayed in his house. He had given me the best of his rooms, but it was very cluttered with furniture. He had all sorts of furniture in there; in fact, there was no room and to go in and out was difficult.He asked me, “How do you like the room?”I said, “There is no room at all. There is no question of liking and disliking. Somehow I managed to enter and somehow I managed to leave. There is no room at all.”He said, “What do you mean?”He had gathered all designs of furniture, antique, modern; all sorts of things – radio, TV – everything was there, but there was no room. His concept of the room was these things.He asked, “But what is missing here? The TV is here, the phone is here, the radio is here, the fax is here – what is missing? Just tell me and we will order it.”I said, “You don’t understand me. Your concept of the room is nothing but the list of the furniture here, and my concept of a room is of the emptiness that is within those four walls.”The word room means emptiness. So if the furniture were removed completely, when this man came into the room he would say it is empty because to him his room is the furniture: the fax, the TV set, the radio, and this and that. That is his concept of a room. If everything is taken out, he will say, “What has happened to this room? Everything is empty. This is just empty.” This would no longer be a room for him.To Lao Tzu this would be a room; to me this would be a room. Now one can expand in this room, one can be in this room, there is space, there is spaciousness.So when for the first time your mind goes off you suddenly feel empty because all that noise was what you used to feel you were; that was your concept of your being. When the mind goes off suddenly you will feel empty.I have heard about a man who used to take care of a watchtower…It is an old story, maybe a hundred years old. In those days each watchtower had a gun and the gun used to go off every five minutes continually, twenty-four hours a day. That was the only way to give signals to the ships passing by.This man used to live there, he used to sleep there, and although the gun would go off each five minutes he was never disturbed. For thirty years he lived there.Then one day something went wrong and the gun didn’t go off. He was fast asleep; it was the middle of the night. He jumped up and said, “What happened? What went wrong?” He felt very uneasy.His mind had become accustomed to the gun going off each five minutes. It was no longer noise, it was his atmosphere, it was his mind, it was part of his mind. Now suddenly the gun was not going off and because of that his sleep was broken. But the noise of the gun had never broken his sleep.This is how it happens: when whatsoever you know about yourself suddenly stops, you feel empty. It is not empty. It is full of silence. It is a new fullness; it is a totally new well-being. Godliness is descending on you but you cannot feel godliness. You go on groping for your old furniture and it is not there and you become very afraid: “What has happened to me? Have I gone mad?”“I see your heart,” said the physician. “The place an inch square is empty. You are almost a sage. Six of the holes of your heart run into each other but one is stopped up. Can this be the reason why you now think the wisdom of the sage is an illness? My shallow craft can do nothing to cure it.”This parable is very relevant to my whole life. I was also taken to a vaidya, to a physician. In fact, I was taken to many doctors and to many physicians. Only one ayurvedic vaidya told my father, “He is not ill. Don’t waste your time.” Of course, they were dragging me from one place to another. And many people would give me medicines. I would tell my father, “Why are you worried? I am perfectly okay.” But nobody would believe what I was saying. They would say, “Keep quiet. You just take the medicine. What is wrong with it?” So I used to take all sorts of medicines.There was only one vaidya who was a man of insight – his name was Pundit Bhagirath Prasad. His daughter lives here in Pune and is married to a physician. That old man has gone but he was a rare man of insight. He looked at me and he said, “He is not ill.” And he started crying and said, “I have been searching for this state myself. He is fortunate. In this life I have missed this state. Don’t take him to anybody. He is reaching home.” And he cried tears of happiness.He was a seeker. He had been searching all over the country from this end to that. His whole life was a search and inquiry. He had some idea of what it was about. He became my protector – my protector against the doctors and other physicians. He said to my father, “You leave it to me. I will take care of it.” He never gave me any medicine. When my father insisted, he just gave me sugar pills and told me, “These are sugar pills. You can take them just to console them. They will not harm you, but they will not help. In fact, there is no help possible.”This man, Wen Chih, must have been a man like that. He said: “My shallow craft can do nothing to cure it.”You have to go through it. Although you will be in search of somebody who can help, remember that the help will not be a cure – nobody can cure it. The help will only be able to help you to understand what is happening, to help you accept it, and fall en rapport with it so that the process becomes speedy. Then the one who is almost a sage becomes a perfect sage.Enough for today.